From Here to Eternity Read online

CRESTONE

  One afternoon in August I received the email I had been waiting for.

  Caitlin,

  Laura, a very dear member of our community was found dead early this morning: she had a history of heart problems and had just entered her 75th year. Don’t know where you are, but you’re welcome to join us.

  Stephanie

  Laura’s death was unexpected. On Sunday night, she danced with abandon at a local music festival. On Monday morning, she lay dead on her kitchen floor. On Thursday morning, her family would gather to cremate her, and I would be there.

  The cremation was scheduled to start promptly at 7 a.m., just as the sun broke through the blue light of dawn. The mourners began to stream in after 6:30. A truck pulled up, driven by Laura’s son, bearing her body wrapped in a coral-colored shroud. There had been a rumor that her horse, Bebe, would be making an appearance, but at the last minute the family decided the crowd and the fire would be too much for Bebe’s constitution. The announcement came that the horse was “regretfully unable to attend.”

  Laura’s family pulled her body from the pickup and carried her on a cloth stretcher through the field of black-eyed susans, up the slight incline toward the pyre. A gong rang through the air. As I walked from the parking area up the sandy path, a beaming volunteer handed me a freshly cut bough of juniper.

  Laura was laid out on a metal grate atop two parallel slabs of smooth white concrete, under the expansive dome of Colorado sky. I had come to visit the empty pyre twice before, but its purpose became more sober and clear with the presence of a body. One by one, mourners stepped forward to lay a juniper bough on Laura’s body. As the only person present who hadn’t known her, I hesitated to deposit my juniper—call it funereal awkwardness. But I couldn’t very well hang on to my bough (too obvious) or stuff it into my backpack (tacky) so I walked forward and rested it on the shroud.

  Laura’s family, including a young boy of eight or nine, circled her pyre stacking piñon pine and spruce logs, selected because they burn with heightened intensity. Laura’s partner and her adult son waited at the corners with lit torches. A signal was given, and they came together to set Laura aflame, just as the sun peered above the horizon.

  As her body caught fire, white smoke swirled about in tiny cyclones, twisting upward and disappearing into morning sky.

  The smell called to mind a passage from Edward Abbey:

  The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

  After a few minutes the whirlwinds dispersed, and glowing red flames danced in their place. The fire gathered strength, shooting up six feet high. The mourners, all 130 of them, ringed the pyre in silence. The only sound was the pop of flaming wood, as if one by one Laura’s memories were diffusing into the ether.

  Cremation, in the form they practice it in the tiny town of Crestone, Colorado, has been around for tens of thousands of years. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hindus were most famous for employing the modest alchemy of fire to consume the flesh and liberate the soul. But cremation itself goes back even further.

  In the late 1960s, in the remote Australian Outback, a young geologist discovered the cremated bones of an adult woman. He estimated the bones might be up to 20,000 years old. In fact, further study revealed that they were 42,000 years old, antedating the supposed arrival of the Aboriginal people in Australia by some 22,000 years. The woman would have lived in a verdant landscape filled with giant creatures (kangaroos, wombats, other rodents of unusual size). For food she collected fish, seeds, and the eggs of enormous emus. When she died, the woman, now known as Mungo Lady, was cremated by her community. After the cremation, her bones were crushed and then burned again in a second cremation. They were ritually covered with red ocher before being buried in the ground, where they lay resting for 42,000 years.

  Speaking of Australia (this transition will pay off, I promise), ten minutes into Laura’s cremation, one of the fire-tenders picked up a didgeridoo and signaled a gentleman holding a wooden flute to join her.

  I braced myself. The didgeridoo is a ludicrous instrument for an American funeral. But the combination of the didgeridoo’s all-encompassing drone and the flute’s lament was haunting, soothing the crowd as they stared deeper into the flames.

  And so it goes: another American small town, another grieving community gathered around the pyre. Except, obviously, not. Crestone’s pyre is the only community open-air pyre in America and, in fact, in the Western world.*

  Cremations in Crestone didn’t always employ such stirring rituals. Before the processions at dawn and the didgeridoos and the well-organized juniper dispersers, there were Stephanie, Paul, and their Porta-Pyre.

  “We were the Porta-Pyre people,” Stephanie Gaines explained matter-of-factly. She describes herself as a hyper-engaged Buddhist. “I’m a power Aries,” she added, “a triple Aries—my Sun, Moon, and ascendant.” At seventy-two, she rules Crestone’s pyre operation with logistics, charm, and a white-banged bob.

  Stephanie and Paul Kloppenberg, an equally enchanting character with a thick Dutch accent, kept the pyre mobile, moving it from place to place, cremating on private property, swooping in and out before the county could stop them. They ran this portable operation for seven cremations.

  “We’d just come set it up at the end of your cul de sac,” Paul said.

  The Porta-Pyre was a low-tech system, built from cinderblocks with a grate laid on top. The intense heat would cause the grate to warp and sag after every cremation. “We had to drive a truck over the top of it to get it flat again,” Stephanie said. “It seems crazy, looking back now,” she added, amused but not apologetic.

  In 2006, the pair began searching for a more permanent location for the pyre. Crestone seemed like the perfect place, the very definition of rural, four hours south of Denver, population 137 people (1,400 in the surrounding areas). This gives Crestone a libertarian, “government outta my business” sort of edge. Weed is legal there, as are brothels. (Not that there are any brothels in operation, but there could be.)

  The town attracts a mélange of spiritual seekers. People come from all over the world to meditate there, the Dalai Lama included. Flyers at the natural foods store advertise Qigong instructors, shadow wisdom teachers, retreats for children to “awaken their natural genius,” retreats for North African dance classes, and something called the “Enchanted Forest Sacred Space.” Crestone’s residents include hippies and trustafarians, but many who live here are serious lifelong practitioners: Buddhists, Sufis, and Carmelite nuns. Laura herself had spent decades as a devotee of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo.

  Paul and Stephanie’s first proposal for the permanent pyre location was squelched when landowners downwind of the site—“smokers, mind you,” Paul pointed out—developed a serious case of “not in my backyard.” They were “curmudgeons,” Stephanie said, uninterested in evidence showing no threat of wildfires, unpleasant smells, mercury poisoning, or particulate matter. The smokers wrote letters to the county board and the Environmental Protection Agency.

  To fight them, the Porta-Pyre crew went legit. They created a nonprofit, the Crestone End of Life Project. They filed motion after motion, collected four hundred signatures (almost a third of the surrounding area), and amassed huge binders full of legal documents and scientific papers. They even visited the residents of Crestone one by one and listened to their concerns.

  At first, they met strong resistance. One man in the anti-pyre camp termed the group “Neighbors Burning Neighbors.” When Paul and Stephanie suggested (as a joke) sponsoring a float in the local parade, a family came forward protesting that it was “horribly disrespectful” to feature a float decorated with papier-mâché fl
ames.

  “Folks in the town even worried the pyre would bring too much traffic,” Stephanie said. “Keep in mind that for Crestone, six cars is traffic.”

  Paul explained, “There’s a lot of fear. ‘What about air pollution? Is it not morbid? Death stuff gives me the creeps.’ You have to stay patient, listen to what they’re asking for.”

  Paul and Stephanie kept going, in spite of the overwhelming legal hurdles, because the idea of the pyre inspired the community. (Recall that the residents were so excited about the chance to be cremated on a pyre that they were summoning Paul and Stephanie to set up a cinderblock grill in their driveways.) “How many people provide a service that actually resonates with other people?” Stephanie asked. “If it’s not resonating, forget it. It was that resonance that fed me.”

  They at last found their pyre a stable home: outside of town, a few hundred yards off the main road. The land was donated by Dragon Mountain Temple, a Zen Buddhist group. They don’t keep the pyre hidden. As you drive into town there is a metal sign with a single flame reading “PYRE.” The sign was handmade by a local potato farmer (also the coroner), and stands as an obvious landmark. The pyre itself sits on a bed of sand, ringed with a bamboo wall that swoops and curves like calligraphy. Over fifty people have been cremated there, including (dramatic twist) the “Neighbors Burning Neighbors” guy, who had a change of heart prior to his death.

  Three days before Laura’s cremation, volunteers from the Crestone End of Life Project came to her home. They prepared her body, helped her friends wash her, and laid her out on a cooling blanket to slow down any decomposition. They dressed her in natural fabrics—synthetics like polyester don’t perform well on the pyre.

  The organization will assist a family with its postmortem logistics regardless of finances. The family doesn’t have to choose open-air cremation, either. The volunteers at Crestone End of Life are prepared to help whether the family chooses a conventional (embalmed) burial, a natural (no vault or embalming) burial, or a cremation at the funeral home several towns over. Paul referred to the last option as “commercial cremation.”

  Stephanie interrupted, “Paul, you’re supposed to call it conventional cremation.”

  “No,” I argued, “commercial cremation sounds right.”

  Crestone was inspiring to me as a practitioner—which is why I kept returning—but there was also a touch of melancholy (that bordered on jealousy). They had this glorious pyre under the blue sky, while I had to take my families to a loud, dusty crematory in a warehouse on the outskirts of town. I’d even promise to invite the didgeridoo player if I could have access to such a spectacular cremation facility for my funeral home.

  Industrial, furnace cremation was first proposed in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In 1869, a group of medical experts gathered in Florence, Italy, to denounce burial as unhygienic and advocate a switch to cremation. Almost simultaneously, the pro-cremation movement jumped the pond to America, led by reformers such as the absurdly named Reverend Octavius B. Frothingham, who believed it was better for the dead body to transform into “white ashes” than a “mass of corruption.” (My next drone folk album will be called The Cremation Reforms of Octavius B. Frothingham.)

  The first body to undergo a “modern, scientific” cremation in America was that of Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm. (Scratch that, the drone folk album is now The Burning of Baron De Palm.) The good Baron, a penniless Austrian nobleman, whom the New York Tribune called “principally famous as a corpse” (literal and figurative burn), died in May 1876.

  His cremation was scheduled for December, six months after his death. In the interim his corpse was injected with arsenic, and when arsenic was deemed too weak to prevent rot, his organs were pulled from his body and his skin was covered with clay and carbolic acid by a local undertaker. On the train journey from New York to Pennsylvania (where he would be cremated), his mummified corpse briefly went missing in the baggage car, launching what historian Stephen Prothero called “a macabre game of hide-and-seek.”

  The crematory for this inaugural event was built on a physician’s estate in Pennsylvania. It contained a coal-fired furnace that was supposed to cremate the body without the flames ever having to touch it—the heat alone would disintegrate the corpse. Even though the physician said the cremation would be “a strictly scientific and sanitary experiment,” De Palm’s body was still sprinkled with spices and placed on a bed of roses, palms, primroses, and evergreens. When the body first went into the furnace, observers reported a distinct smell of burning flesh, but the smell soon gave way to the aromas of flower and spice. After an hour in the furnace, De Palm’s body began to glow with a rose mist. The glow turned gold, and finally shone transparent red. After two and half hours, the body had disintegrated into bone and ash. Newspapermen and reviewers at the scene declared that the experiment had resulted in “the first careful and inodorous baking of a human being in an oven.”

  From there, cremation machines only grew larger, faster, and more efficient. Almost 150 years later, cremation has reached record heights in popularity (for the first time, in 2017, more Americans will be cremated than buried). But the aesthetics and ritual surrounding the process have hardly changed. Our cremation machines still resemble the models introduced in the 1870s—24,000-pound behemoths of steel, brick, and concrete. They gobble thousands of dollars’ worth of natural gas a month, spewing carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, and highly toxic mercury (from dental fillings) into the atmosphere.

  Most crematories, especially in larger cities, are relegated to industrial zones, tucked inside nondescript warehouses. Of the three crematories I have worked at in my nine years in the funeral industry, one was across from the Los Angeles Times distribution warehouse, where freight trucks rumbled out at all hours, one was behind a “Structural and Termite” warehouse (who knows what they do there), and one was next door to a junkyard where cars were torn apart for scrap metal.

  One might find a crematory located on the grounds of a cemetery, but those facilities are most often hidden within the cemetery’s maintenance buildings, meaning mourners who wish to attend the cremation must navigate John Deere mowers and piles of rotting flower wreaths collected from the graves.

  Some crematories are styled as “celebration of life facilities” or “cremation tribute centers.” Families are kept behind glass windows in air-conditioned rooms, watching as the body disappears into a small metal door in the wall. The machine concealed behind the wall is the same industrial oven found in the warehouses, but the family cannot see the wizard behind the curtain. The camouflage removes the family further from the reality of death and of the clunky, environmentally inefficient machines. For the privilege of taking mom to a “cremation tribute center,” the price may rise above $5,000.

  I’m not arguing that a switch to open-air cremation would resolve all of these issues. In countries where pyre cremation is the norm, such as India and Nepal, the many millions of cremations every year burn 50 million-plus trees and release carbon aerosols into the atmosphere. After carbon dioxide, carbon aerosols are the second leading man-made cause of climate change.

  But the Crestone model comes close. The nonprofit has received several calls from reformers in India wanting to adopt the structure and methods of their pyre—raised high off the ground to use less wood and release less damaging pollution. If reform is possible for this ancient method, inextricably tied to religion and country, then reform is possible for the modern, industrial cremation machines as well.

  LAURA HAD LIVED in Crestone for years, and it seemed as if the whole town had come to the pyre that morning. Her son, Jason, spoke the first words, his gaze focused on the flames. “Mom, thank you for the love,” he said, his voice cracking. “Don’t worry about us now, fly and be free.”

  As the fire continued to burn, a woman came forward to describe her own arrival in Crestone eleven years prior. When she moved to town, she had been suffering from years of chronic illness
. “I moved to Crestone to find joy. I thought it was the clouds and the open sky that healed me, but I think it really was Laura.”

  “We’re all just human beings,” another of her friends added. “We all have faults. But Laura, I didn’t see no faults about her.”

  The flames had made quick work of Laura’s coral shroud. As mourners spoke, the flames jumped to her exposed flesh and the layers of soft tissue. The fire dehydrated the tissue, the majority of which was water, which shriveled and withered away. This exposed her internal organs, next to succumb to the flames.

  This would be a macabre spectacle for the uninitiated, but the nonprofit volunteers were vigilant in concealing the pyre’s inner workings from the crowd. They moved with grace and expertise, ensuring there was no odor, no threat of a rogue head or charred arm popping into view. “We’re not trying to hide the body from people,” Stephanie explained, “but the cremations are often open to the entire community, and you never know who is going to be there, and how they are going to respond to the intensity of feeling the pyre can provoke. People imagine themselves lying on that pyre one day.”

  As the ceremony proceeded, the volunteers crept imperceptibly around the pyre, adding wood. Over the course of the cremation, the nonprofit burned one-third of a cord of wood: 42.6 cubic feet.

  As the flames burned on, they reached Laura’s bones. The knees, heels, and facial bones were first. It took longer for the fire to reach her pelvis and arm and leg bones. The water evaporated from her skeleton, followed by the organic material. The color of her bones transformed from white, to grey, to black, and then back to white once more. The weight of the logs pressed Laura’s bones through the metal grate to the ground below.

  One of the fire-tenders pulled out a long metal pole, sending it into the fire. The pole pushed through the space where Laura’s head had been, but the skull had vanished.

  I had been told that each cremation at Crestone was unique. Some were straightforward, of the “light me up and go” variety. Others lasted hours, as mourners performed elaborate religious and spiritual ceremonies. Some were more casual, like the cremation of the young man who wanted a half gallon of tequila and a joint placed on his pyre. “Well, I can tell you everyone downwind enjoyed it,” one volunteer told me.