In February 2015, that first donor body, a seventy-eight-year-old female (we’ll call her June Compost) was laid in a bed of pure woodchips at the bottom of the hill at FOREST. A month later, the body of a second donor, a larger male (we’ll call him John Compost) was placed at the top of the hill in a mix of alfalfa and woodchips with a silver tarp pulled over the mound. The experiments were not overly sophisticated. The sole question that these two donor bodies were answering was, “Will they compost?”
At FOREST today there was a brand-new donor body to worry about, set to arrive at the facility in an hour. His name was Frank, a man in his sixties felled by a heart attack earlier in the week. Before his death, Frank chose to donate his body to the human decomposition facility.
“Does Frank’s family know about the whole composting thing?” I asked Dr. Johnston.
“I talked to the brother, Bobby, several times,” Dr. J explained. “I made it clear, ‘You can say no to this, and Frank will be used for regular forensic study.’ But the family insisted this is what Frank would have wanted. To be honest, by the time you sign up to donate your body to a place like this, you’re up for pretty much anything.”
To prepare for Frank’s arrival, we had begun shoveling and hauling a giant pile of pine and maple woodchips up the hill in five-gallon painter’s buckets. The physical exertion didn’t faze Katrina, who was tall and lean with a short pixie haircut. Even in her late thirties she reminded me of the popular soccer player from high school, and practically bounded up the hill with the buckets.
One of the undergraduates, a blond, strapping young man, could haul four buckets at a time, two in each hand.
“You are a student here?” I asked.
“Yes ma’am, I am. A senior in forensic anthropology,” he drawled. For self-preservation I attributed the “ma’am” as a Southern thing, rather than a sign of my advancing age.
Hauling woodchips in the North Carolina sun (at which I made a valiant effort, I would like to add) seemed like manual labor, and didn’t give me the same sense of deathcare Zen as raking the ashes out after a cremation.
By 11 a.m. we had created a two-foot base layer of woodchips at the top of the hill in the pen. It only lacked a willing victim, our man Frank. As if on cue, a navy blue van rolled into the parking area. Two men entered the facility wearing pressed khakis and matching blue polo shirts with Crowe Funeral Home logos. They were a father and son funeral team, the elder Crowe with white hair, the younger Crowe with blond.
The Crowes had never been to the FOREST facility, so Dr. Johnston began by giving them a tour. I could see their faces scrunch in confusion, calculating exactly how they were going to get the donor body Frank up multiple embankments and through the undergrowth. The elder Crowe broke the news to Dr. J: “He’s a bit of a bigger fella.”
People die in inconvenient places all the time (armchairs, bathtubs, backyard sheds, the tops of high perilous staircases). But funeral directors usually remove bodies from these places, not deposit them into these places. Funeral work prides itself on taking a dead body from chaos to order, not the other way around.
I asked the elder Crowe if this was one of the strangest removals he’d done in a while.
He looked over his shoulder, and with a dry tone, rewarded me with a “Yeah.” Full stop.
Calculations were made for a route that provided solid footing without disturbing the other residents of the FOREST facility. On their messy journey to skeletonization, the donor bodies are disturbed by rainwater and small creatures. At FOREST, it was all too easy to accidentally tromp on someone’s rogue fibia if you didn’t take precautions.
The elder and younger Crowes pulled a stretcher up to the entrance gate, with Frank’s electric blue hospital body bag riding on top. The vibrant blue color stood in stark contrast to the muted greens and browns of the North Carolina summer. The toe tag attached to the bag read “Western Carolina University – Urban Death Project.” Katrina flipped the tag to take a look. Her mouth tugged up in the smallest smile. She later told me she felt a jolt of legitimacy to see that name in print.
Father Crowe chatted with Dr. Johnston. To my surprise, his inquiries weren’t along the lines of “Tell me again what y’all crazy-quacks are trying to do out here?” but had already moved to “So, are you using alfalfa to release nitrogen faster?” Father Crowe was a composter himself, and was well versed in the technicalities of the process. In a corporatized funeral industry, where I’ve heard a natural burial described as a “hippie myth that our clients would never want,” it was a joy to see a more traditional funeral director present himself as an unexpected ally to a somewhat radical idea.
Unfortunately for Katrina, winning over the funeral industry won’t be her only challenge. Mike Adams, a popular blogger (also an anti-vaxxer, 9/11 truther, and Sandy Hook shooting skeptic), wrote about Katrina in an article shared almost 11,000 times on Facebook. Adams viewed the recomposition project as being solely geared toward growing food for the urban populace. Since the new world order would need a steady supply of human compost to keep people fed, it would surely lead to “the forced euthanasia of the elderly so that their bodies can be tossed into the composter.” Adams claimed that the project would be “used by the government to greenwash mass murder.”
Knowing Katrina, a Seattle-based eco-enthusiast with a partner and two children, the idea of her masterminding mass murder seems preposterous. But the public relations issue remains: for every person who believes it is destiny for their body to nourish the earth, there is a person who thinks Katrina’s plan represents society at its most debauched and depraved.
Soon enough the struggle to get Frank up the hill began. It was a team effort, starting with a lengthy feet-first vs. head-first debate. At one point I looked over and saw a skull gazing down from its perch at the top of the hill, observing the absurdity of us living folk below.
When Frank finally arrived at the top of the hill (head-first), the blue body bag was laid on the bed of woodchips and unzipped, revealing a tall, sturdy man, naked except for underwear and socks. We rolled Frank over on his right side and gently wiggled the bag free, so it was man on woodchip, no turning back.
Frank had a white goatee and shoulder-length hair, and his left arm was draped almost elegantly behind his head, “draw me like one of your French girls” style. Tattoos covered his torso and arms: a wizard, serpents, religious symbols, a T-Rex galloping across his chest. The ink added bursts of color to the forest floor.
The undergraduates retreated down the hill to gather more alfalfa mixture, and I was left alone with Katrina for the first time all morning.
She gazed down at Frank, her eyes wet around the edges. “This man, he’s here on purpose. You know? He wanted to be here.”
She paused, took a breath before continuing, “I am filled with gratitude.”
Katrina took a handful of green alfalfa and wood chips, and placed the mixture over Frank’s face, the first part of his body to be covered.