“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.
What remains consistent is that the pyre experience, for those present, is transformative. The youngest person they have cremated was Travis, just twenty-two years old, who died in a car crash. According to the police report, he and his friends were drunk and high, speeding too fast down a dark rural road. The car flipped, and Travis was ejected and declared dead at the scene. All of the young people from Crestone and the surrounding towns came to take part in his cremation. As Travis’s body was laid on the pyre, his mother pulled down his shroud to kiss his forehead. Travis’s father grabbed the driver by his face and, in front of the community, said, “Look at me, I forgive you.” Then the pyre was lit.
About an hour into Laura’s cremation, the pall of grief had lifted from the circle.
The last speaker came forward to address the crowd in a way that would have been inappropriate just ninety minutes earlier. “Everything you all said about how Laura was a wonderful person, that’s true. But in my mind, she’ll always be one of the wild crones. A partier. I’d like to give her a howl.”
“Oooooooooooooooooooooo,” she bellowed, with the crowd joining in around her. Even I, who had just recently been too timid to drop my juniper bough on the pyre, let out a tentative howl.
BY 9:30 THAT MORNING, only Stephanie and I (and what remained of Laura) were left at the pyre, sitting on a carved wooden bench. Just three logs remained among the embers, in their gentle, end-stage burn. An infrared gun from the fire department measured these embers at over 1,250 degrees.
Stephanie is often the first to arrive and the last to leave the cremation site. “I like the silence,” she said.
Stephanie stayed still for a few minutes, and then suddenly she was on her feet again. She picked up a piece of metal grating and examined it. “This is Paul’s new spark protector design. It’s supposed to keep the ashes contained on a windy night. Chunks of wood can’t get out, but what about sparks from the embers?”
Within a couple of minutes, Stephanie was on the phone with the fire department to arrange spark protector tests and an inspection. Her boundless energy didn’t allow her to remain idle for long. I wondered how she had been able to summon the years of patience required to make this pyre a reality. “It was exhausting, waiting for the community to accept us. It was so hard for me to not drag people in.”
The longer I spent in Crestone, the more it seemed like a morbid Mayberry. The nonprofit hosts get-togethers for locals to make sure their end-of-life paperwork is in order. People stop Stephanie in the post office to say, “I’m glad you’re here, I’m coming to the next meeting to fill out my advance directive.” People in Crestone just know what to do when someone dies. The volunteers who go into homes to prepare the bodies told me that families have started to tell them, “Oh, thanks for coming but it’s okay, we can take it from here.”
Even the corpses have a small-town feel. One woman decided she wanted to be buried in Crestone’s natural burial ground (the first in the state). When she died, her daughters drove her body down from Denver in the back of a truck in a Rubbermaid container filled with ice.
“We didn’t have anywhere to put the woman until burial,” Stephanie said, “so we decided to keep her overnight in the town museum.”
The daughters liked that idea. “Mom was such a history buff, she would have been into that.”
The natural burial ground is open to anyone, but the pyre is restricted to those living in the community. The nonprofit receives calls from all over the country, from Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and general pyre enthusiasts who want their bodies sent to Crestone after they die. As a small volunteer operation, they just don’t have the ability or manpower to handle out-of-town corpses (even if they did, the local commissioner only allows them to serve the surrounding county). Having to decline is difficult for both sides.
The only time they made an exception was when a hiker from Georgia, missing for nine months and the subject of a massive search, was found. Well, a portion of him was found—his spine, his hip, and a leg. They agreed to do the cremation, deciding that he had “established his residency postmortem.”