Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

by Caitlin Doughty

Here’s the thing: after those first fifteen minutes of glorious flame, you still need several hours and a lot of wood to fully cremate that body. Your average canoe is between sixteen and seventeen feet. It could carry enough wood to start the pyre off, but I have it on good authority (the cremation pyre people told me) that a full cremation requires over 40 cubic feet of wood. The fire has to reach 1200 degrees and stay there for two to three hours. You have to keep adding wood close to the body throughout the cremation. Even stacked high with logs, a sixteen-foot Viking boat holds nowhere close to the amount of wood needed.