The Promise at Cap Rock

The trouble with a promise is that once one of you is gone, there's nobody left to check it. Gram Parsons was a singer, twenty-six years old, and he loved this country. The way it's told, he stood at a friend's funeral with his road manager, Phil Kaufman, and said, "Don't let this happen to me." He wanted to be cremated and scattered at Cap Rock, at the turn for Keys View. His family planned a burial in New Orleans. He died at the Joshua Tree Inn on September nineteenth, nineteen seventy-three. His body went to the Los Angeles airport, bound for New Orleans. Kaufman and a friend, Michael Martin, talked the airport people into handing it over. They signed the slip Jeremy Nobody, the story goes. Two days later, park maintenance men saw smoke near Cap Rock. Near it. People still argue over how near, and I'll leave that where it lies. That smoke was the promise. Kaufman was arrested with a movie crew working at his house, and they cheered when he came back three hours later. "I'm charged with stealing a coffin," he said. "One of the cops called it Gram Theft Parsons." The court fined the two men three hundred dollars apiece. But Rolling Stone asked it plainly that fall. When, if at all, did he make that request? There was nothing on paper. The family denied there'd been any such promise, and he was buried in Louisiana. The park's own administrative history says the Service kept the story out of its programs and "continues to resist," though it's allowed the odd concert. So the visitors tell it themselves. They leave little memorials around that rock, and the caretakers clear them away. He's in Louisiana. Some morning a stranger will set something down for him at Cap Rock anyhow, and stand a minute, and drive on.