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09-10-2023, 12:20 AM
Burning Man. Really.
So this came up at EWO in BC the other day.
I don’t usually tell people I went to Burning Man. Mainly I don’t want them to think I’m a pot-smoking hippy, which I’m definitely not. I don’t want it to screw me down the road somehow or other, when somehow it comes out that I hung out at this big festival of psychedelic junkies, which is basically how I figure it looks to anybody in law enforcement.
But here’s the thing: TPI is no ordinary place. It’s a dark, strange corner of the internet with more secrecy and greater thinkers than elsewhere. Somehow I believe that people here will understand that there is something here worth seeing, worth experiencing, and worth writing about.
So yeah. I went to Burning Man.
My wife was raised by Mennonites. No kidding. Not full-on horse-and-buggy Mennonites, but no-chrome-on-your-car Mennonites. Her mom was on all the Mennonite committees in the town she grew up in and her whole life revolved around the church and its bizarre doctrines of dependence and exclusion, and she tried to move the family to some mission in Africa when my wife was two. It caused a massive fight with my wife’s dad, who was also a Mennonite, but by that time already lapsing badly. He was a Mennonite youth counselor, but he quit the church and became a photographer, eventually anchoring his career with the faculty of architecture at a nearby university, where he teaches photography still. He no longer describes himself as a Mennonite, but as a buddhist. He also owns a small business photographing art for galleries considering artwork for acquisition. He’s an interesting guy, and between the fact that my mother was originally an art historian, and his high-level amateur astronomy and my elective courses in astronomy and astrophysics, and general interest in science and naturalism, he and I get along very well and can talk for hours.
My wife, unfortunately, harbours intense bitterness for the church and only speaks to her family every few months. They do live several time zones away, which makes things easier. When she talks to them, she talks almost exclusively to her father.
One day, my wife and I were lounging around on the couch and he happened to phone. After talking quite a bit about a hexagonal structure visible on the sun through a particular filter, we got to talking about the motorcycle trip I wrote about here a couple of years ago.
“You know what might be an interesting side trip,” said my wife’s father, “would be to investigate Burning Man. A few of my students have gone. It sounds interesting.”
I had heard of Burning Man before, but knew no details at all. I associated it primarily with hippies.
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.” I changed the subject to the incredible sky views available in remote parts of the desert, and that was that.
I guess he also mentioned it to my wife. From here on out, I’ll just call her Erin, so I don’t have to keep saying “my wife”. Erin spent some time looking at pictures of it on the internet. I didn’t. I forgot about it. Well, I guess that’s not true. I looked up the price of tickets. Four hundred bucks. Forget it. That’s as far as I got.
Erin, though, is exclusively visual. The artist daughter of a photographer, she didn’t look up any information on where, how, how much. She looked at pictures and videos. A week later, she came over and sat down on the couch.
“I have to show you something,” she said.
This is what she showed me:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu2bvv_hula-hoop-cam-at-burning-man_creation
“I think we should go to this,” she said.
“You have my attention,” I said.
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I began to research the event. I won’t go into the boring parts, but here’s what grabbed my attention:
It’s in the middle of a dry lakebed in the desert of Nevada. For nine days.
There is no water. There is no food. There is no anything. If you need it, you bring it. The term the organizers use is “radical self-reliance”.
It’s a leave-no-trace event. No garbage is tolerated. Pack it in, pack it out.
There is no buying, no selling, and no trading. You can give away whatever you want, but no strings attached.
Between fifty and seventy thousand people show up, and basically abide by these rules.
No kidding. I was really interested. Radical self-reliance. That’s the kind of thing I can get into. And no bartering. I thought this was more of a hippy-phony-you-pretend-it’s-a-brave-new-world-but-everybody-sells-hemp-jewelry kind of thing. No. This is not what I thought.
Also...I’m a serial skirt chaser. Eye candy is one of my prime motivators. Erin and I bonded on this years ago. I’m not retelling the whole story here but we have similar tastes when it comes to sexual interest, and checking out “girls of burning man” on the Chive pretty much sealed the deal for me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sold. Are you committed to this?”
“I’m committed,” said Erin. “Let’s try to go. We’ll go once, and no matter whether it’s cool or it sucks, we can at least say we went. If it’s awful we can leave.”
“If we leave on day three, we’ll still be on vacation, with no plans, for a week,” I said. “That’s pretty awesome too.”
“Totally,” said Erin. “I think we should go.”
I went to their website to check into the ticket buying process. It was complicated. It lasted an hour or so, total. The tickets were sold at that one time, and either you got in then, or you didn’t go. Tickets went on sale Wednesday. It was Monday. There was not much time for second guessing. I signed up, got the go-motherfuckers email, and bought two tickets. Nearly $900 Canadian, for the right to camp in the middle of a featureless god damn desert, surrounded by hippies. I was worried.
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We geared up. Erin geared up in a big way. Did I mention she was once a professional dominatrix? So her closet is just incredible. I didn’t have much that seemed applicable. I just prepared for the weather. Maybe cold, probably searing. Probably dry. Maybe pouring. Dust storms. Alkali lake bed. Dark. Light. Loud. Crowded. Honestly, I was nervous. I struggle with crowds a bit. Like (I would guess) a number of us here at TPI, I have had experiences in life that tend to make me hypervigilant, restless, tense. I don’t sleep well. I can’t go in to grocery stores or malls for any length of time. Courses like EWO and ECQC either indulge my probably-damaged neurological wiring, or help me cope with it. I’m not sure which. But crowds are not easy for me. Casual, normal emotional interaction and closeness is not really an option in a lot of situations. So yes, I was pretty stressed out by the impending event. On the other hand, courses like ECQC - well, let’s be honest, ECQC itself and nothing else in my life, really - did give me a chance to work some of the tools I thought would help me get through this experience. So I just focused on the physical environment and tried not to think about the interpersonal aspects. Erin just indulged her bikini fetish and picked out shoes.
I was worried about crossing the border.
“They’ll think we have drugs for sure,” I said.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” said Erin.
“I wish we had Nexus cards,” I said. “We could just cruise right through.”
“Maybe next year.”
“Can you imagine the amount of time it’ll take if they search this thing? We’ll be there for hours.”
“Just tell them we’re going camping.”
“With three rubbermaid tubs full of stripper costumes.”
“Well, tons of people go. They have to get in somehow.”
“I’m really not looking forward to this.”
We approached the border Friday night. Erin worked that day. I had it off. I had the 4runner all loaded up. She got home, we had dinner, and left. We tied bicycles to the roof after pulling out of the underground parking lot. It looked pretty sketchy. The truck was bursting at the seams. There wasn’t much of a lineup at the border. We pulled up and the US border guard looked past us, at the vehicle.
“Holy christ,” he said. “What are you, the beverly hillbillies? Where are you moving to?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re going camping. The packing got a little crazy for a while there.”
“That’s my fault,” said Erin.
“Does that, uh...does that whole bin just have shoes in it?”
“Um, yes.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Have a good time.”
And that was it. It was one of the fastest border crossings I’d ever done, and we were through. We drove for a few hours and got a hotel in southern Washington State. They had free waffles in the morning. And then we drove to Reno, the closest major city, and stayed in a hotel with a pool. I had booked that hotel, and two nights there for after Burning Man, so we could soak in the pool and unwind, first from the drive down, then from the event. One thing I know: I like pools. They help me sleep. I figured I’d need it.
We spent a day in Reno putting together the last details. We bought a couple of cases of Coronas, a dozen limes, half a gallon of red wine, half a gallon of white wine, a forty ounce bottle of vodka and a forty ounce bottle of rum. I also bought sleeping pills at the Walmart. And earplugs.
We got up at four to begin the final trek in to Black Rock Desert, the home of Burning Man. The last thing we did was gas up and fill the tires on the mountain bikes, which we heard were useful there. And off we went, following the interstate east, looking for a small turnoff that headed north into the desert.
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The traffic began to build before dawn. When the sun came up, we had already cut our speed down to about twenty miles an hour. There was an endless line of vehicles - some RVs, some cars, and lots of small SUVs like mine. There were a couple of real beater motorhomes, which is what I expected to see lots of. There weren’t many, though. Mostly the vehicles were pretty new.
Around seven in the morning the traffic slowed to a crawl. In the distance was a town called Empire. It took us an hour to get past it, entirely because people were fueling their vehicles at the last gas station. When they’d turn to get into the station, they’d block the road. Traffic would snarl up, and we’d all sit for ten minutes.
In front of us was a camper van full of hippies. At every stop everyone would pile out of it and ride skateboards in bare feet and baggy pants and floppy hats. They were talking excitedly about getting back to Burning Man. Specifically, they kept referring to “the Playa”. That’s how the cool kids talk about Burning Man. The Playa is the term they use to describe the dry lakebed where everything takes place. It’s a bit pretentious, I guess. Mainly these hippies were pissing me off. The driver had been to Burning Man before. He was talking loudly to one of the passengers.
“The Playa is like nothing else on earth, man. You see that dust on the camper? That’s from last year. It never washes off. If sticks, and it becomes part of the vehicle. This camper is like a permanent burn vehicle, forever.”
I looked at the fiberglass surface. It had the powdery surface old fiberglass gets from being out in the sun. There was nothing special about it. I wanted to stick an ice pick in the driver’s brain. The camper had BC plates on it, just like my 4runner.
“I really wish they weren’t Canadian,” said Erin.
“I really wish I was stabbing that guy right now,” I said.
We made it off the paved road around nine a.m. and turned out onto the strange, dusty desert. There was an impossibly long and impossibly wide line of cars - maybe twenty lanes wide and stretching further than I could see - snaking out towards the site itself. I had no idea how things worked once you got to the end of the lineup, either. But it didn’t seem to matter, because there was a near-infinite amount of time to figure it out. We sat in the lineup all day. But I was getting a bit interested. Girls were already stripping down. Still, we didn’t get to the vehicle inspection until around two in the afternoon. Vehicle inspection was cursory. In theory, the inspection was supposed to weed out anyone with feathers, fireworks, guns, or anything that would explode and leave a mess. In practise, I think they were checking for stowaways. You could easily get a gun in if you wanted. I’d considered that; it’s not that difficult for a Canadian to bring a gun to the US, and I had no idea what to expect at Burning Man. I like being armed when possible. But I’d been so worried about crossing the border that adding another layer with ATF Form 6s and guns just seemed like a bad idea. I was armed with an Endura. And, of course, who camps without a hatchet? In my case a swedish razor blade of an axe. I’d just have to go with that.
After the inspection was another line, but it was quicker. We approached the area I really feared: the greeting station.
From a distance I could see people getting out of their vehicles, hugging the greeters, rolling in the dust, and, in general, participating. I was hot, probably dehydrated, tired, and although I hadn’t seen the BC camper hippies for hours at this point, I was still kind of considering stabbing someone to death. It was a long, hot, day, and while I wouldn’t say I’m prone to violence...I do like it as a conflict resolution tool. And I am prone to conflict. I could see the greeter we’d be trying to get past. She was a mostly-naked sixty-year old with a deep, like luggage-grade deep, tan.
“I don’t know if I can handle this,” I said.
“Just be calm,” said Erin.
“If they try to make me roll in the dust I might freak out.”
“Just try to stay positive.”
“Don’t tell me to stay positive. I’m afraid I’m going to have a full-on outburst.”
“Wow, this is going to be tense.”
“She’s going to try to hug me. I don’t think I can be hugged right now.”
“Stay cool. You’ll be okay.”
“This is one of those things where it’s supposed to be cool and open and self-expressive, but actually there’s this unwritten behavioural code and you’re only allowed to participate in the way they want you to, and I’m not going to wear flip flops and hug people and they’re going to sense it and a conflict is going to begin over something because they’ll know I don’t belong here, and it’ll spiral out of control and I’ll seriously stick my thumbs into somebody’s eyes until they’re dead.”
“That’s...yeah. Please try not to do that.”
“You know what I’m talking about though. I know you know what I’m afraid of here.”
“Yeah. Let’s just play it by ear. If we have to get out, we have to get out.”
We pulled up to the greeter. I looked at Erin and Erin looked at me. I locked up my jaw as I habitually do if I think I might get hit and I don’t have a mouthguard. I stepped out of the vehicle.
“Hey,” said the greeter.
“Hi,” I said.
“Look, I know it’s been a long day,” said the greeter. “Everybody’s tired. It’s a lot of sun and a lot of waiting. Would you like a quick greet-and-scoot so you can get in and get your camp together instead of a big long ceremony?”
“Please,” I said. “You’re right, it really has been a long day.”
“All right,” she said, “no problem. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to draw a line in the sand, and if you want, you can step over it. And all I’m going to ask is that whatever you expect about how this week is going to go, whatever preconceptions you have about what people expect from you, when you step over the line, you just shake those off. This doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just walk in to it with an open mind, and take whatever you want to take out of the experience.” And she drew a line in the sand.
I looked at her. She’d read me well. I nodded slowly, thinking about that. It was something I could respect. I stepped over the line.
“Were you expecting something more dramatic?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“You’re going to have a really good time this week. Do you want to hit the bell?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
She handed me a wooden rod. I struck one of the gongs that stood next to every greeting booth.
“Good one,” she said. I handed the rod to Erin. Erin struck the gong. The greeter handed us each a map and a booklet.
“Okay,” said the greeter. “You can go enjoy yourselves now. Would you like a hug?”
“Well,” I said, “actually...sure.”
She hugged me, and I got back in the car. She hugged Erin. Erin got back in the car.
“That’s not what I was expecting at all.”
“Me neither.”
“She was surprisingly cool.”
“I thought so too.”
“She really got where my head was at. I’m impressed. I thought this was going to be so fucked.”
“I was surprised at how there wasn’t really any pressure.”
“Yeah, that was...surprising.”
“So do we just, like, drive in and park somewhere now?”
“I guess.”
“So we did it. We’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
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We drove around. I was confused about what to do. There was a map but I didn’t understand it. I gave it to Erin. I was too focused on the driving to navigate. Everything was way bigger than I’d expected. I felt totally lost.
Burning Man is laid out like a clock or compass. There is a central, open area, about a mile across. Then there are a series of streets arranged in concentric circles. The closest to the center is called the Esplanade, and after that they’re named by letter, A next to Esplanade, and stretching out to maybe M or so. There are radial streets, every 15 minutes on the clock, stretching out to the edges. From 10 to 2 on the dial, there’s nothing. Just a giant open space with sculptures in it. From 2 to 10 is camping space. There’s a compass pattern that lays over everything which determines which spaces are available for pre-arranged theme groups, but mostly it’s just this anarchic riot of camps assembled wherever and however, as long as they aren’t in the roadways.
Erin looked at the map.
“I think...maybe around J street, about 3:30. That’s far enough out we’ll have some space, but not too far from a big bank of toilets. Not too close, either.”
I was glad to have someone else make a decision I could just run with. I headed for 3:30, and it was nice and open. J was calm. It seemed like a good call. There was one guy right at the corner under a Patagonia sun shelter, his feet up, drinking from a titanium camp cup. I pulled in about a hundred feet past him so he wouldn’t feel crowded. We got out and began to set up the camp.
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The camp was based around a sun shelter of my own design. I’d set it up once before in an industrial area near my home. It was a 12x16 industrial tarp, with one short side tied to the 4runner. Then two triangles of 2x3s that held together with bolts and wing nuts to make a kind of tunnel. We set up our tent - the GoLite Shangri-la 5 - under the sun shelter.
As I was putting the sun shelter together, our neighbour walked over.
“How do you feel about ice in your drink?” he asked.
“I feel fine about that,” I said.
“How do you feel about rum and coke?”
“I feel awesome about rum and coke.”
“Because I have a rum and coke with ice in it right here, and some europeans get really snooty about ice in their drink. But if you’re good, I’m good.”
“Man,” I said, “I would pretty much just chew ice and snort raw grain alcohol right now. Rum and coke with ice in it sounds fucking incredible.”
I drank. Man, yeah. It was so good.
“So look,” said my neighbour. “I see what’s going on here, but your triangle thing...I’m not really seeing how this is going to work. Is it an inverted triangle? That doesn’t seem stable.”
“No, this works,” I said. “I tried it.”
“Okay, man. The inverted triangle. Long known as the most stable of geometric forms.”
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I started hammering chunks of rebar into the clay. I’d chopped up a couple of lengths into 18” stakes and sharpened them on my belt sander. They looked like medieval weapons. I pounded them in with a sledgehammer. I was prepared.
After about an hour the sun shelter and tents were up. We had a secondary tent Erin wanted to use as a staging room for her costumes, but it ended up being a storage tent. This was because it didn’t fit under the tarp, and one minute after we set it up we realized it was hotter than the sun in there. Reaching in for a pair of socks was practically fatal.
My neighbour came back over.
“Shit, man,” he said. “When you see this all finished, it actually makes sense.”
“Well,” I said, “my dad was an engineer. I also used to be a framing carpenter, and a mechanic. I know it looks like it wouldn’t work when you see the parts, but we gave it a shot at home. I think the extra level of sun protection is going to be nice. Come by and enjoy the shade any time.”
“Okay,” he said, “that’s cool. But what about the styrofoam panels?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s the cooler-cooler.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Hand me the duct tape,” I said. “I’ll build it.”
I began to assemble panels. I’d cut a 4x8 sheet of 2” rigid foam insulation into six pieces. In fact I’d done the math to build the largest box possible from a single sheet, with minimal leftovers. There was about two square feet left after I did the cutting. The box went together exactly as it had in my apartment, and I slathered it in duct tape to make it somewhat sturdy.
“So what’s it for?”
“In this box go our coolers. I figured any cooler at all wouldn’t be enough to keep things really cold in this heat. But two coolers fit in here with some spare room all around. So the styrofoam takes the brunt of the outside heat, and we can tuck bread and stuff that doesn’t need to be really cold between it and the coolers. One cooler is full of food, and one is full of drinks.”
“It’s a cooler-cooler.”
“It’s a cooler-cooler.”
“Holy shit.”
“Wait ‘til you see the solar-powered air conditioner.”
“Fuck off.”
“No kidding. I made it out of a bucket and a computer fan. I found the instructions on the internet.”
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https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2013-08-26173249_zps9d0e8ac0.jpg
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The air conditioner:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2013-08-26181020_zps9f087188.jpg
And so we got ourselves set up. We were pretty exhausted by the end of the first day. It was six before we got our camp finished. We drank a couple of beers and ate our standard travel food: cold cuts and calabrese buns. We also ate salads. I tried to open a bag of tortilla chips according to the directions but I couldn’t, so I sliced the bag open with a knife. We set up our chairs and just drank in the warm, dry air and the gold light that poured over everything as the sun began to set.
Our neighbour, Jeph - as spelled on his birth certificate, not an affectation - came over for chips, salsa, and a drink. He was also pretty well situated and prepared, although in a different way: he’d been a medic in the US Army Special Forces and his gear reflected that. Every bag he opened had gauze, moleskin, and ace wraps pouring out of it. Every pocket contained sterile dressings and latex gloves. We laughed about how within twenty minutes of arriving, we’d found probably the two most like-minded people at Burning Man. I was never in the military, of course. Incredibly, at the time I was interested in joining, which was twenty years ago, getting in to the Canadian military was hard, really hard. You had to have a bunch of references. It was like applying to a police force. I had no references at all - I was a punk kid and lived half my life on the street. I didn’t have the connections to enlist, so they turned me down.
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Never having lived out that life, I guess it always remained in some fantasy form, and now I own a small pile of guns and I spend a bunch of money on extracurricular training, like most people on TPI. But I’ve been fortunate to train with some great people, and for a while I ran a little company doing corporate and marketing writing for the defense industry, and I always placed a premium on getting access to training materials for whatever course a client might run, or be associated with. As a result it’s very easy for me to chat with a retired SF medic. We talked about SERE training and data mining and all kinds of stuff we figured nobody else at Burning Man would be even slightly interested in.
“Does this drive you crazy?” asked Jeph, to Erin. “You must be so bored hearing all this.”
“I’m used to it. He does man things. I’m making a necklace.”
This was around when we started seeing Art Cars. Art Cars are the only vehicles allowed to drive around at Burning Man, and they all get licensed by the Department of Mutant Vehicles. They’re both rolling works of art, and public transportation, and in many cases, traveling parties. And bars.
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They just roll slowly down the roads, sometimes cranking earthquake-grade bass out of giant sound systems - there were ones that shook the ground from hundreds of feet away - and if there’s space, you hop on. There’s no way to know where they’re going, so you get on and off at will. Some of them are famous, and people vie for a spot on them because it’s the place to be seen. I didn’t have a clue which ones were famous and I didn’t know that there was any kind of special status being imbued by riding one. We later heard that some of the big art cars only let on young, hot women, which is against the rules. All Art Cars have to be available for anyone to ride, but in practise probably some do discriminate. I’m sure that’s probably true but it didn’t affect us at all. We’re not young and nobody rejected us. We just got on whenever. Of course, that was usually at night, when maybe my grey hair wasn’t as obvious. Anyway, I heard that some people took issue with the Art Car royalty, but some level of social stratification is going to happen no matter where you find yourself. Burning Man isn’t the utopia some people want it to be, but if you’re really looking for utopia at a giant party that exists for a week in the middle of nowhere once a year, you’re probably not being very realistic. It’s still cool.
In the morning, we decided to ride our bikes around and get a look at the whole thing. I still didn’t have a good sense of the scale of anything, but I figured the bikes would be quicker than walking. I thought it would probably take two hours to walk and get a look at most of it.
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We put our exploring gear together. This includes goggles, dustmasks, fluids, hats, and extra socks. It also includes costumes. And empty cups. More on this in a bit.
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When people say “bikes are useful at Burning Man” they mean “if you don’t have a bike, stab your own feet off, because you are wasting your time trying to walk it”.
The gap in the center is a mile across. The entire site is three miles in diameter. To ride L street from 2 to 10 is seven or eight miles. Esplanade is probably two miles. And everywhere - I mean everywhere - is a bar.
I mentioned that there is no buying and selling, only giving, with no strings attached? That’s true at the bars as well.
So everywhere, literally everywhere, is a bar, giving booze away.
After four hours we hadn’t seen a tenth of it. We’d barely even glanced at the art installations. Erin and I looked at each other.
“I need to get out of this sun.”
“I need to eat. It’s four in the afternoon, we’ve been going all day.”
“We’re never going to see it all.”
“My face hurts from staring at everything with my mouth open.”
“My face hurts from the sun.”
“We need to head back to camp and recharge.”
“This is enormous.”
It is enormous. The scale blew my mind. But let me backtrack a little. I’d like to explain the presence of the bars.
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The bars are directly connected to what are called Theme Camps. Theme Camps are pre-organized group camps which are totally optional. They’re usually groups of friends, either from some town where they all know each other in person, or some corner of the internet, brought together by a common purpose. They have names like Death Barbie, or Les Fruits Organiques, or White Trash Superstars. There’s no advantage to being in a theme camp beyond the fact that you can stake out a bunch of territory and reserve it for your friends. Also, there’s unofficial status that goes along with having a theme camp.
I’ll just mention here that preliminary discussions of a “Guns ‘N’ Grappling” theme camp have already occurred. Just imagine. If you dare.
Theme camps are permitted on one condition that I know of (although there may be other requirements I’m not aware of): you must be giving something away. In some cases, that’s barbecued meats. One camp had an entire pig of bacon, slow cooking over a little fire, all week long, and they just gave platefuls of half-inch-thick bacon to anyone walking by. Another camp had all-you-can-eat organic fruits of a hundred different types, all sponsored (anonymously, no advertising is allowed) by an organic orchard in California somewhere. They sliced up fruit by the crate and you just filled plates and ate.
But the most popular giveaway is booze. You have no control over what you’ll get, you just hand them your cup - they don’t have disposable ones, that much garbage is not acceptable - and get something back. Sometimes it’s awesome. Sometimes it’s and adventure, like when White Trash Superstars, who were awesome, ran out of everything except whisky and cosmo mix, so they invented “Irish Cosmos”. It didn’t make a good first drink but as a fifth or sixth drink it was great.
So that’s what you did. You pub crawled, from crazy theme bar to crazy theme bar, in the dust and the dirt, surrounded by half-naked girls, getting loaded on free booze. In retrospect, when I said it wasn’t utopia, that might have been wrong.
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Night comes early from the perspective of a Canadian in summer. By eight, it’s pretty dark. There’s minimal artificial light out in the ‘burbs, which is about what 3:30 J amounts to. When night falls, the traditional thing to do is to howl like a wolf. It’s a bit silly, but also a bit haunting, because you’re listening to something like forty or fifty thousand people howling, simultaneously, in a vast and ordinarily utterly empty desert, surrounded by dry, desolate mountains, echoing back a slow, faint response as the last rays of the sun disappear.
And night is when things really get going. It’s too hot during the day to go hard. At night, everyone begins to move. The clubs on the esplanade fill up, and you can ride art cars, or ride your bike, or walk, to wherever you want to go. The party atmosphere is pretty wild. Erin described it as a “giant dirt rave”. I thought that was pretty accurate. No matter where you go, it’s got the same floor of bentonite clay, pounded into powdery moon dust. But the scenes are bizarre and incredible. Giant, glowing jellyfish puppets pulse through the air overhead at a club called “Slutgarden”. A block away, people are meditating in a multi-faith spiritual structure. Next door is to that, a kissing workshop is being held, and the adjacent theme camp is handing out glasses of water with finely chopped cucumber for flavour. Overshadowing the scene is a tree sculpture, thirty or forty feet tall, made entirely out of cattle bones. And this stretches on for miles. The neon displays rival the strip in Las Vegas, and massive lasers shoot across the open playa and project for such vast distances that, if viewed from the right angle and through the faintly dusty atmosphere of the Black Rock desert, they reflect a subtle bend - the curvature of the earth’s gravitational well, bending the light as it traces out the geodesic path into the endless void of space.
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This picture was taken by Jeph. Note on his phone says “trying to explain ‘gravitational lensing’ to Erin”.
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At night, I rarely took pictures, for a lot of reasons. Most importantly, I was probably drunk. But also, I didn’t really go with the intention of recording everything. In fact, I didn’t take even ten percent of the pictures I probably should have, because I wanted be be there, not behind a camera. And the downside of that is that I can’t show you just how much nudity there was in the clubs at night. But there was a lot. I’ll sort through the pictures I do have and see what I can find to whet your appetites, though.
Mornings were a little rough. I took sleeping pills to try to outlast the sun a bit, but I wake up early no matter what, and more so if hung over. On the other hand, I tried to stay as hydrated as possible, so none of the hangovers were too severe. Also, the experience of being there was so innately hallucinatory that I didn’t really feel the need to get too plastered.
While I’m on the topic of substance abuse, one of the things that surprised me the most was the infrequency of blatant drug use. I have no doubt that the kids who came to dance in the big clubs and on or around the biggest art cars until the sun came up were using party drugs of different kinds. But you couldn’t see it happen. And outside of assuming they were using drugs, I didn’t really have much exposure to drug use there. In fact, I saw less direct evidence of drug use my whole week at Burning Man than I do on the average chair lift at Whistler. All week, I got offered one joint, once. I admit, I have short hair and I’m in good shape. I could be a narc, I guess. But really, there is a heavy police presence there and people aren’t just walking around using drugs. I heard there was a major bust of a vehicle loaded with drugs on the third day. That’s pretty plausible. But contrary to what I expected, I just didn’t see much other than alcohol.
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I dealt with the rough mornings by employing my favourite ritual: prescription strength coffee. I made it the same way I make it at home, which happens to be pretty simple to take on the road. In fact, I learned to make coffee this way from my dad, and I was probably in my twenties before I realized this isn’t how everyone makes coffee. I guess my dad started doing it this way because he lived a big chunk of his life as a prospector, camping by himself in remote parts of BC for weeks or months at a time. People occasionally ask me what coffee made this way is called - i.e. cowboy coffee, or campfire coffee. I don’t have a name for it and neither does my dad, because it’s the only way I’ve ever made it or seen it made except in a restaurant. I just call it “coffee”. I put grounds in a pot of cold water, heat it up slowly, and pour it through a strainer just before it boils.
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This ritual attracted the neighbours, and by about day three, I was handing out cups of nuclear-grade coffee. A pound of beans makes me about 15-20 cups. It’s very strong, but not too bitter. I like it. A few days in, everyone else liked it too.
Late on the second night, two trucks pulled in between Jeph’s camp and ours. In the morning, I met the owners. They were, at first glance, extremely ordinary people. One was a technician who worked on medical equipment. The other was a lineman. The lineman was an avid hunter of all sorts of game. The medical equipment tech had brought his teenage daughter. Both men were in their mid-forties.
By this time I’d gotten used to the tendency of people to greet you by asking whether it was your first “burn” or not. I would have asked these two, but their camp was so well-appointed that I thought they must have been here before, and that’s what I said instead.
“This is my nineteenth consecutive year,” said the tech.
“It’s my twelfth,” said the lineman.
“It’s about the twelfth or thirteenth for me as well,” said the tech’s daughter.
“Wow,” I said.
“I consider this “world B,” said the lineman, whose name was Kevin. “You live in two worlds, world A and world B. World A has your work and your home and everything you get sick of. Once a year, you load up your spaceship, and it’s back to world B. World B should be my home, but you know, you take what you can get.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How did you discover this?”
“Hunting,” he said. “I used to drive by it on my way into the outback, which is what we call this part of Nevada. Every year I’d see these hippies or what have you - that’s what I thought back then - and I’d bash the hell out of them. I was always a go-to-work guy. You know. I went to school, I worked. I bought a house. I thought these people were just complete wastes of skin.”
“Right,” I said.
“So I bitched about them so much, one of the guys at work started saying to me I should come down here and see it, because I was always talking about it. And I figured it would be a big mess. I’d go and get in some fight with somebody and get thrown out, but I also figured whatever, I mean it’s hippies. What are they going to do?”
“I get you.”
“So I went. And you know what? I showed up and I was like...this is actually pretty cool.”
“That’s pretty awesome that you kept such an open mind.”
“I didn’t. I was all ready to hate it. But I don’t know, what is there to hate? People are nice. They give you food and drinks. Everybody’s friendly. Sure, some people look like idiots. Some people are idiots. But mostly, it’s just...it’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah.”
“I was thinking about making elk tacos. You guys want elk tacos?”
“Yes, definitely.”
So we ate elk tacos with Kevin and the tech, whose name was Don. But Kevin and Don went by Turtle and Stumbles. This is another feature of Burning Man. People give each other “Playa Names”. The names are pretty fluid and change from year to year, although some people keep a name for years. Veteran attendees give out the names, seemingly at random. Erin and I were named after a conversation with Stumbles and Turtle which centered on our camp, which was heavily adorned with Canadian flags, because we’re patriots.
“So,” said Stumbles. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, just down here to steal your jobs,” I said. “Also I was told there would be education and food stamps.”
And so we were named Pedro and Lupe.
Jeph also got his own name: Dot. He was named Dot after a confusing, drunk discussion about immigration and Canada and the United States. I’d been trying to explain Surrey, BC, as being full of Indians, and Jeph was asking questions about that and about Erin’s work with the branch of the Canadian government that deals with on-reserve health in BC, the First Nations Health Authority. Jeph was confused as hell trying to connect these two things, and finally asked, “okay, hang on. These Surrey indians...what kind of indians are they? Feather or dot?”
And so they named him Dot.
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Terrible photography: Pedro, Dot, Stumbles, Lupe, Turtle
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I can’t remember which night it was, but we were out wandering around, catching rides on art cars, and we found the most incredible thing: Death Guild’s Thunderdome.
If you watched the Mad Max movies, and I hope you did, you don’t need an explanation. If you didn’t watch the Mad Max movies, you probably don’t deserve an explanation, so consider this an act of charity: Thunderdome is the greatest thing ever. It’s a geodesic dome made out of some kind of heavy pipe. It’s open and you can climb on it and look in. But that’s not the important thing.
The important thing is this: Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves.
Inside Thunderdome, there are two climbing harnesses, and four giant elastic bands to suspend the harness-wearers and allow them to swing and jump. And there are two padded bats which the harness-wearers use to beat each other.
Bottom line: AWESOME. I pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers and found an organizer, someone from the theme camp Death Guild. They were easy to spot: they all dressed like people from Mad Max.
“How can I fight?”
“Do you have a partner?”
“No.”
“Find a partner.”
I stood on the edge of the dome. I was wearing a business suit.
“I will fight anyone!” I shouted. “I’m an accountant and I’m drunk and unrealistically confident!”
The volunteer was a mouthy guy who introduced himself as “a black belt”.
“Ready to get whooped?” he asked me.
“I’m mainly interested in having a good time,” I said.
“I’m a black belt,” he said, “I’ll try to take it easy on you.”
“Cool. I’ll just try to take it easy, period,” I said.
“I’ve been doing martial arts for fifteen years,” he said.
“This looks like tons of fun,” I said.
“I’m pretty good,” he said.
“Awesome,” I said.
They strapped us in. The crowd began to chant. My mouth was dry. It was pretty intense. The Death Guild people pulled us back. I could feel the elastics stretching.
“Ready?”
“Okay.”
“One hand on the bat. No whining, no complaining. You good?”
“Good.”
“Two men enter! One man leaves! Go!”
The people at my sides hurled me at my opponent, who was of course hurled simultaneously at me. The elastics made it hard to get a good purchase on the ground. We collided hard. It was basically a clinch. I switched my foam bat to reverse grip and threw some jabs with the pommel to get a bit of range, but it was tough to connect. Within a minute or so I’d swung upside down. Position was tough to control.connect hard I threw jabs and used my left to tie up his striking arm, but you couldn’t really Hmm. They separated us. The black belt, whose name I never found out, was yapping the whole time.
“Stop dicking around! Hit me!” he shouted.
The referee or whatever she was pulled me aside.
“Don’t play chess,” she said. “We’re not scoring this. That guy is a fucking prick. Do some damage.”
“It’s tricky,” I said. “I can’t really plant my feet and drop my weight on him.”
“Figure it out,” she said. “Smoke this fucking loser.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. I took off my jacket.
They launched us again. Rather than let myself collide with the guy, I used my legs to get a bit of range, and stayed with a forward grip. I didn’t swing, I just jabbed. It was still tricky, but I was getting the hang of it. I got a few solid connections on the guy. I couldn’t hear the crowd at all, but the guy stopped yapping. They pulled us apart.
“Nice,” said the ref. “Keep doing that.”
“You got it,” I said.
They launched us again. This time he climbed up my legs so I couldn’t just lay back and throw hits. He was close in, avoiding the bat. I stayed with the forward grip, but threw hits with the pommel, which was lightly padded. I caught the guy hard three or four times. After a couple of minutes they pulled us apart. I could hear the crowd again. Everyone was cheering. The lippy guy looked okay, but he wasn’t lipping. The ref held up my arm but honestly I couldn’t tell whether that was because I won or because she really didn’t like the other guy and had already decided he was going to lose. I had a sprained middle finger and a black eye, although I didn’t notice the black eye until the morning. I don’t know what the other guy looked like. I didn’t see him again. For all I know he looked fine and I lost, hard. It was really tough to tell.
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One thing I haven’t really gone into is the lack of any sort of economy at Burning Man. There’s two things you can buy, and only from the organizers: ice, which is kind of a critical safety thing, and coffee, which is kind of a critical safety thing in its own way. If I hadn’t bought a couple of pounds of coffee at the Starbucks in Reno, I guarantee there would have been a trail of corpses between 3:30 J and the one coffee shop each morning.
Ice wasn’t really cheap, either. $3/bag or 6 for fifteen. On the other hand, a fridge truck has to drive it out to the middle of nowhere every day. And there’s about a dozen people required to organize the process of distribution, because half the city is buying some every day.
The cooler-cooler really showed its worth when it came to lining up for ice, which we only did twice: once on day 2, and once on day 5. Not bad considering we were cooling drinks and food in the sun in 40-degree heat (hundred-and-something-degree heat for you southrons). Most people I talked to bought ice every other day.
So day 5, we went to get ice, and the lineup was a mile long. It was around noon. After a bit of discussion we decided to wait at a local bar, White Trash Superstar. We hadn’t been there yet but it looked right up our alley. Honestly, up until this point we’d kind of struggled with the idea that you could just walk up and ask for booze. I felt really weird about it and so did Erin. I don’t know if this is common to everyone or it’s a Canadian thing or if it was just us. But this was the moment that we decided: screw it. Everyone else seems to be okay with this. We’d gotten drinks at night before, but not that much, really. I felt kind of ashamed to be taking stuff from people. Anyway, it was really hot, and White Trash Superstars looked pretty cool. We walked over to their bar.
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“Well,” I said, “what are you pouring?”
And this was when I found out about Irish Cosmos, as mentioned earlier. It’s better than it sounds.
“So how did you come to be out of everything but whiskey and cosmo mix?”
“Well, we’re not really out. The only people with keys to the liquor cabinet are passed out.”
“Oh.”
“At some point, they’ll wake up, and we can start pouring more drinks again. Right now we’re pretty fucked. Another I.C.?”
“You bet.”
And so we sat there and drank. The bartenders were kind of rotating in and out. One was this guy who was so good looking, it was almost embarrassing. He was a surfer from Hawaii in a straw cowboy hat and he looked like the love child of Brad Pitt and Owen Wilson. But better looking. But instead of being a dick, which he totally could have been, he was really nice.
After maybe an hour or so, somebody came by from another bar and gave them two 40 bottles, one rum, one gin, so they would have more options. That was the kind of atmosphere it was; the point was to party, wherever. Giving the booze away was the fun. Also, it was great for us personally. We got buzzed right up.
Eventually the ice line looked pretty short so we went over and waited. There were some people who, just to be nice, were walking back and forth with misters of ice water, and misting anyone who wanted it. They did it for about an hour that I saw, but I don’t know how long they’d been there when we showed up.
We only needed a few bags of ice, because the cooler-cooler was pretty efficient. But I bought two six-packs. Thirty bucks...who cares? I hadn’t spend a dime in five days. On the way home we stopped in at White Trash Superstar and I gave them a couple of bags of ice. They were ecstatic. How crazy is that? We’d drank free at their bar for hours. I gave them a few bags of ice and they all came out from behind the bar and hugged me. They were out of ice, so I’m sure it was nice to not have to go stand in the line but still, no skin off my back and they were so thrilled. I couldn’t believe it. They pulled us aside and poured us massive shots of Jaegermeister, which was like gold out there. It was their personal private reserve, and we all drank it together. I don’t want to sound all doe-eyed about it but I just couldn’t believe how nice they were because we did this one little thing for them.
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When we got back I handed out ice to the people near us. It was easy to get caught up in the whole spirit of giving things for the pleasure of giving them, that’s for sure.
Another interesting aspect of Burning Man was dealing with the dust storms. Everywhere we went, we took dust masks and goggles. Often a wind would kick up and the dust was so fine it would just turn the air into a fog of unbreathable soup. Particularly anywhere with a lot of foot and bike traffic would get really hectic, as the ground was pounded into talc. 3, 6, and 9 on the clock were all pretty beat up, and 9 at the Esplanade, which was probably the biggest party spot, was just nuts when it got windy. A lot of the time, the central playa just looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
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Out there on the open lakebed was where you could see most of the art. I’m not a huge art guy exactly but I can appreciate some of it. My little sister is a professional visual artist with a BFA, and my wife used to be a 3D artist for the video game industry, and I think I mentioned my mom was originally an art historian. So I have some contact with the art world. And it happens to be that the art I tend to appreciate the most is large-scale installation stuff. Well. They do that at Burning Man.
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Art Cars.
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At night, this spun in front of a strobe that gave it a crazy kinescope effect.
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Art you could play on:
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Lighting the lanterns at night:
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This was a flaming sculpture you could play like an organ. I'm playing it here. I got kind of into it.
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"The Man" himself. This structure is probably three or four hundred feet across.
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Erin and Jeph, inside the Burning Man UFO.
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The above-pictured art isn’t a tenth of it, either. You would need a month to see it all, and you only have a week. Plus you’re partying it up the whole time. It’s too much.
The big finale is, of course, the burn. They start burning smaller pieces of art late in the afternoon on the last Saturday, and the Man burns Saturday night. It sort of seems like a shame to burn so much of this stuff, but I guess that’s the whole point. They lay down a thick layer of sand so the surface of the playa doesn’t get marred, and there’s a big celebration. You can’t get closer than about a thousand feet, so everyone forms into a huge semi-circle and watches the performance of fire dancers, fireworks, and waits for the burn to start. It’s the biggest part of all, and everyone dresses up. Even I wore a primitive viking outfit.
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I shouldn’t tell you this but I wasn’t super fascinated by the fire dancer stuff. I don’t know why not. I think I was just tired. I’d been going hard all week and I just didn’t have much energy left, I guess. In retrospect it was a good display, and of course as per usual for Burning Man, the amount of eye candy was extreme. Of course on the eighth or ninth straight day of topless girls in booty shorts, you kind of start to tune it out, even if they’re juggling flaming swords and breathing fire. By this point, everything starts to look normal.
We wandered around for a bit before joining the big audience for the burn. The atmosphere was chaotic. All the art cars were forming into an outer ring and people were climbing on to them to get a good view. Some of the cars themselves were shooting fire out of different tubes and hoses, illuminating the playa momentarily, like lightning. Everything was moving. It was hard to focus on much other than the big burn, though. There was this sense of impending finality that undercut everything. I don’t think it was just me. I think that everyone feels this way leading up to the burn.
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Interestingly, there is stuff after the burn. They burn the Man Saturday night; on Sunday, they burn the Temple. The Temple is a place of quiet meditation and I’m told the atmosphere at the Temple burn is very sombre. It used to be that everyone left on Sunday morning, and the organizers stayed around and burned the Temple by themselves, but I guess a couple of things changed: the sheer scale of the event probably means that more people are going to participate in every aspect of it, and also the increasing popularity of Burning Man as a sheer party event for fans of electronic music (as opposed to people committed to the ‘values’ of Burning Man as conceived by the founders) has led to a situation where a lot of people don’t arrive until Thursday, and party like it’s the ultimate long weekend, and they’re still able to keep going on Sunday, and they don’t want it to end.
But by late Saturday, personally, I kind of wanted it to end. I’d been sleeping on an inflatable mat on the ground for a week, drinking every day, surrounding myself with huge crowds. I was pretty burned out, in every sense.
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But this in itself is probably the single most telling thing about the Burning Man experience. I’d arrived feeling like I might not last through the greeting station. I don’t want to turn this in to a big thing about my personal issues but crowds are difficult for me for the same reason sleeping is difficult for me. I’m getting better at it but it’s true, if you’re the kind of person who takes on adventures for no reason other than because they’re hard, or dangerous, well, you’ve probably had some things go wrong, and you’re probably coping with some psychological problems stemming from the things that were supposed to be adventures, but turned out to be disasters. That’s fine, but it also makes you a bit jumpy in crowds, and that’s something with which you just have to cope.
But you might notice that after I got over the sense of trepidation that I had before Burning Man started, I haven’t written about being stressed out at all. That’s because I didn’t experience any of the usual sense of psychological strain that crowds give me. I didn’t fear anything at all. The constant exposure to other people wore me down after eight or nine straight days of it, but I never worried about anything. I didn’t worry about who was in the crowd at all. I drank more than I ever would, anywhere else, around any other group of people, and I wasn’t even slightly worried about getting in to trouble.
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Maybe the low threat-level is best summed up by a conversation I had with one of the police officers who was patrolling the event.
“So,” I said, “is this an annoying event to get stuck at? You guys are sure putting in a lot of hours in the sun and dealing with a lot of weirdness.”
“Are you kidding? This is a dream. Everybody is friendly. Nobody gets aggressive. If you need to talk to someone about something they’re doing, they stop and talk. All we do is hang around and make sure nothing keeps on happening.”
“Wow...that is pretty good.”
“Buddy, my last assignment was Sturgis. You want headaches? Go try to police a bunch of dentists who bought a symbol of being a tough guy, and now they have something to prove.”
“Yeah...huh.”
“And I’m raking in OT right now.”
“And pretty much lounging around and checking out the scenery.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s...brilliant.”
“Yep.”
This is my favourite set of pics from all of Burning Man. You can literally read the thoughts of the two featured individuals.
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“OH YES” vs. “oh, hi”
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“Well, that guy was enthusiastic.”
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“...but, I’m going over here now.”
And I also found that there were a lot of people who were more like me than I expected. I met a surprising number of retired military, some of whom were pretty switched-on. I met a couple of current members of law enforcement. I met lots of people who were just pretty normal, and came to have an experience during which they felt they could express themselves more flamboyantly than normal.
One of the most interesting couples I met was a fairly ordinary looking pair, in their mid-sixties. You do see some people that age at Burning Man, but they’re usually pretty obvious lifers in some kind of counterculture. But these two looked pretty ordinary.
“Would you like a painkiller?” asked the man. The woman laughed.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Wait til you hear the details. Come this way. We’re setting up at a bar.”
At the bar, they were making cocktails called painkillers. They were pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut milk, rum, and nutmeg. They were really, really good.
“This is our contribution. We discovered these while sailing in the British Virgin Islands last year, so we brought all the supplies to share them with people.”
“They’re really good,” I said. “How long have you been coming to Burning Man?”
“This is our first time.”
“No kidding.”
“We heard about it, and we thought we’d try it. Just challenge ourselves. Why not?”
“That’s cool,” I said. It was. They’d never done anything like it before, and now, retired, they were giving it a shot, because ‘why not’. Why not indeed? It’s quite an experience.
The fireworks display built for half an hour and the crowd was nearly in a frenzy when the first flames appeared on top of the Man. Within minutes, the structure began to burn in earnest, and the heat was perceptible back at the safety line.
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“I know I have the telephoto on. I’ll just lean back in and it’ll look fine.”
After ten minutes, the structure was engulfed in flames which reached hundreds of feet into the air. I felt like I was getting a tan from it. The heat was so intense it began to generate its own tiny weather system. Winds began to rush around the structure and little tornadoes of fire came spinning off, one after another. People cheered. The tornadoes of fire reached up a hundred feet into the sky. Everything was lit up a beautiful golden-orange by the inferno. It was spectacular. Within half an hour, it was a pile of smoking debris, and we stared at it, feeling strangely empty. A dust storm began to envelop the entire desert. Erin and I wandered around the playa, looking at the festivities, but feeling no desire to participate. We planned to leave early in the morning, intending to beat the rush out. But it felt like there was nothing left. I started thinking about another night lying on the hard desert clay, waking up every few hours as an art car rolled by hammering out thunderous bass, or because I’d been drinking for hours on end, or for no reason at all. I just didn’t want to be there any more. Every time I woke up in the middle of the night - and for me that’s four or five times - I’d have to decide whether I wanted to walk the equivalent of a city block to go to the bathroom. Leave no trace extends to everything. And when you decided, at 4 am, that you did want to go to the bathroom, you didn’t walk through your dark, silent house, you walked through an ongoing, benevolent, psychedelic riot. I was just about done with it.
“Hey,” I said. “You know what would be amazing? Sleeping in a bed. I bet if we left tonight, we’d be in Reno in three hours. We could go to the hotel a day early, and just grab a room. Then we’d have three days to lounge in a pool and decompress. What do you think?”
“I could go for a bed. It seems like this just feels over now.”
So we went back to our camp, packed it in about a half hour, and left. It was a bit tricky to pack because there was a howling dust storm, and it was dark. I was really motivated, though. I couldn’t wait to get a long, hot shower and a bed. The 4runner was bursting at the seams when we finished, though. Nothing was packed and organized in the neat, efficient manner we’d done on the way down. We just crammed it in and left.
Driving out across the playa in the dust storm was interesting. There were about twenty or thirty other vehicles that we could see that carried other burners who opted to bail out. The roadway that took six hours to traverse on the way in took twenty minutes on the way out, even with severely compromised visibility. The highway was less of a free-for-all. Nobody was taking any chances on doing anything that might result in getting pulled over. Everyone was doing ten under the limit, which was driving me absolutely crazy. But I didn’t freak out. I passed when I could do so safely, and I didn’t drive aggressively at all, because I didn’t really want to get pulled over, either. I saw one guy pulled over. Unfortunately for him, whatever he did that got him pulled over appeared to warrant a full search of the vehicle. Everything was strewn over the shoulder for inspection. I didn’t want that to happen at all, and that moderated my driving significantly.
We pulled into Reno around two a.m. and found the hotel.
“Hey, you came from Burning Man! Awesome!”
“Yeah. We’re actually booked for tomorrow night, not tonight, but if it’s possible to get in tonight I could really go for that.”
“Well, you could camp in the parking lot.”
“Ha, yeah. No, seriously, though. Can we have the same room, or is it occupied?”
“Not only can you not have that room, you can’t stay anywhere in Reno tonight. No room for you!”
“Yeah, for sure. Ha, yeah. Seriously, though.”
“No, I’m being serious.”
“Yeah, because...okay, what?”
“The international chili competition is in town this weekend, dude. There literally isn’t a hotel room in the entire city.”
“What, really?”
“Yeah. It’s one of the biggest events of the year.”
“Oh.”
“And I already called around to like twenty hotels looking for a room for someone else. And I’ve been on every booking website. You’re out of luck, man.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I went back outside.
“Babe, I’m really sorry, but I fucked this up.”
“Why?”
I explained.
“We could drive around and see if we can find a place anyway, if you want.”
“We might as well.”
We drove around for an hour, but the clerk was right. There was no place to stay and nowhere to sleep. Erin fell asleep in the passenger seat, so eventually, I just took the Toyota out to the highway, and began the long drive home.
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09-10-2023, 12:23 AM
Stress, relaxation, and fancy hats: Burning Man 2
I get stressed out. I get stressed out and I start fixating on problems. I rarely raise my voice. I try to be extremely disciplined about displaying any emotions at all, but definitely negative ones. But I do get a bit short with people - not hostile, generally speaking, but compressed. Like I don’t have enough time to get things done, so even my individual words get a bit clipped.
As a rule, I don’t like to argue. I prefer to have constructive discussions. I’m very careful about how I phrase things in the context of my relationship, especially. I will say things like, “I realize you couldn’t have predicted that a traffic jam would occur right then and there, and obviously I don’t blame you for that. But at the same time, this is the third time in two weeks you’ve been late meeting me at a restaurant, and that’s something I’m starting to find frustrating and I would like to feel like you’re taking my schedule seriously.”
In this case, the time pressure was getting to me. I was less disciplined in my language. In fact, I was about as curt as I like to get and I gritted my teeth afterwards, knowing it would bother me for hours.
“Look,” I said. “You had to know that gluing a hundred feathers to your head would take forever. I’m sorry, but I can’t really take the time in the middle of wrapping fifty feet of freezing, wet rawhide around a sheep skull to try to solve it for you. Can you figure it out on your own? Try a hair dryer.”
But overall, preparations were going well.
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Apparently these boots were designed for the people who made them: underfed Vietnamese children. I slit the seams up the back and hand stitched triangles of leather in to spread them out, then glued reflective tape on just to make it look cool.
Last year at this time, I was stressed right out. I was checking off lists and breathing very deliberately. This year it was mostly about the hat.
“Honestly, I don’t even know how to do this. What goes on the back? More fur? Can I borrow maybe…some ermines?”
“Okay, but you have to be careful with them. Also these are minks.”
“Pretty sure they’re ermines.”
“They’re minks.”
“And I don’t know how to hold the horns on. I need some coathangers. And to draw on this hat somehow. I have literally no idea how to…mark it. So that I can stick wires or something to it. And sliding the wires off the skull is basically fucking impossible. Fuck.”
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But I was stressing about my hat because there wasn’t really anything else to stress about. Since last year, we’d gotten Nexus passes and the border wasn’t a worry. We had all the gear from last year plus a bike rack on the back of the 4runner which made us look WAY less sketchy. We loaded up on the last day and rolled out around 6 pm, drove for four or five hours, and cruised into a cheap King Oscar motel in Centralia. I had selected the King Oscar after careful research based around two factors: price, and a photograph of the interior of the lobby proving they had serve-yourself waffle breakfasts. The King Oscar had two waffle irons for forty bucks a night. Sold.
You laugh, but I’m evidently not alone in my waffle breakfast lust: the lobby was jammed at 8 am. There were people spilling out into the driveway with paper plates of waffles. I ate three waffles and looted the fruit basket and took a bagel and cream cheese from the fridge and poured myself two glasses of orange juice and left with enough calories to last me until California. Erin ate a waffle and helped carry bananas and orange juice. On the way out we looked at the various people eating their waffles and speculated about how you could probably sneak from waffle breakfast motel to waffle breakfast motel without staying in them. Then we imagined a person cackling with supervillain glee over successfully stealing breakfasts all over Centralia (possibly also Chehalis) and we laughed. We were on the road by 9 am.
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Erin thought it looked like this car had a giant wedge cap on.
I can’t remember if I said much about the drive down last time but last year we left the hotel too late in the morning and then we got stuck in an hour long jam on a highway following an accident of some kind. Then we got delayed again by traffic going through this town the name of which I don’t remember but which backed up the highway for miles just on account of this one bakery which people were lining up to get into.
All told, last year we were probably about four hours behind where we were this year and we kept talking about it. I just couldn’t believe how relaxed it made me feel. I kept recognizing stuff in bright sunshine that last year I’d only seen in darkness.
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The only upside to last year’s traffic jams was this one moment when we’d been sitting in traffic, barely moving, on a remote highway somewhere in eastern Oregon, when I decided to try to find some kind of traffic information station on the radio.
I’d hit “scan” on my radio and after a minute, I locked in to something on FM 89.1, but it was fuzzy. It sounded like police radios and people were yelling. Erin and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. I turned up the radio but the reception wasn’t good. It definitely sounded chaotic and there was a lot of hoarse yelling. I started to pull out a bit and scan down the road to see if I could see emergency lights. Then on the radio there was gunfire. Like lots of gunfire and more yelling.
“What the fuck.”
“Yeah, I do not like this. I don’t have a damn thing on me if we get shot at.”
“Do you want to keep driving?”
“Yeah, we have tons of gas. If something’s going on we’ll see cars turning around and bailing out from up front. Just reach back and grab my first aid gear out of the top of my pack, just in case. I’ll keep my eyes open. If it gets weird I’ll get us out of here somehow.”
“It sounds like people are fucking killing each other.”
“Just watch out and keep track of any pullouts or logging roads or whatever that we go past.”
Then there was this weird sound on the radio. I don’t know how to describe it, sort of a buzzy kind of humming that had a weird staccato quality to it. It sounded really familiar.
“Did that sound like…Transformers?”
I looked around in confusion. Then it clicked. Not the car in front of me, but the car in front of him. I could see a TV screen hanging down. The kids in the back seat were watching a Transformers movie, on a DVD player that broadcast a short range FM signal so you could play it on your car stereo. I explained it to Erin. Man, did we ever laugh.
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But this year there wasn't anything quite like that. There was just the feeling of relief that I basked in, because I wasn’t stressed out about getting to Reno, or going to Burning Man in general. I was just relaxed.
Last year we arrived in Reno really late. I can’t remember if I told you about that either. And then I couldn’t sleep. And the next day we ran around getting outfitted and honestly it was kind of tense because we were both stressed out and we actually debated whether we should stay in Reno an extra day just to calm down, because we’d actually been a bit snappy with each other, which I really hate. But we just went, and I know I talked about how I was totally stressed out in the lineup and contemplating violence but then the greeter person was really friendly and everything just went well.
Well, this year we arrived in Reno early. I was so happy, I just couldn’t stop talking about it. I mean I didn’t want to harp on it to the point that Erin felt like I was obliquely criticizing her past lateness, but I just felt so good getting in around 8 instead of 1 that I was really chipper. I know I’ve talked about my sleep problems to some people here but if you’re just hearing about this now, yeah, I have kind of a complicated relationship with both stress and sleep which I don’t generally like to detail in public. TPI is a bit not-public so while I don’t want to drag this off on this pity tangent, I’ll just say this once that yes, my references to stress are connected to a full-on diagnosed-by-a-real-live-psychiatrist traumatic stress disorder. And yeah, I have sleep problems. Again I don’t want to make this a big focus of anything here. I’m really just relating it to explain why it was such a big win for me to roll into Reno relaxed, rested, and cheerful. And if you go back and read the other Burning Man thread, well, that’s why I was so concerned about freaking out on the way in. I don’t like to talk about it because I was never in the military and I don’t want people thinking I’m playing some weird poser game with this. But yeah, you can do dumb stuff or have dumb stuff done to you and end up with PTSD without having a military or emergency services background. Anyway it’s pretty long ago and I’m totally coping fine and everything is pretty much good for me, but I don’t sleep well and I assume I never will. Here endeth the sidebar on my stupid psychological problems and I apologize for that detour.
So there we are in Reno, hanging out in the hotel room, drinking. Somehow Erin comes up with a hotel toiletries pack…from…Kokanee Beer? I’m not clear on this. Did the hotel know we were Canadian and just thought, hey, these guys will want stuff from Kokanee Beer? Does everybody in this casino hotel thing - Silver Legacy I think it was called, or maybe that’s an old folks home - get Kokanee shampoo? Bizarre.
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This year we had it pretty dialed, I guess, We ran around town picking up supplies but we didn’t get lost or wonder where to go for stuff, we just cruised around to the places we’d been previously and bought stuff. We bought more booze than last time, just in case. I wanted to have coronas and limes out there, so we bought 24 coronas and a bunch of limes. We also bought 60 oz bottles of vodka and rum, 40 oz bottles of Jagermeister and whiskey, and a dozen sugar-free Monster energy drinks. Oh, and there was a bottle of tequila as well: my favourite, El Cazadores blanco. I like a really raw tequila. I couldn’t get my hands on any real rye, which was my only significant regret. I drink a lot of rye at home and it makes other whiskeys seem a little sweet, I think.
So there we were, with a moderate amount of food and a disturbing amount of booze in a couple of cardboard boxes. We went out for dinner that night at a barbecue joint that was pretty good, but it also made me think about whether I’m kind of a dick. The waiter dropped off the bill before I was finished the meal, and then kept coming by while I was still eating to see if I was ready to pay. After the third time in ten minutes I told him to fuck off.
I mean I didn’t say “hey, waiter, fuck off”.
I said “Seriously, man, I’m still eating the damn food. I’m not breaking out my visa until I’m done. Just cope for a few minutes, would you?” Everyone looked at me, except Erin, who saw it coming a mile off. Then I wondered how it was possible that the most aggro guy in the whole place was a Canadian. Then I wondered if the margaritas were making me violent. I had to flag down another waitress to pay the bill. The waiter we had wouldn’t come back. I left a decent tip, anyway. The food was really good.
I had this idea that we could get up at 5 am again and go super early in the morning, but after some discussion we decided against it. Mainly it was midnight before we got to bed and probably one before we’d get to sleep, and anyway this year, they changed the entry times. The gate opened at 10 Sunday night, this night. Last year it opened at 10 a.m. Monday. We figured lineups would be a little easier and anyway, fuck it. Why get stressed? We’d been having a great time the whole time in Reno, wandering around at night on foot in the warm, dry air. I can’t really do casinos because of the flashing and movement - I get a little spooky around too much of that - but off the strip I kind of liked Reno. It’s small and I don’t get lost like in Vegas, which I really can’t handle.
So we got up and six and left by seven and it was pretty good. I guess there was a bit of a weird conflict over a luggage cart the night before we left. I’m always paranoid about leaving stuff in the car but everything had gone so well that I was pretty much at the “fuck it, everything’s fine” point so I agreed to pack up the car Sunday night.
We’d brought everything inside the hotel room though so of course I needed a roll cart thing to get it all back out. I called down to the bell desk and it took three tries to get someone on the line, who then told me I should have been calling the bell desk.
“I did call the bellhop. It rang about ten times and then you picked up.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“I do,” I said. “I could explain the technology to you in literally numbing detail, but suffice it to say, select-ring no-answer call-forwarding is a very easy technology to implement, and when it doesn’t work, they specifically send people like me to make it work again. So the fact that I called someone else and got you isn’t really surprising, just disappointing.”
“I’ll transfer you to the bell desk.”
This time someone at the bell desk answered and I said I needed a luggage cart.
“We don’t have anyone available now.”
“Well, I can come down and get it.”
“No, that’s not possible. We can send on up in about twenty minutes.”
“Okay, that would be great. Thank you.”
Half an hour later I called back. No answer. Fifteen minutes later there was a knock at the door and there was a guy in a bellhop uniform holding this weird thing that looked like a tiny apartment clothes drying rack or a miniature self-supporting hammock. He handed it to me.
“What is this?”
“A suitcase stand.”
“A…what?”
“Didn’t you order one?”
“Who would order one of these?”
“Uh, people who need to put their suitcases on them?”
“Okay, well, I need a luggage cart, like for taking out to my car, with all my stuff on it.”
“Oh. I don’t have one of those.”
“No, I can see that. Can I get one?”
“Um, we don’t loan those out.”
This is the point at which I reached what I call the “for fuck’s sake” point. I start saying that in reference or response to everything. I sat down on the bed and had a hard drink of tequila and just breathed for a bit. Then I went down to the bell desk. There was some old guy there.
“Hey,” I said. “I realize this is probably something that happened before you even came on shift, but I’ve been trying to get a luggage cart for about an hour.”
“Jeez,” he said, “I only have about half a dozen of them, just take one.” And he rolled one out like it was nothing.
I was pretty buzzed. “For fuck’s sake!” I shouted. “Sorry, not you. That’s awesome and I really appreciate you lending me a cart. Just…for fuck’s sake, I’ve been trying to get one forever. I’ll just take this. Thank you.”
So we got the cart loaded and the stuff out to the 4runner. We slept pretty soundly and popped up in the morning and hit the road. It was calm and we cruised, feeling absurdly clever for having skipped traffic.
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I guess I’ll get really briefly technical here…to get to Burning Man, you head east out of Reno for about 45 minutes, then turn onto this much smaller highway that cuts through some indian reservations and a lot of pretty empty desert, and stops at a town called Gerlach. Well, the highway keeps going, but at Gerlach you hang a right and drive maybe five or ten miles east, to a turnoff into the actual Burning Man site. Then it’s another ten miles, with a theoretical top speed of 10mph. In practise, the top speed is probably more like 2 mph, or that’s what it was for us last year.
Gerlach is a strange town. It’s population is listed in the census as 206. The economy is largely based on waiting for Burning Man and the sixty or seventy thousand people who roll through every year. A lot of the Gerlachers are hard core Burners, who decided to base their lives around the event so completely that they live out there, waiting for the next go-around. But some are these totally normal, ultra-rural America types. It must just be hell for them.
So we drove up the 447 towards Gerlach. One thing I saw that I thought was pretty cool: there’s a big solar installation powering what I think was a school on one of the reserves, donated by Black Rock Solar. That’s a volunteer group that handles solar power stuff for Burning Man. I’m glad to see the organizers giving stuff to the local communities, for whom this really must be a mixed blessing.
Last year I had these typically Canadian feelings of guilt about how I was driving on the 447. I drive a bit fast. Not outrageously so, but you know…I’ve owned a lot of fast motorcycles, and I have tons and tons of fairly high-level driving experience. So I tend, when there’s space to do so, to run around 80 mph, and while I pass courteously, I do pass anyone going slower than me as soon as it’s safe and reasonable to do so.
I wasn’t sure on the last go around whether I was violating a major unwritten rule of Burning Man by passing a lot of vehicles. I actually asked the 20-year guy about it, because I didn’t really see anyone else passing dozens of cars on the way up the first time.
“Fuck that,” he said. “Hammer down.”
So this year I just ran it up to 80, flipped on the cruise, and blew past everyone. I’d fuelled up before we left the interstate and I was feeling pretty fucking smart when we hit Gerlach around 10 a.m. with three quarters of a tank and no need to get in the gas lines which were full of motorhomes and trucks and…just fuck that.
Gerlach itself had turned into a total carnival. If you haven’t read anything else about Burning Man, here’s one of the key features: no buying, no selling, no trading. Only giving away. So Gerlach is the last place you can shop for crazy Burning Man costume stuff, and this giant market springs up there selling every weird steampunky, raver-stripper garment you can think of for everyone who needs to find that one last thing, or replace something they forgot. We just rolled on past.
About a mile after Gerlach, we hit the lineup. No sweat. We were probably five miles from the gate and it was 10 am. Last year we’d hit the lines twenty miles earlier. Seriously. There were so many people blocking the road at one of the last gas stations that it had caused traffic jams an entire city before Gerlach. This year they had volunteers directing traffic at the gas stations, which was a big improvement.
One thing that was a little funny…the last hour or so had been a bit rainy, and we could see storm clouds out in the desert. That was a little unnerving. The grounds are on what’s called the “playa” which I thought was Burner jargon, but it turns out it’s actually a geological term for a dry lake bed, or a salt flat. Anyway, the playa is made of clay, which feels to me like bentonite, which is pretty common in some parts of the place I’m from. And the thing with bentonite is that if it gets wet, it really swells up and gets kind of porous and puffy. And you can’t drive in it without a decent 4x4. My dad got a vehicle stuck in it a few years ago in a remote place near the mining camp where he was born, and it took him a couple of days to dig out.
Now the 4runner is pretty good in mud and snow and so on…but that doesn’t help much if half the vehicles on the same tracks are motorhomes. When we got stopped, I pulled out my binoculars (which are real monsters, by the way - Nikon Monarch 8.5x56. In low light, incredible. In the daytime in the desert…ow.) and started looking towards the Burning Man site. It was getting hammered with rain. I’m from a rain forest and I’m used to seeing rain of various different levels of suck at different distances and this was nasty looking rain. Not good.
Fortunately, the organizers of Burning Man run a couple of radio stations. I figured we’d tune in, get a sitrep and settle in for a bit of a wait. I walked up the line a bit to chat with a group of people that had formed maybe ten cars up, just to check to se if anyone had better info, or better reception - the 4runner’s antenna is kind of sketchy which just now I realized is a bit of a survival issue, and I’m going to get that fixed now.
But nobody knew anything special. There was a broadcast which repeated every half hour or so saying to sit tight, and expect to wait for a few hours, and everyone should just get to know their neighbours and thanks for being cool. Okay.
I went back to the 4runner. It was getting hot and I wished I could crack open a Corona, but I didn’t. I mean it wasn’t scorching, but it was muggy. And anyway, I could drink whether it was hot or cold. But I didn’t, although I saw plenty of people who did.
We waited around for about an hour, and nothing was really moving. That in itself wasn’t too worrying; there’s a process for entering and exiting Burning Man known as “pulsing” which I think is actually a pretty good idea. They stop the line at a few points, and only let you move once an hour. So there’s no point sitting there idling…once you move into position and take five minutes for the line to compress a bit, you just shut down and wait, and you know it’s going to be an hour so if you want to walk around you can. It’s a decent system.
Then I started seeing cars coming back the other way.
“This is it,” I said to Erin. “They’re turning people around at the gate. The roads inside are fucked.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Erin. “Do you want to drive back to Reno?”
“Not at all,” I said. “We’d have to get a hotel, and get all the way back out here again tomorrow. Fuck.”
“Maybe flag someone down and ask and make sure.”
So I did. “What’s the story?” I asked.
“There’s sending everyone back to Reno,” said the guy I flagged down. “We were right at the gate and they turned us around.”
Erin and I sat in the 4runner for a bit. The stream of cars was steady now.
“This blows,” I said.
“What do you want to do?”
“I guess there’s two options. Stay here, or find somewhere to stay for the night.”
“Staying here might get us in sooner.”
“But what if the police come by, and boot everybody off the road? That’s going to be a disaster.”
“Well, we could find somewhere else.”
We considered this. Erin and I are from two different parts of Canada. She’s from a town in Ontario maybe three hours north of Detroit, and I’m from an island off the west coast. But Erin spent a lot of her time in northern Ontario, which in some ways is kind of like where I’m from: there’s a lot of wild country. One thing we’re both really accustomed to is the idea that if you’re on a highway, there’s logging roads that connect to them that head up into the bush.
Granted, the Nevada desert did not appear to have any trees at all. But still, we were not able to imagine a world in which wild country did not have rough roads that led up into it, if not for trees, then maybe for minerals. In Canada all such roads are called logging roads. I think we couldn’t really grasp the concept of a treeless desert so we just looked at each other and said, “drive to a logging road?”
So when there was a gap in the traffic, I swung the 4runner around, and we began the search for a logging road, in the middle of a treeless desert.
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It didn’t actually take very long - before we hit Gerlach, there was a turnoff. We drove up the road for about half a mile and found a large area - probably two acres, maybe more - that was flat and protected. There was nobody there, which we found surprising. I walked out to the edge of a small ridge and found I could see the entire road leading into Burning Man. We pulled out a couple of reclining deck chairs and some tortilla chips and beers and salsa, and relaxed for a bit. I thought for sure the whole flat area would fill up with other vehicles like ours over the next couple of hours so we staked out what I thought was the best spot. It was about noon.
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Within an hour or so we were bored. No other vehicles had showed up yet. The line on the road wasn't moving at all. We pulled our bikes off the rack and rode around a bit, and then put some beers in my backpack and decided to ride down into Gerlach, which we could see from our camp. We named it Camp Monkeywrench, because the rain had thrown a monkey wrench into our plans, and because Erin found a monkey wrench on the ground the second she stepped out of the 4runner.
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It was about a twenty minute ride and Gerlach was bizarre. The market that had sprung up was full of people buying all kinds of weird stuff. We wandered around for a bit, then rode further in and stopped at a bar and ordered beers from a woman who was about ninety and almost totally deaf.
“What have you got?” I asked.
“Miller.”
“I’ll have a Miller, please.”
She handed me a Budweiser. $3.
The bar was called the Miner’s Club, and the old woman was named Bev. I looked it up just now and she’s 87. The place is full of frog stuff. It’s a tiny little shack that looks like it’s been there since cowboy days. I didn’t take a picture of the outside so I found one on the internet:
Inside, I did take a couple of pictures. I have a screenplay lying around somewhere that takes place in a really small town in northern Canada where there aren’t local police - that’s common up here - and this bar looked exactly like the bar I pictured in that fictional town. I’ll tell you guys about it sometime. It’s my idea for a contemporary western, which could probably still happen in a place where the police are 8 hours away, if they’re coming at all.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-25172331_zps0e29ee08.jpg
Between the unpredictable beers we were served and the beers we brought in my backpack which we drank while riding the bikes around, we were pretty buzzed. It was around four or five when we went back. We had to walk the bikes up the hill, especially Erin. I guess I never mentioned it but she crashed her motorcycle this summer and broke her leg, and just got the go-ahead to walk on it about two weeks before we left. It wasn’t a bad break and they never put her in a cast - that’s also common up here now - just braced it and told her to stay off of it. When she wasn’t moving around, she’d unlock the brace and flex her knee. I think it really helped her to heal quickly, and without as much muscle atrophy. Anyway she couldn’t make it up the hill so we walked the bikes. I didn’t mind.
As we left town and headed back up to our camp, we passed a roadblock. The local sheriffs, or maybe the Bureau of Land Management, who police the actual event, had set it up. Frankly I was too drunk to notice which. Anyway, they were preventing anyone from driving down the highway where the lineup to get in the now-closed gate was. Nobody could get past Gerlach.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-25182150_zps5a2edbc3.jpg
The road blocked off at the wye: nobody is getting through.
On bikes, we rode past with no issues, and went back up to Camp Monkeywrench, where we set up the tent and had dinner, which was mostly just tortilla chips and more salsa, and more drinks.
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From the ridge, we could see the lineup. I’d watched with my big Nikons on and off for most of the day at this point, noting some of the more memorable vehicles and landmarks on the side of the road. Other than the line compressing a little, nobody had moved forward at all.
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We settled in. My big fear was that if we stayed down on the road, they’d open it back up around midnight, and then the massive crush of people that took six hours to clear last year would take as long or longer in the mud and the dark. We just hung out and watched the line through the binoculars, which was kind of entertaining. Every once in a while a police vehicle would roll slowly down the line next to the cars, which had all pulled on to the shoulder. That was my other big fear: that they’d say “okay, get off the highway and no camping on the shoulder” and then there’s be this massive rush of half-drunk-to-fully-drunk and/or stoned people trying to get out. I did not want to be anywhere near that scene.
But the police, no doubt anticipating the absolute mayhem that would cause, didn’t kick everyone off the shoulder or anything. They just let it go.
Interestingly, nobody else ever showed up at our perfect spot. In the evening we wandered down to some other areas on the highway that headed north from Gerlach, like if you didn’t take the turnoff towards Burning Man. There were groups of people who’d pulled onto clearings on those shoulders, but nobody left the highway at all. I found it strange.
Back at Camp Monkeywrench, we had the idea to tune back in to Black Rock Radio, which came in clearly up on the hill. I figured if we listened for half an hour, we’d get some pretty good details. So we hung out in the 4runner for a bit with the seats tilted back, listening. The wind had picked up and the sounds of the radio mixed with the rushing sound of the wind around the vehicle.
So we listened to this DJ from England play some music for a bit. It was about 5 after 9 o’clock and I guessed we’d probably missed an hourly update. In between songs, the DJ talked about how great it was to be here, playing music, and his podcast that he did back in England, and what an honour it was to get invited to play a set on Black Rock Radio.
So about nine thirty, I turned up the volume a little so I wouldn’t miss any information. Around nine forty, he started talking about how he’d heard that the gate was a mess and how he was surprised to see rain out here in the desert.
About ten after ten, he said the organizers appreciated everyone’s patience.
Around ten thirty, they switched to a new DJ, who started off by saying he wanted to update everyone on the situation on the playa: they weren’t expecting more rain. Also, thanks to everyone for being patient and wasn’t it cool how muddy it was?
Around eleven I shut off the radio, because it was that or ride my bike down to the radio station and beat everyone there to death.
Here’s a fucking clue, you morons: everyone at Burning Man either brought their own music, or is in a big fucking party listening to music at a jillion fucking decibels. There is ONE group of people that MIGHT be listening to your stupid fucking radio station and that’s people outside, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in regards to the gigantic, stationary lineup outside your closed gate. So here’s one simple question for you: are you guys actually retarded? How would this not be obvious?
Around midnight, the line began to move and we could see vehicles grinding their way out into the desert, exactly as I’d feared would happen. I was so glad not to be down there. I watched it for about half an hour. The line moved about a hundred yards. We went to bed in the cool, quiet calm of our plateau.
We got up around eight and I looked out over the ridge. The roadblock just east of Gerlach was still there. The entire highway was empty. We were east of the roadblock. West of the roadblock was a lineup stretching back through Gerlach and at least a couple of miles back towards Reno.
“Holy fuck,” I said. “Grab everything. Let’s go.”
We packed up in twenty minutes and drove down to the completely empty highway, pulling on to the road only a few hundred yards east of the roadblock. We then drove to the gate at sixty miles an hour.
The roads inside were rough. They’d obviously turned to mud, been driven on and potholed to hell, and then dried. No skin off our backs in the 4runner, of course. We cruised in and barely slowed down the whole way - well, not below the 10mph limit, I mean. It still took nearly an hour to get all the way from the highway to the site.
I’m not sure if anyone remembers my big fear last year, that I’d go crazy and kill the greeter. I mean not seriously exactly but I had this overwhelming rush of violent imagery in my head as I imagined the greeter expecting me to participate in this “you can do whatever you want, as long as you’re behaving the way we think a proper Burner ought to” way, which obviously I wouldn’t and probably couldn’t do. But then the greeter was really cool, and the fact that I’d been totally stressed out just melted away, and I was really impressed.
So then there was this year. I was pretty fucking annoyed with the organizers, on account of the radio station and the total dearth of information they provided when they had the opportunity and means. And this time, when I got to the greeting station, this guy slid a guide - they make these slick, glossy guides listing all the events and everything for the three people that don’t have the app because yeah, there’s an app for that - the guy slid a guide across my hood to his co-greeter.
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about the paint. I’m driving a vehicle covered in gritty dust here, so it’s pretty much the ideal moment to slide something diagonally across my hood. Nice work.”
“You gotta get out and get a hug, man!” said the fat guy who’d caught the guide.
“No,” I said.
Then the guy who slid the book across the hood came around.
“No hug, no entry,” he said.
“I disagree,” I said. Erin put her hand on my leg. The co-greeters looked at each other.
“First time?”
“No.”
“Do you know where you’re trying to get to?” “Yep.”
“Okay, where’s that?”
“3:30 J.”
“That’s quite a ways.”
“I know where it is.”
“Yeah, because you’ve been here before.”
“Yeah,” I said, “exactly. Because I’ve been here before. You done?”
“Okay, well, I see on the back of your car your bikes are kind of partly obscuring your license plate. You could get pulled over for that. You might want to mount it on the bikes instead. Just some friendly advice.”
Now it happens that the previous owner of my car was going out with a Japanese woman who would bring him weird accessories that only came on the Japanese 4runner, called the Hilux Surf. One of the things he did was relocate the license plate to the side of the rear door instead of the centre. I never thought about this being useful until I got a bike rack, and then I realized that unlike everyone else with a trailer hitch bike rack, my license plate is almost perfectly visible.
And it also happens that I’d seen a couple of vehicles pulled over on this specific trip who had their plates wired to their bikes on the rack, which made me suspect that there’s likely a law saying the plate has to be on the vehicle. Now maybe the people I saw who were pulled over were pulled over for something else. But I’d noticed that the only vehicles I saw that were actually pulled over on the highway north after we left the interstate were ones with license plates attached to the bikes, and I’d commented on it to Erin. It struck me because I’d thought about it before we left, because BC, my province, has a similar law. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed likely that the wording would simply state something like “affixed to the vehicle”.
“Really,” I said. “Does Nevada state law not specifically say the license plate must be attached to the vehicle?”
“Um, that’s just what we’re telling people.”
“Well, maybe now you’ll stop. Or are you a licensed attorney in the state of Nevada?”
“It’s okay, babe,” said Erin.
“I’m good,” I said. I drove on without saying anything else to the greeters. I realize my car isn’t new or fancy, and in fact it’s kind of scuffed because I take it into the bush pretty regularly. But those are scuffs that I chose to put there.
Step the fuck back, is what I’m saying.
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It was busier this year than last around 3:30 J, but we found a good spot. There was probably twenty or thirty feet on either side of us, and fifty out back. I like to have a little bit of space if I can.
The people on our right were just finishing putting up a tent and dragging some stuff out of a couple of pickups. They looked ill and they did a really half-assed job of putting up the tent, which was one of two they had out, and one of them climbed in to the already-standing tent and didn’t come back out. The other one came over, holding a beer.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Rough. When did you guys get in?”
“In…like, in here?”
“No, in the gate.”
“I don’t know, maybe an hour ago?”
“No, like the gate off the highway.”
“Yeah, like an hour ago.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, when did you guys get in? Were you in the big lineup on the road last night?”
“We got off the road around two. We got here maybe 45 minutes ago.”
“You went all night?”
“Yeah, they were trying to get us through the mud. You could barely move.”
“And you got to this spot forty-five minutes ago.”
“About that.”
“Well, it’s about ten a.m. now. You want a hit of tequila?”
“Sure. You want a Sapporo?”
“I don’t see why not.”
So we sat on the already drying playa and drank for a bit.
“You guys weren’t in the line?”
“We were for a bit. Then I started worrying that the line would get the boot from the BLM or the sheriffs, or that they’d start moving people in late, and it would take all night. Sorry. We hid out on a plateau up a logging road just this side of Gerlach. They blocked the road a little way west of the logging road, so we slept until about eight, got up, and the whole road was open. We just drove right in.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“No. I’m sorry. That’s what we did.”
“How did you know they were logging? And what logging is going on out here?”
“There’s no logging. It’s just what we call those roads. We’re Canadian.”
“Oh. But you knew the spot?”
“No, we were just going on instinct. In Canada, if there’s a logging road, there’s a place to hide out up there somewhere. Where are you guys from?”
“San Francisco.”
“Oh, nice town.”
“Thanks. I have to crash.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
And that was the last we saw of those two until night.
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We set up our camp. It was a variation on last year’s pretty successful system, with one extra bit of shade screening to cover the tent a little more, a shower, and more space under the big awning to sit. Also, instead of regular camp chairs, we bought a couple of recliner camp chairs. They were the best thing we brought, I think. I would never go without them again.
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And so it began. We got ourselves rigged up and headed out to explore.
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There was a lot of the same kind of stuff as last year, of course, but there was some different stuff as well. This year’s art theme was “caravansary”. Okay, I don’t think I talked about the art themes last time so here’s something I should explain.
Every year there’s a theme. One year was “Fertility” and I wish I’d been there for that because I assume that theme involved getting laid a lot. Last year’s theme was “Cargo Cult” and this year’s was sort of an amalgamation of the 20th anniversary of Burning Man, and the concept of the Silk Road caravans. And for whatever reason they decided that this would be represented by the world “caravansary”.
Last year’s theme was kind of hard to recognize. For some reason people just couldn’t really relate to it, even though I thought it was kind of an interesting idea. I guess you could have just repurposed weird stuff and made it into clothing and art and so on but people didn’t get it, really. This year, even though “caravansary” doesn’t mean a thing as far as I’m concerned, people did kind of buy in because silk road imagery is easy to get your head around, and putting a scarf over your face makes a lot of sense here, too.
The level of involvement with the theme really varies from individual to individual. Some people don’t seem to have heard of it at all. Others go all out. There’s not really any obligation to do it, anyway.
So right in the centre of the whole place, where “The Man” is, there was a big sort of art installation which was like a sort of market, but of course in keeping with the core principles of Burning Man, nothing was for sale. It was just stuff you could look at, or do, or read, or whatever. It was pretty cool and we wandered around for a bit taking it all in.
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This picture is kind of interesting: it’s a picture of two mirrors set at ninety degrees to each other, so when you look at yourself in them, you don’t see the flipped mirror image you ordinarily see, you see yourself how others see you. I’d heard of this many times and about how peoples’ brains process the mirror images to make them seem more symmetrical than they are, and how non-reversing mirrors show you a much more asymmetrical image of yourself than you’re used to seeing.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28113242_zpsb5995f1b.jpg
The main thing Erin and I realized is that we’re really fucking symmetrical. I look exactly how I remembered myself and so did she. Only usually my tattoos are backwards.
In the centre of everything was, as always, the man itself. I liked this picture because I thought a lot of people would be fairly familiar with the size of the manlift at the bottom.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28113427_zps2aace38f.jpg
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Working our way around the “market”, we found all kinds of interesting and often humorous stuff. A “persian rug dealer”:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28113609_zps345eab0a.jpg
The Canadian Acculturation Centre:
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https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28113956_zps1d40affa.jpg
They took pics of every Canadian that dropped in. Well, actually I think they took pictures of every scantily clad girl that dropped in, but whatever.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28114022_zps34dffd87.jpg
This is Erin in front of their “snowshoe rentals” rack:
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The main gate:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28114333_zps29af2a95.jpg
A sculpture of cigar boxes, which Erin loved:
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Detail:
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Another sculpture which I can't explain:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28114513_zps4b404e47.jpg
Okay, and this was fucking hilarious. A real estate office, which was WAY too real.
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There was a woman there offering timeshares for blocks of time immediately before and after Burning Man in frighteningly realistic lingo, and she had detailed brochures on various master-planned communities that included all kinds of amenities. She gave us fake keys which she said would get us a free drink anywhere on the playa. I laughed so hard and told her she was the funniest person I’d met at Burning Man, ever. I wish I took her picture.
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We cruised back to the camp after a while because I was pretty thirsty and we were out of drinks, but we stopped along the way at a neighbourhood bar called “Mistakes Have Been Made”. I asked if they had a photo of Nixon, Reagan, or Oliver North that we could drink to, and they didn’t understand at all. But they did give me booze. Actually they gave me a lot of booze. I talked a little bit about my past involvement with the defense industry and working with arms manufacturers and I was pretty loaded so I implied that I was a much bigger deal than I ever really was. In reality, I rarely did much more than write stuff and pitch ideas about how to communicate effectively with clients, or within an organization, or how to shift the self-perception of an organization to make it more effective at whatever it valued. But when you’re getting free drinks and everybody thinks you’re cool, it’s easy to make that sound like you’re a big wheel. I was never a big wheel.
There was a guy there who was doing what he called “Fishy Hipping”. He was drunk enough that he meant to say Hippy Fishing but it kept coming out wrong. He actually had a fishing rod, with a little baggie of some chewable vitamins and some rolled up paper sticks ties on to it. He’d cast it out into the intersection outside the bar and jerk the bag along. He’d figured out a pretty good system in which the line wrapped around the street sign pole, and gave the baggie a real “gusting along with the wind” kind of effect. It was beyond hilarious to watch. Most people pointed, looked around, and then kind of casually reached down, and then followed it along awkwardly as it drifted away. But the best reaction was from a couple with a little kid. The woman looked down and BAM. She was like a fucking cobra, just grabbed it and stuffed it into her husband’s pocket at warp nine. It popped back out when the Fishy Hipper gave the rod a jerk, and WHAM, she was on it again. I was in fucking tears laughing.
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And then they kept giving me drinks. They had a hidden stash of Johnny Walker Black and we had a bunch of that. And then they asked if I wanted to try a seriously harsh drink, and I said yes, so they asked if I’d had a limoncello clear. I thought that sounded gay but I said no, I hadn’t. So they gave me a pretty heavy-sized shot of it. It was horrible. I asked what the fuck it was, and they explained that they’d let some crushed lemons ferment in a muslin bag, and drip down into a funnel over a bottle of everclear. I don’t know if we have everclear in Canada…apparently it’s almost pure grain alcohol. I don’t think it’s meant for drinking.
“Wow, man, nobody was going to touch that stuff.”
“Yeah…that’s probably smart.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ll be honest with you…I’ve felt better.”
But I’d felt worse, too. I walked home after a bit. I was spinning pretty hard by the time I got home. I’m thirty-seven years old, by the way. This is not a great idea, to do this stuff.
I flopped down on one of our lounger chairs and had an energy drink and some vodka. It was dark and the people next door were just heading out. I think it was pretty early, maybe ten o’clock. A lot of people at Burning Man pretty much shut down during the day and live at night. I can’t do that. I’m just wired to line up with the sun. We hung out on the chairs until I stopped spinning. Basically I decided I wasn’t getting out of the chair unless I was confident I could fuck, and that took a while, because I kept drinking. Overall it was a fun day, but…mistakes were made.
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I woke up the next morning feeling strange. Not really hung over, which made sense in a way because I’d waited out most of the drunkness. Just strange, like my skin wasn’t on right. The guys next door had had a couple more people arrive in another vehicle, and they were setting up a couple of shelters: one big tarp frame, and a hut made out of 2” styrofoam boards.
The tarp frame was easy. I gave them a hand, and it went up no problem. The styrofoam hut - and this is a popular piece of gear for repeat Burners, the “hexayurt”, was not easy. It could have been, but the guy who was setting it up was being directed by his girlfriend, who’d designed it herself, and set it up once in her apartment, and it sat perfectly there.
Of course her apartment probably had a perfectly flat, level floor. And she probably hadn’t taped every seam, just checked to see that they lined up.
So I helped her boyfriend, Ed, set it up. And she stood inside. And when one seam had a gap of a quarter inch - pre-taping, of course - she was upset, because it should line up perfectly, according to her design. Forget the fact that they had rolls of tape six inches wide…she’d done the math. It shouldn’t have a gap.
So she wanted us to press in different directions and clamp it different ways, and eventually she was sort of satisfied. I kept joking to Ed that he was building an airtight structure and that he was going to die in there. I worked on it for about an hour, until the structure was at what I’d call the “roughed-in” stage. But by this point I was A) sick of her bitching, and B) feeling really weird.
I sat down in the chair under our sun shelter, and had some coffee. I lay there for a bit. It was really fucking hot. I drank some water. My skin felt really weird. It felt totally dry. Suddenly I realized that even though it was a hundred degrees, even the parts of my body that were touching each other were bone dry. I thought back to the day before and realized that I’d hardly had anything but hard alcohol from around 6pm on. I started pounding back water and misting myself with a spray bottle. I drank carbonated beverages to try to force some fluids into my gut. After an hour or so I walked to the porta potties - and incidentally this is one thing that the Burning Man organizers have got really under control: they’re pretty clean 99% of the time - and started hoping I’d need to go to the bathroom. But I didn’t. And I didn’t start sweating, even in the porta potty, which was like a sauna.
Man, I didn’t start sweating again until about six pm. I felt so fucked up. I just misted myself over and over and pounded back non-alcoholic drinks. It was bad. I felt so dumb. We don’t really have dehydration in Canada, but once I got really seriously dehydrated when I was hitchhiking in southern California so I should have known. But I guess I just got wasted and made bad decisions.
So if you get offered weird drinks, accept them. The weird drinks aren’t necessarily the problem. But also drink some water. Don’t be like a Canadian.
I was basically too fucked up to go anywhere that day. Erin hung out and made crafts, which is what she likes to do. More people kept arriving at our neighbours’ place, which to be honest I wasn’t super thrilled about. The previous year, we’d had tons of space, which I liked. This year, they kind of shoehorned themselves in to a spot that I didn’t think was big enough for two people, and now they were up to six or seven. It was hard to tell how many exactly, actually, because half of them were really similar looking. Which is basically just me being racist, I guess, because they were Vietnamese, I think. But there were seriously two guys who looked just like each other, and two girls that looked just like each other too. So I got confused about who was who. But they were really nice, even though it was more crowded than I would have liked.
Actually, the main thing I didn’t like about having so many of them was that it made it really hard to offer anyone anything. The year before, I’d make a pot of coffee and offer a cup to anyone walking by. But now, if I wanted to make enough coffee for everyone, it would be two or three pots, and I have a particular coffee process that’s kind of involved. So then I didn’t really want to offer up coffee to people as much because I didn’t want to get stuck short, or making pot after pot. So although it wasn’t really their fault, I felt like I couldn’t offer as much to a large group as to a couple of individuals.
Later that evening, I went for a walk with Erin. Well really, I did pretty much everything with Erin, so if I don’t mention her being there, it’s just because she was always there. It was just a relaxing walk around the outskirts of our area. I felt better by the evening, but not really a hundred percent, and of course she was still walking on a knee that had been broken two months earlier, so having a quiet night wasn’t so bad. In fact, it really made me realize that although Burning Man is cool and everything, I wouldn’t enjoy it by myself, so really what I was enjoying was being with Erin while we were there. I got kind of introspective for a bit, thinking about how much I liked the experience of going places as long as I had her there to share it with me. It was just a peaceful, quiet, night, I guess.
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The next morning was good. I woke up feeling fine, which you never appreciate until you feel rough. I made coffee, and gave a cup to the couple of neighbours that were up. They’d gotten in around 5 am.
The rains a few days before had vanished without a trace, and the playa had returned to its better-known bone-dry state. We prepared to go walking out to see some of the art installations. I brought a lot of drinks. I wasn’t getting dehydrated again for any money.
So basically the next bit is mostly going to be pictures of the stuff we saw. I don’t have a lot of deep thoughts about much of it, it’s just interesting stuff to see. In fact these pictures are probably the results of a couple of walking trips over a couple of days, but it doesn’t really matter. They days started to blend together pretty quickly, and this is just what it looks like.
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This is one of the three or nine o'clock causeways. I think last year I had some pictures of the lamps being lit.
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The next couple of pics are inside the “library”. It’s a neat space but I found it unintentionally hilarious that written information didn't play much of a role in there. It was like an artist’s conception of a library, by an artist who didn’t understand he actual value of the written word. Or maybe they did but they just chose to represent it differently, I guess. But I found the scene funny. It was like people were pantomiming the act of reading weird scrolls and stuff. In a way it belonged more to last year’s theme, the Cargo Cult theme. They had an idea of what it was supposed to look like, but they didn’t get the importance of books. Maybe hilarious isn’t the right word. In a way I thought it was kind of dark.
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This was a cool object: a climbing tower. No fall protection was supplied; climb it at your own risk. The ball at the top was accessed through a hatch which was about ten feet from the top of the tower, then it had an internal ladder for the last little bit. I climbed it, of course. That’s me in the cowboy hat in some of the pictures.
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At night, this machine rotated, and there was a strobe light going off around it, giving it a crazy kind of kinotropic effect Pretty cool.
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This is the very edge of Burning Man, the farthest point from anything.
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One thing I liked that I didn’t see last year was the observatory. Here they had a 60mm scope with an integral filter which only allowed through light in a particular bandwidth, I guess just the hydrogen bandwidth. The guy who really ran the place wasn’t available so I asked an assistant a bunch of questions but they couldn’t answer many; my wife’s father is a pretty high-level amateur astronomer and we’ve looked at the sun through his big scope with a neutral filter on it and so I ended up asking technical questions about the equipment and the assistant was clearly just there to keep people from tripping over the scopes, so that didn’t go far. But I did get to look at the sun for a bit, which is always interesting.
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One major installation I was really looking forward to seeing was the Temple. The Temple is like the Man: it’s a huge project that changes every year, and they burn it at the end. There must be dozens of volunteers involved in constructing it, if not hundreds. This years’ Temple was spectacular.
I’ll state for the record that I’m literally an atheist. Not the way a lot of people use the term, to describe people who are really fired up about religion being terrible, but in the same sense as atypical, or asexual. I’m non-theistic. I have no interest in religion at all. I don’t think about it, ever. In fact I am usually more inclined to describe myself as aspiritual, because it’s not that I’m against organized religion but I think other forms of spirituality are more valid - in fact I kind of think the best thing about religion is that it gives people a sort of social structure in which to involve themselves. No, I’m just utterly uninterested in spirituality. Whatever gene allows some people to appreciate anything from prayer to meditation to rituals with incense and pope hats, I don’t have it. I feel about it the way I feel about golf. It doesn’t bother me that it happens and I don’t blame golf for ugly pants or self-entitled doctors, I just can’t imagine spending any time on it and the people who do kind of mystify me.
So Erin was interested in seeing the Temple also, and she’d been told that the atmosphere inside was “thick” and “intense”. And definitely a lot of people are having some kind of moment there, and people write messages on the walls and shrines to people they knew that are dead now, and some people sit and meditate and other people touch their heads to the walls and some people are quietly crying and I found the whole scene kind of phoney. But that’s why I wrote the prologue about my inability to relate to that stuff. Maybe if I was a different kind of person it would have seemed more genuinely emotional, and Erin found that the experience lived up to the reputation. I just found it crowded, and the people inside reminded me of the people who speak in tongues when they know they’re supposed to. For me it was as spiritual as a box of car parts. But the building was really spectacular.
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I know the whole thing is built to be burned, but I’m glad I didn’t watch this go up, even though it would have been impressive from a technical perspective as fire goes. It would have practically exploded with all that latticework. But it was so beautiful, I didn’t want to see it burn at all. I don’t think I could stand to work on that thing, knowing it would all get destroyed a week after it was assembled. These are some of my favourite pictures from all of Burning Man.
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It’s not Burning Man if there’s no dust storms. They kick up pretty quickly and they’re sort of exciting but pretty much harmless unless you’re really inclined to do foolish stuff. I’d used up all my stupid on the “only drink hard alcohol in the desert” night, so for us it was no problem. Actually we were kind of looking forward to it on account of the goggles I’d made for Erin. She wanted these particular welding goggles, but they were way too wide, so she wanted fur attached so they’d seal up. You’d think this would be simple but it wasn’t. It was a huge pain in the ass. I built up the edges with that foam you put on hot water pipes and glued the fur overtop of the foam. I know that doesn’t sound hard, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this.
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And within a minute or so you can see the dust beginning to accrue on Erin.
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I brought my own goggles with interchangeable #4 welding lenses and clear safety lenses for nighttime. They’re made by a German company that’s been building safety goggles since Hitler had scientists working for him, apparently.
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Once the dust storm passed, we went on to look at a huge piece of art that lots of people were talking about: The Embrace. It was worth checking out.
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This was the heart inside the male figure:
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It glowed with a red light, and beat slowly. You could walk up inside both figures. Here I’m looking down inside the same figure.
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And you could look out of the eyes.
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I don’t have a good picture of the heart in the female. It was more organic, and glowed green. I really wish I’d taken a picture of it, and I can’t find one on the internet either.
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Night at Burning Man is pretty wild. I’m starting to feel pretty old to go hanging out in clubs or whatever but Burning Man is pretty much a free for all. Plus it totally appeals to my cheapskate side, because you can either have free drinks at lots of places or you can haul around a backpack of booze. There isn’t a place to buy drinks anywhere, so carrying booze is expected. Some people have bikes rigged up with trailers with big coolers full of drinks and they ride them right up to the edge of these open-air clubs and wander back and forth, getting more drinks all the time. It’s cool.
Last year’s fancy hat, with a gift from Jeph. I’m pretty sure I must have talked quite a bit about Jeph last time. He was the US Army Special Operations medic that I met and totally hit it off with. We still hang out and now he lives just down the road in Seattle, which is awesome. Anyway he’d bought this crazy fiberoptic whip that flashed all kinds of colours, and he gave it to Erin. It looks wild when you’re whipping it around in the dark.
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Back to Jeph for a second: I realized after this year just how much of a difference he’d made in my experience last year. He couldn’t make it this year, and that’s really a shame. I guess when it comes down to it, I don’t really enjoy large groups of people that much. I’m more of a “small, intimate gatherings” guy and I feel like I’m at my best with two to five people that I can hang out and talk with, and talk as deeply as we want. Last year I really got that, and this year I got it but just with Erin. Which was still nice, but anyway I just wanted to give credit where credit was due here. Hanging out with Jeph really made last year cool in a way that I don’t think it would have been otherwise.
So back to night at Burning Man:
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There are these gigantic clubs that are just out there in the desert. Okay, kind of impressive. But the scale of their sound systems is just unimaginable for a guy like me. I play in a rock band - I think I mentioned that before - and we’re notoriously loud. And I think the entire band together represents maybe a thousand watts of power.
The hockey arena in my town - pretty sure we covered the Canadian thing also - has a system that runs 165,000 watts. That’s where U2 plays when they come to Vancouver.
The big clubs at Burning Man were measuring their sound systems in fractions of a million watts. Like “Oasis is running a quarter million watts” or “Pyramid has a half-million watt system”. I’ve never been into DJ’d music, on account of my background as a real musician. So I never really listened to the stuff these places were playing before. By far the most popular style seemed to be one called “dubstep”.
You’d think “dubstep” would be some kind of reggae thing. Or I’d think that, anyway. It isn’t. It’s like the music that robots would rock out to. It was actually pretty cool. If you get the chance, I recommend going on Youtube and looking up stuff like “20 hardest dubstep drops”. Because the “drop” is clearly the thing you’re there to hear. It’s like the first minute of the song is a sort-of-melodic prelude to this one gigantic bass hit. So if you’re interested, have a listen to some of this stuff, and imagine yourself in a desert, in the midst of a sound system so huge that when the bass drops, the ground gets fuzzy because the dust is getting vibrated into the air. It’s pretty impressive. I definitely didn’t “get” any of this music before I heard it out there.
Oh, also, dads…do not let your daughters go to Burning Man.
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So I didn’t really specifically go around shooting pictures of girls at Burning Man, but there’s so many half naked chicks it’s impossible not to get some, so in no particular order, I figure this is as good a place as any to just throw down some of the girls of Burning Man. Erin is in some of these partly because I just liked the pictures and partly because she was proud of some of her outfits.
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Okay, that’s that. I didn’t really want to run around doing creeper shots, but then as you see, you can pretty much just walk up to whoever and take their picture and most of the time they’re pretty stoked about it, or at worst just indifferent. And I didn’t feel like it was right to talk about the endless stream of half-naked girls without offering something.
Something that was kind of funny about the entire experience: Erin and I had specifically gone in with the intention of being more aggressive in terms of going out and participating in other peoples’ scenes. It was Erin’s one regret from the year before: she felt she’d let herself kind of skirt the edges of everything without getting as involved as she thought she could. Erin’s pretty quiet, and pretty introverted. I’m fairly extroverted but I’m also pretty misanthropic, which is a really screwed-up combination. But it allows me to cope with Erin’s introversion, because when she is nervous about getting out and interacting with a bunch of people she’s never met and I am bored at home and specifically want to go out and interact with people, I just remind myself that they’re still going to be people. That kind of puts the brakes on my inclination to go talk to anyone.
Anyway, this year we planned to do things differently, and to challenge ourselves a little more. Well, really, Erin planned to challenge herself a little more. I’m easy. But in fact what happened was that we did things very similarly to the previous year, and that made me think that maybe we should just ride our own ride.
I mean I can’t sleep in, no matter how late I was out. So if I go out until four am, I’m exhausted. And the more exhausted I get, the more my stress issues get weird, and the more emotionally unstable I get. Not like I just lose it or anything, but the more severely disrupted my sleep schedule gets, the more unpredictable and uncontrolled my reactions get. Plus I’m just not having fun then. So I can’t really do the “party all night” thing very much.
And I guess that brings me to this whole other thing I haven’t really talked about yet: the subtle shift that I believe is occurring at Burning Man that is changing the atmosphere of the entire event.
Burning Man, I think, is becoming a music festival. It used to be something else; a medium-sized, temporary, anarchic party town that housed a gigantic art festival. It’s still that town, but now it’s that town, hosting a music festival that is one of the major tour stops for EDM - that is Electronic Dance Music, which is what the kids are calling techno these days - artists, DJs so famous that even I’ve heard of most of them.
And people from all over the world who are into EDM are now going to Burning Man to see their favourite DJs, because the app is now so thorough that you can find out exactly who is playing and when.
And this is changing the flavour of Burning Man. The organizers are putting a pretty good spin on it; they’re basically putting down the line that Burning Man belongs to whoever shows up and whatever experience you want it to be, it can be that for you, so everything is equally valid.
But I think that’s spin. It feels like there are two concurrent Burning Man scenes, one that is committed to some kind of Burning Man ethic and art installations and a kind of visceral, benign anarchism along with their partying, and one that is interested in Skrillex and big-money party scenes and trying to sleep with the DJ. And that wouldn’t really be an issue, but I think the former is shrinking and the latter is growing.
Our neighbours were a good example of the EDM festival crowd. I don’t want to come off as overly critical of them; they were really friendly and we hung out with them sometimes in the afternoons. They had a blender and sometimes we’d sit around and drink margaritas and I helped them with any structure they were assembling, and I brought ice when I went to get some, and we had a good time. They brought us ice as well when they went on ice runs, and they were great neighbours. They knew every big DJ that was playing, though, and they had planned their whole trip around seeing the different acts. It wasn’t really about a unique event designed around radical forms of self-expression for them. It was like a giant candy store of EDM for them.
Oh, man, I totally forgot something from earlier, though.
So the first day, you might remember how I was joking about their hexayurt structure being airtight, and how they were going to die in it.
On the morning of day two, Ed crawled out of the hexayurt. He looked lethally hung over. I mean his skin looked grey. No joke. This was before my limoncello-everclear-dehydration hangover kicked in and I was still up and around and doing stuff.
“Ed, man,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“No, dude,” he said. “I think I’m suffocating.”
I stuck my head in the hexayurt. It felt like I was breathing inside a paper bag.
“Jesus fucking christ, dude, there’s no air in here at all.”
“Yeah, just leave the door open.”
We kept Ed upright and walking around for a bit and it didn’t seem to take too long for him to feel better, and by the time I was starting to crash, he seemed fine. His girlfriend - I can’t remember her name - had slept on a lounge chair outside, so she was fine.
Later that day they punched a bunch of two-inch holes above the door. But they mostly left the door open after that, unless it was really windy and blowing dust everywhere. We never really confirmed whether he really had just breathed enough of the air in there to get sick, or whether he was just hung over and the air in there was kind of depleted, but not enough to be dangerous. But man, he looked so bad when he came out.
We had a good laugh about it later, and he told a story about going hunting one winter with a guy who insisted on running a propane heater inside their tent, which was a pretty tightly-sealed 4-season tent. At the time, Ed hadn’t known enough to know it would be an issue, but after a couple of hours obviously they were both really ill from carbon monoxide. So he thought it was kind of funny but also pretty embarrassing that he’d just done something so similar, years later.
You can see their crowded camp and the hexayurt in the middle here.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30192608_zps60666216.jpg
Before I go any further, I just want to post this one pic. It should have been earlier, maybe around the Embrace pictures, but I forgot it, and I really liked this particular car.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-28135643_zpsfe33e1a2.jpg
They drove around, broadcasting scratchy radio comms. I listened for a bit. It was a fake lunar landing recording the satirical paper The Onion put out a few years ago.
“I can see the Earth. The entire Earth. For the love of Christ. Are you fucking believing this? Over.”
In fact maybe I’ll just throw some random mismatched pictures here…there’s probably a few that don’t really fit in anywhere else.
I wish I had better pictures of this…dancing butterfly girls with robots:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29012012_zpsc2cebc91.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29013532_zps9d9197f4.jpg
I really wish I had a better picture of this, too. This girl came out of nowhere and she was the exact same height as Erin. Craig knows what I’m talking about.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29013830_zps8af6192a.jpg
El Polpo Mechanico:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29014014-2_zps48ba40d5.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29014017_zpscf8c28f7.jpg
Erin’s crazy fiberoptic whip on a long exposure:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-29021133_zps1c396f47.jpg
The sky on the last day:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30185755_zps67c7822a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30184928_zps2e3d5696.jpg
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The last full day of Burning Man for us was Saturday. Last year we’d gone out but I was just mentally drained by the time the burn itself was over and we wandered around for a bit and then left, in what of course turned out to be a terrible decision.
This year we were still in pretty good shape, so the last day was fun. We went riding around on our bikes and ran into the two guys we’d met last year, the guys who’d been going for years and years. That was really cool and we felt way more at home the minute we saw them. The really funny thing was that Don, the 20 year alumnus, said the exact same thing to Erin this time as last year, the first time he saw her: “nice rack”. She was wearing her antler hat, so anyway…whatever. I’m not bothered by it. Looking is free, and talk is cheap. I check out every girl I like the look of, and I don’t ask if they’re single first. So as long as Erin isn’t creeped out, I don’t care. Anyway she was wearing the hat the first time he saw her last year too, and he used the same line.
We were hoping to see them, and we were actually half looking for them at the time. They didn’t expect us necessarily, so we had to get right on top of them before Don realized who we were. And sure enough, they invited us for sloppy joes with elk and pork. We shared drinks with them and had a good time just hanging out. And Don, who is pretty into taxidermy, was really impressed with our hats.
First of all, Erin’s hat gets attention from serious hunters because everybody knows they’re deer antlers, but nobody can figure out what kind. In fact, I forgot to mention this, but when we were down in Gerlach, there was a big taxidermy tent run by some local guys who set up there every year. Apparently they get quite a bit of business out of it.
Anyway, they run a taxidermy shop and have a ton of really impressive mounts on display, and they went nuts over Erin’s hat, trying to figure out what the antlers were from. Don had the same reaction.
German roe deer is the answer, incidentally.
Okay, and there’s also my hat. So you saw the construction pics at the top of the thread and I did reference it a bit, but this is the big reveal. I didn’t wear it until the last day because I wanted it to be the big finale, but the second I put it on, I wished I’d worn it every day. I now look for excuses to wear it and thankfully I’m still in a rock band so I can still sort of justify it from time to time.
So this is the hat I spent all my time freaking out trying to build, along with the German welding goggles for good measure:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30184946_zps2356ca6a.jpg
If you think for one second I’m not praying for an apocalyptic scenario to play out so I can live in this thing as some kind of tribal warlord, you’re crazy.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30184941_zps61c3bf23.jpg
Walking around like this, people kept coming up and looking at it and looking at me and frankly, the most common reaction was to back away slowly. But some people were super excited about it, and one guy told me I looked exactly how he envisioned the devil. This is when it’s nice to be a big guy, as well. It just goes together.
So Don loved the hat, but he thought I’d get a lot of static for it from some people who were offended by the fur or whatever. But anybody who was thinking it, sure wasn’t saying it. This is also when it’s nice to be a big guy. I mean not like I’m huge or anything, but bigger than most people at Burning Man. The average Burner is probably a little skinnier than the average person, and the same height. So I have about fifty pounds on most of them.
I’ll tell you who did get a lot of static about headwear, though: Erin. And this is where things started to go a little wrong.
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So what do you know about the term “cultural appropriation”?
Essentially, it’s the idea that if white people adopt some item of cultural significance to some other group, we all need to feel really terrible about that. Or really, if anyone does something that could be attributable to another culture, but doesn’t somehow get permission for that, that that’s a really awful thing. Because what we all need to be, of course, is really fucking sensitive about who culturally owns what imagery. So I guess if you see a Chinese guy in a kilt, make a big fucking deal about it, because that’s what matters. Does all of this seem kind of unimportant to you, and like something most people just wouldn’t even pay attention to for ten seconds?
Well here’s a really critical fact: The Huffington Post likes to write about it. A lot.
Now, one of the big popular themes of past Huffington Post white-guilt cry-ins has been native headdresses on white festival-goers. To be entirely fair, seeing soft, pudgy college geeks in headdresses from H&M would piss me off to no end, especially if it was a badge of honour in my own culture. But then seeing pudgy college geeks anywhere tends to annoy me. And H&M just makes shitty clothing.
But in a twist that somewhat parallels the argument at the gate about the license plate, it turns out that Erin has a particular reason for wearing the headdress.
You see, Erin, who is actually German, although she has spent her whole life in Canada and can’t even really speak German, works for a branch of the Canadian government which deals with aboriginal health.
In fact, this agency is a new entity which was previously made up of three different levels of government, none of which were under the control of what in Canada are called First Nations people - most of you would probably use the term Native Americans.
Erin’s agency was created to put control of health programs, which in Canada are extensive as we’ve had socialized medicine for decades and it’s all run through the government, directly in the hands of First Nations people. Her career is basically to assist with the development of certain types of health programs and she works with a few doctors and a bunch of different tribal councils to implement this stuff.
And the work that she does is apparently important enough to these people that one of the tribes ceremonially adopted her, and she is now a member of a particular clan here in my province. I’m not going to go into her specific tribe and clan because she’s kind of private about it, but they do use feather headdresses for ceremonial purposes.
And Erin made hers with permission from her tribe. It’s got a bunch of stuff on it that’s specifically there to represent her, and it’s not exactly traditional, and it’s totally culturally legitimate, even by Huffington Post standards.
Now to be fair, I wouldn’t personally give a fuck. If she’d never so much as seen a person with black hair and a tan, and she wanted to make a kimono because she thought they looked cool, I’d be entirely for that.
But apparently the headdress, which, incidentally, is absolutely spectacular, is a big hot-button issue for white guys about 25 years old who haven’t been laid recently, or ever.
I did actually suspect this might be the case, but Erin wanted the headdress and she had every right to make it, so I didn’t caution her against it, mainly because I figured that most people would keep their fucking mouths shut.
One thing I did not count on was the combination of alcohol, and feelings of moral superiority.
I’ve tried to include a representative sample of pics with the headdress here, but the last night a big sandstorm kicked up, and most of the time it was a chaotic mess out there.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205413_zps3e06243c.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205500_zpsb717b5c6.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205326_zps2fbf8e5b.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205209_zpsbbe15b7a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205300_zpse622b462.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205601_zps2d818bae.jpg
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The last night, as I said, was pretty crazy, weather-wise. It would clear up for a bit, then storm, then clear up, then storm again. I didn’t mind. It’s fun. In fact part of the experience of Burning Man, and one of the things I really like, is that you get whatever you get, and there’s no refunds, no complaining, nothing. Maybe things will be beautiful and sunny. Maybe it’ll be windy as fuck. It’s a week or more in duration; it sure won’t always be easy. So I like that and I was kind of glad for the chaotic weather on the last night.
So you’ve seen Erin rigged up for the last big party, but here’s some of the neighbours getting ready as well, and of me. I like these pictures because you get the idea of how crazy it is: there’s a blinding dust storm, and what are people doing? Putting on costumes and stumbling through several types of haze to a giant party that starts with a berserk act of arson.
So for comparison purposes - I think I already showed you this picture - here’s the neighbours’ camp at around 6 pm.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30192608_zps60666216.jpg
These pictures were probably taken about two hours later.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30203931_zps2cd6b2af.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30203924_zps494fad8a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30203940_zpse162aace.jpg
And there’s me, looking somewhere between heroic and psychotic:
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205628_zps2de32c66.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205712_zps75f4e010.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30205720_zpsf4a0f0c8.jpg
And so-attired, we headed into the centre of the playa for the big burn.
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I guess I’ll start by saying that I didn’t get a picture of the one burn I really would have liked to: Nuclear Dream. It was stunning and it happened way too fast for me to get my camera going. Nobody saw it coming. The heat was incredible.
Fortunately I did find a video on Youtube (of course). The big action is about halfway through, so I’m starting you at 1:15 just so you can get the sense of surprise everyone felt.
http://youtu.be/5jfdVzVUgvs?t=1m15s
I wasn’t really close and I could feel the heat. The fireball was about two hundred feet high, just a savage mushroom cloud of fire. Incredible.
The stuff I did photograph was pretty tame, in a way. The Man itself was pretty plain, kind of a throwback to traditional Burning Man imagery because of the anniversary thing, I guess.
I tried as much as I could to get kind of a visual survey of the scene, knowing I’d be posting it here for you guys. So here’s something: the mile-wide circle of glowing vehicles surrounding the Man, waiting for the burn to start.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30212923_zpsab480ee4.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30213531_zpsd706f9fa.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30213617_zps481f427a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30213939_zps83efa888.jpg
One thing that was kind of neat was the way the fire rained down ash and sparks on everyone. That makes it sound bad, but it didn’t seem to be setting anything on fire.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214027_zps5f3ac00a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214431_zps2cfab26a.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214554_zps0f257047.jpg
It was a little tricky trying to capture the rain of sparks, but I kept at it. I’ll throw up a lot of pictures so hopefully everyone finds something to their interest.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214708_zpsc0431357.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214805_zpsb8752f1d.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214822_zps4fcb2515.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30214833_zps7ba3370e.jpg
Okay, so then this group of Dutch kids showed up, and they were super excited about being there. They wanted their picture taken and they were incredibly thrilled about everything. I couldn’t really tell if they were on drugs, or just extremely psyched to be a part of this thing. Some people get so wrapped up in the whole Burning Man thing; it just means so much to them. It’s funny in a way, because compared to lots of European EDM festivals, it’s not exactly huge. But it’s really different, and everybody I encountered thought that Burning Man was somehow ground zero for everything. The giant German EDM festivals were bigger…but also more controlled, more corporate, more safe. Burning Man was the event that everyone wanted to get to if they could. So maybe these kids were all high, or maybe they were just excited. I couldn't tell.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30224732_zps52c43883.jpg
It was while I was photographing these kids that the first cultural appropriation problem cropped up. I was joking around with these Dutch kids, and Erin was kind of in the background, and some fucking college kid started hassling her. I heard it happening behind me.
“That’s cultural appropriation,” he was saying.
“Oh, fuck,” said Erin. “I have the right to wear it.”
I snapped around and got between them. Erin is pretty quiet and she’s really not verbally agile. I think I mentioned that she’s German, but doesn’t really speak German. But sometimes I think she thinks in German and has to translate it into English. I don’t think that literally what’s happening exactly, but it’s like she has a linguistic gap between what I know is happening in her head, and what she can actually express. Sometimes the words come out in slightly the wrong order, or there’s a big list of adjectives instead of a single word. That’s why I think there’s some kind of German-to-English mental translation happening. It’s like she’s using German syntax, and applying it to English.
I’m pretty verbally agile, though. I talk like I write, in fast, dry sentences. I use spoken phrasings that are very similar to written English, with few contractions. In fact, when I was younger, one of my friends used to make robot sounds whenever I spoke, because he found my speech robotic. So when I write down dialogue that I’ve spoken out loud and it seems improbably clean and structured, well, no, it probably did sound like that.
“Take a hike, little boy,” I said. I was probably six inches from his face.
“Cultural appropriation is racist,” he said.
“Is it racist if someone wears the cultural insignia of her own tribe with the permission of her tribal council?”
“It’s racist,” he said, kind of weakly, but I could see he was beginning to process the information. I leaned down and got my forehead to just about touch his.
“No,” I said. “I want to know if my wife’s decision to wear the cultural insignia of her tribe in Canada while on the tribal lands of a different nation meets your privileged white standards of what constitutes racism. I want you to make a decision and say words. I want you to say them, to me, now.”
Man, he was really breaking down fast. He was shaking pretty good. It was interesting to watch his face as the moral high ground he’d been so sure of a minute earlier was slipping away underneath him. He bailed.
About thirty feet away, he turned and yelled one last thing.
“And feathers are MOOP!”
“Read the fucking website, you dimwitted yokel!” I shouted back. “Feathers got approved this year!”
MOOP is the Burning Man acronym for litter, or anything that’s not supposed to be there. It stands for Matter Out Of Place. Up until this year, feathers were prohibited, on the grounds that organizers figured they’d blow off and contaminate the entire area. They really do take the “leave no trace” thing pretty seriously. But the thing was, tons of people were bringing feather boas anyway, because unless you read through all the materials, you probably didn’t realize they were verboten. And yet it didn’t seem to be a problem. So if you kept an eye on the website, or the various emails they send out to people on the ticket holder list, one of the big news items was that they decided to admit feathers this year. It was one of the deciding factors for Erin in making the headdress.
So there you have it. That’s the first cultural appropriation conflict I got in.
The Dutch kids were totally weirded out by the entire scene. For them, there was this fun guy joking around and taking pictures and asking questions about life in Netherlands who suddenly turned out to be a guy who wanted a fistfight in the middle of downtown lovefest. And there was another guy who walked up in the exact centre of a massive crowd of people wearing weird clothes - lots of which were half-assed interpretations of east asian and north african cultures, because frankly Burning Man is the world’s biggest cultural appropriation festival - and started getting kind of aggressive with a woman because she was wearing the wrong kind of costume. They got uncomfortable and left. I didn’t care. One of the advantages of being an adult is that you stop giving a fuck.
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We wandered around for a while. Last year we’d bailed out pretty quickly, but this time we were still having a good time, although I was a bit keyed up from the confrontation with the college kid. We cruised over to the far side of the playa and wandered from club to club, taking in the music and everything. It was cool, but I was having a hard time relaxing. I was scanning all the time, watching the crowd, mentally keeping everyone back from Erin. It sucked, because if I wanted that kind of experience I could get it just by going down to the main drag downtown on a Saturday night. But we kept wandering around, having the occasional drink and just watching the scene. It was worth seeing, after all.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30225016_zpsb1716e34.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30225042_zps7d34d741.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30225055_zpsce62b6a0.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-30234258_zpse8cd7a0b.jpg
Okay, so a lot of these pictures aren’t going to win any awards for quality photography. But in a way they do really represent what it’s like to be there: it’s dark, there’s a bunch of glowing stuff everywhere, and your brain is being rattled by giant bass cannons, some kind of alcohol, and probably for a lot of people some kind of weird chemical that makes stuff look like it’s glowing, whether it is or not.
I remember commenting last year that I didn’t see much actual drug use. That’s still true: once again, I had neighbours that smoked a joint or two, but I didn’t see any of what I’d consider worrying drug use. But I also assume it goes on, and on the far side of the playa, around 9 o'clock on the map, I think it’s probably fairly prevalent. I just can’t imagine how anyone could still be wanting to party and listen to skull-inverting techno at 5 a.m. if they weren’t on drugs.
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-31001020_zps1d10002f.jpg
https://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/a509/geordiepickard/TPI/2014-08-31002554_zpsb496375e.jpg
So after a bit I’d calmed down and got talking to someone at one of the big clubs. We were kind of on the outskirts of the dance area or whatever, and I was talking to someone and I got distracted. And Erin got a little bit separated from me. And that’s when it started again.
“Excuse me, do you know what cultural appropriation is?”
I think I was mid-word talking to someone else and I wheeled around with my left hand about halfway out and my right chambered up. And again, it was some lonely geek who’d finally found someone he could righteously bully: a girl by herself, ostensibly committing an egregious offense against progressive thought.
“Hey,” I said, “come here.” He suddenly looked worried.
“I’m going to tell you what I just told some other scrawny fuck,” I said. “She has the blessing of her tribe to wear that. She doesn’t need your blessing. You’re a fucking nobody. Do you understand? Your opinion has no value, and the fact that you read the Huffington Post just makes you a moderate-value target for someone like me. Do you understand that?”
He was backing away. One thing I’ll give him: he looked shaken but he didn’t quite give up. And he didn’t wait until he was out of range to try to get one last shot in.
“You can…eat me,” he said, with a pronounced gap mid-sentence as he struggled to find the words.
I reached out and put my hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in close. I spoke directly into his ear.
“It’s an interesting offer,” I said. “Do you know what the texture of kidneys is? It’s strange and sort of…powdery. Granular, maybe, is the word. It’s a filter, you know. All the blood in your body is being pumped through your kidneys.”
Then I relaxed the grip on his neck so he could take a step back, and I just looked at him for a few seconds. Man, he did not want to be there any more. I think the hat really helped make it a memorable experience for him.
“It’s hard for me to imagine this,” I said, “but did you really think that everyone who comes here is a good person?”
I let go of him and he was gone. And now I was all keyed up again. I mean it was funny, to have these little conflicts, and it was sort of entertaining for me to think of things to say which were really menacing, but not actual threats. But I wasn’t there to get in fights. I was there to have a good time, and to dress like a nutcase, and to hang out with Erin who loves costumes and wishes she could dress like this everywhere, but obviously she can’t.
In fact I can’t remember what I told you guys about this last time, but Erin really has a hard time shaking off the judgements of others. That’s the whole point of Burning Man for her: she loves the idea of a place where she can look the way she likes without being mistaken for an escaped circus stripper on psychedelics. She goes there specifically because it’s a straight week of wearing all her favourite stuff and everyone just accepting her. And these fucktards were ruining it. And that was making me angry. In fact just writing about it makes me angry, because I personally have a very thick skin and I’m able to shrug off most stuff, but this was upsetting Erin and stuff that upsets her makes me very upset.
“Do you want to head back?” I asked.
“Yeah, let’s just walk back the long way.”
So we started wandering out across the emptiest stretches of desert, in real blackness. It was calm out there. You could hear the bass from a hundred parties, but it was all distant and the very distance of it made it feel reassuring to me. Every once in a while, some kind of art car would loom out of the darkness, but mostly it was just us, walking across this giant stretch of sand.
We passed the temple, which would burn the next night. Lots of people stay for that, but we didn’t plan to. It looked beautiful in the dark.
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I walked up to get one of these pictures, I don’t remember which one. I think the pirate ship looking one. It was neat looking and I wanted to try to capture it and I couldn’t zoom in the dark, so I jogged over about fifty feet to get the shot.
After I took the picture, I turned to head back and it was happening again. Some guy was fucking hassling Erin. I just fucking lost it. I’m a huge believer in what I call “emotional discipline”, which is the intentional control not only of what emotions you put on display, but to what degree you let yourself get wrapped up in an emotional response to whatever is going on. In general, that works really well for me. I rarely react to problems around me in my day to day life. I just think about how I want to fix the problem. In fact at home, with Erin, I virtually never even raise my voice. I guess I mentioned something related to that at the very beginning; I just try to focus of addressing whatever problem has come up. I bet that if you asked Erin, she’d probably tell you I’d gotten visibly angry three or four times in our fifteen years together. I just don’t like to be out of control.
And usually this is a pretty good system. Usually I’m able to decide how I want to react to people, and that’s why even though I was getting fed up with the cultural appropriation people, I was still sort of toying with them. I’d decided I wanted to be menacing without directly saying something that I thought could be construed as an actual threat of violence.
Now I was just done.
I walked up and the guy was talking about cultural appropriation and I led with a phrase that I actually think I got from Craig. In one quick roll, no pauses, and let me know if this is something that you’ve heard from Craig yourself, I said:
“Yeah, that’s real interesting; let me ask you a question.”
The guy looked away from Erin and up at me and the anger just poured out in a wash of very violent reasoning.
“How easy do you think it would be to tell the difference between the body of someone who fell off and art car and got rolled over a few times as it passed over them, and the body of someone who got kicked to death out here in the desert, where there was no one around to see it happen, or come to help them?”
The guy opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything. Every year or two, someone dies at Burning Man. Usually it’s that they got really drunk and fell off an art car at the front, and nobody noticed because there’s no lighting, and they got crushed. It happens.
“And with seventy thousand people leaving this place in the next twenty-four hours, going back to their own states, countries, and continents, how easy do you figure that investigation would be?”
He wasn’t saying anything. He was just standing there. I don’t remember him closing his mouth but he must have, because I do remember him opening it again. But he didn’t say anything.
“And with that body almost certainly going unnoticed until sometime tomorrow morning, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that whoever committed that murder would pack up and drive on back to their own country, and be gone before anyone even realized there was a reason to look, thus pretty much guaranteeing that there would never be any consequences to that action?”
And I didn’t want him to say anything now. I didn’t want any buttons pushed at all. And I basically said just that.
“Don’t say a fucking word. Turn around, and walk the fuck out of here.”
And he did that, and that was the last person that happened to bring up cultural appropriation, and I was happy about that, because I did not want to hear one more fucking word about it.
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We walked back to our camp and along the way I thought about how nice it was to be rid of everyone else and just together, and I told Erin that.
“You know,” I said, “the thing I really enjoy about the trips we do is not the trips, exactly. It’s the fact that we’re doing them together. And back home, you know, I think my favourite thing every week is when we go out on weekend mornings for coffee and just relax and drink coffee together. In fact, some of my favourite times here are in the mornings when we just sit and drink coffee and talk. I don’t know if I really need Burning Man at all. I’m just really happy that we get to spend our time together.”
Erin didn’t really say much because she’s not much of a talker. She just held my hand, and we walked back to our camp. And in the morning we packed up, and drove back to the highway. We timed it well, and there wasn’t much of a lineup. We read the sides of U-haul trucks and laughed at one that had a picture of a moose that looked like it was standing in front of one of the great Pyramids, and another one of a zebra which somehow represented the state of Idaho. And a bit later there was one with a hummingbird on it, which I pointed out and drove next to for a while, because Erin loves hummingbirds.
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