Burning Man

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.  We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”
Albert Schweitzer

It may not seem so to you, but it’s been a long week for me.  Not a hard one, just very…eventful.  I put up last week’s post in a hurry from a small town in middle of nowhere Nevada.  Our RV stopped for gas, and I grabbed someone else’s laptop and made a mad dash for Starbucks (wifi).  That was the last wifi I had all week.  After that, the phone got turned off too, and stuffed in a ziplock bag as we headed towards the Black Rock Desert for a week at Burning Man.  I want to explain.  It might take a couple of posts.

It started when my friend Ricardo approached and excitedly talked me into applying for a ticket to Burning Man- an event I’d heard of but never really looked into.  Well, he talked a good talk.  I read up on it and found the whole concept seductive, but what really sold me was this year’s theme:  Cargo Cults.  You can read more here, but basically, the idea is that during WWII, Americans or other wealthy, industrialized nations occupied small, isolated islands home to non-industrialized cultures for strategic military purposes, building airstrips and small bases to receive and dispense cargo.  These activities produced (comparatively) a great deal of commerce for the local economy and paraded a bunch of impressive looking technology around.  Anyway, long story short, the local population equated the boost in prosperity with the equipment and patterns of behavior of transporting cargo, although they did not understand the technology behind it.  The end result was that after the foreign troops left, the population began to imitate these behaviors and build rudimentary devices that mimicked the technologies (radios, satellite phones) in form only, not function.  They became “cargo cults” because a central figure associated with the prosperity was elevated to the status of a god, and the repetition of behaviors became ritualized in an attempt to bring back the glorious riches.

So the idea that that was happening in the world amazed me, and that was this year’s theme.  I applied.  Got a ticket.  Ricardo did not get a ticket.  This posed a bit of a conundrum, as going alone would be an especially expensive endeavor.  Then, a month or two ago, I was on a work call when I heard the phrase “Burning Man” dropped in a conversation by a guy standing next to me.  I waited for lunch break and then approached the guy and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me…but did I hear you say Burning Man?…”

And so it began.  Turns out this fellow Jake was headed in with a group and a RV…and they had space fro more.  So I signed on.  About a week before the Burn, I met my campmates for the first time to sort out logistics, food, costs, etc.  I learned part of the plan was to build a giant geometric dome for a shade structure, fully equipped with humongous beanbags.  Awesome.

We met up in Las Vegas.  Flashy lights, short skirts, high heels, and 9 hippies rolling up to the Mirage in a RV, packing into two rooms.  The next day was all about preparation, aka 9 HOURS AT WALMART.  No, seriously.  This prevented us from making that night’s destination.  We left the next morning at 7am.  Burning Man takes place in the middle of the Black Rock Desert.  To get there, one must pass through a number of small rural towns along a two-lane highway.  And everyone is headed to Burning Man down that highway- all 70,000 of them.  All need gas, propane, provisions to survive the week, and to pee.  We hit stand stop and go traffic around 8:30pm, about 15 miles away from the turn off.  The “stop” part of the stop and go traffic was about an hour at a time.  When darkness fell, people started to get out of their vehicles, some glowing, some slowly twirling lighted hoola hoops, some just walking around in wizard costumes.  By this time our group was 10 people, crowded into the RV and a car that had made the journey all the way from New York.  Midnight came and went, occupants were fading fast, tempers were running high, and we were running out of names for the celebrity name game.  Around what must have been 3 or 4am, someone called for everyone to wake up, we were turning onto the desert, or, as Burners call it, The Playa.
“Welcome to the moon.”  Came a voice from the front.  There was still a several mile long line to reach the campsites, but we finally made it in with the sunrise.  All told, it was about an 11 hour traffic jam.  I never even heard a horn honk, no shouts, no fingers.  A lot of glow paint.  A couple of tutus.  We were all very sleepy little earth aliens, but we had to set up camp before the sun came up and rained down 100+ degrees on us.  This meant constructing the dome (the big project) and our small tent city just outside on the hard cracked desert sand that was to be our home for the next week.  And what a home it was…