parentheticals.com - Report, Reflections and Robots (Burning Man 2018): Prologue and Preamble

I feel like I might as well steal from myself and re-use (with edits and embellishments) the first few paragraphs from last year’s entry, since it seems about the same this year:

I once again didn’t keep a journal at the burn like I usually do (because reasons, none of which are particularly compelling), so I am feeling some sense of urgency to try to remember and set down as much as I can while I still have a little dust left around me. Not letting it sit and stew for a few weeks may mean that the lessons and themes from this year’s burn are still a little unclear, but perhaps doing this write up will help to clarify them.

As usual though, you are welcome to click here if you want to just skip to the end of all this detail and read the list of reflections and takeaways, and click here if all you want to do is look at the pretty pictures with captions. And if you are unfamiliar with Burning Man in general, you can go read some of my initial entries from 2011 in which I do lots of ‘splainin’, or click here to go to the official Burning Man web site which has more info and content and things to look at than you can possibly imagine. (But don’t get lost, come back here eventually!)

It was another busy overwhelming summer for me and especially for Josh, so as soon as the 4 weeks of The Game Academy summer camp finally ended in early August we spent a few weeks frantically putting together the building project we’d committed to (the Pink Heart Patio...more on that later) and prepping and packing All The Things (as Josh has commented, we bring the equivalent of a small apartment out to the desert with us every year, because we are glampers and unrepentant just-in-casers).

I did most of our organizing and packing for the burn, but I also did a lot of Home Depot runs and actual building for the Patio. I made friends with some power tools (specifically the circular saw and power screwdriver) and that was kind of cool since usually I leave that kind of build stuff to Josh. But Josh was away for 3 days at a conference, so while he was away I cut 90% of the wood that had to be cut down to various sizes to build the Patio. Once he got back we (along with the very timely help of several gracious NorCal pinkies like Aimee and Augie, Gabe and Michelle, and Anjanette) screwed and painted and drilled like maniacs and managed to just barely get everything done in time. (Whew.) Unfortunately while we were madly painting I somehow tweaked my knee while squatting and working, which continued to bug me all through the burn and even now still kind of hurts.

Pinkies building the Patio in our backyard

For the Patio, we made twenty 4’x4’ square deck pieces and 12 posts (and painted them all bright pink), which doesn’t seem like that much but I assure you, it took hours and hours and hours. Luckily Josh had a little bit of time to finish up our new yurt fixes while I was gone at my own conference. (We brought home most of a new yurt from an imploded plug-and-play camp last year, but were missing a door panel and needed to retape everything.) It was pretty stressful trying to squeeze it all in but we managed to get most everything done just in time to get the truck loaded up on Monday evening (Josh and Gabe were driving a truck with the Patio, some pieces of the camp shower, and a whole bunch of NorCal pinkie personal stuff up early for build, and they left on Tuesday so they could be on playa on Wednesday).

I stayed behind to get the kids started with Back-to-School stuff and finish the last few pre-burn tasks, and then on Saturday afternoon Mom and Vid (a new pinkie friend that Josh and I sponsored) and I packed up the van with all our coolers and last remaining bits of playa gear and headed to Reno. (We had to stop at Safeway on the way out though because Josh had requested I bring another big bottle of tequila for margaritas. Apparently they’d been very popular.) We stayed in Reno for the night at the Silver Legacy. We had a really nice dinner at the 4^th Street Café in Reno that night and then pretty much went straight to bed because we wanted to get up super early to head out the next morning to playa.

Sunday morning we got up at 4am, had a quick breakfast in one of the hotel restaurants, and got on the road by around 5:30am. As is now tradition, we stopped at Love’s in Fernley for gas and snacks, and then drove very slowly and carefully out to the playa (there were reports of a lot of law enforcement crackdowns in the small towns on the way to the playa, so we were taking no chances). We managed to get to the gate road by around 8:45am with no incidents and were feeling pretty good when we tuned in to Gate Radio and heard about the supposed wait time of “only” 2 hours.

But then.

Then there were dust storms. Not just mild dust storms, that come in and make everything dusty for 20-30 minutes and then blow out again, but serious, super-windy, can’t-see-the-car-in-front-of-you, long, extended dust storms that didn’t have much break in between them. So they shut down the gate, and we wound up sitting and sitting and sitting in our car (we couldn’t really get out and socialize and wander around like we usually do in the gate line because the wind and dust were pretty unpleasant). We listened to BMIR (the Burning Man radio station) and chatted and dozed and just tried to make the best of it. When we had to get out and find a potty it was a major adventure that needed goggles, dust mask, water and a buddy, and we returned seriously frosted. One thing that was memorable though was that on one of our trips to the porto-potties, I heard a familiar voice nearby...it turned out to be our campmate Michelle (and her son Bobby). Turns out we were only a couple of cars away from each other! So we at least had some company to check in with and commiserate with whenever the dust died down.

It took us 12 hours (a personal best) to make it in to the city and to our camp, but boy howdy were we excited to finally get there and hug everyone and drop our stuff off and settle in. Josh had already set up our yurt (and Mom’s tent) so really I just needed to unload the stuff I’d brought and park the van (I was afraid I’d have to go find some random spot in the city to go park but as it turned out there was enough space for us to park it in camp, which was a relief). I couldn’t find Josh for a while at first (turned out he’d been hanging out in someone’s RV), so I wandered around saying hi to various campmates and checking out our beautiful new pink lounge frontage. People kept telling me how excited Josh had been that I was coming and how sweet it was that he was so anxious for me to get there. Finally he showed up (and he was in fact very happy to see me) and helped me move all the stuff into the yurt, but after that we were both disinclined to do any real organizing or arrangement of our stuff so it pretty much just stayed wherever it had originally been shoved. (Hey future me, pro tip: jump on the organization of your space right at the beginning, or it likely will never get done.) I had some food (Josh had saved me some of the camp lasagna dinner) and we got settled in and I actually went to bed relatively early because I had to get up at 2:30am to go do a 4am-8am greeter shift with a bunch of other pinkies.

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