Blog (Irregular Reports From the Front)

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

Being back in the hurly burly busybusy of my "real" world life after a fabulous, creative week in the desert is hard enough; but right now it feels extra hard because I had to deal with a biopsy procedure today (my pre-Burning Man mammogram came back with a suspicious dot, and this is the follow up). I'm generally ok, and am anticipating good news at some point next week, but holy Moses I really just want to hide under the covers for a couple days.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

This is a placeholder post...more Burning Man stories to come.

Because this was the year we brought Mom (and Rhoda, who is of a similar age), we decided to rent an RV for all of us to share. Because we were still wanting to be responsible members of Pink Heart and create the smallest camping footprint possible, we decided to rent a small RV (we also didn’t want to drive a huge one). So Josh and I found a 25’ “Four Winds” RV from El Monte, which was ridiculously expensive but did sleep 4 people, and seemed of a reasonable driving and parking size. Josh and I picked it up from El Monte down in Dublin, and Josh drove it back home. (El Monte was certainly not the cheapest but they were very burner friendly and easy to rent from, by the way, in case we ever do this again.) We had Mom and Rhoda meet us over at our house and bring all their stuff and then we Tetris’ed (is that a verb?) everything into it and got it ready to roll the next morning. We even covered the logos with blue tape like good little burners, and had Rhoda letter some Pink Heart slogans on the tape (“love more, fear less” and “float more, steer less”). We were optimistic at that point about how all the stuff and people would fit in the RV, but as it turned out, it was way too small a space to share with 4 adults for a week. Live and learn, I guess. If we ever wind up RV camping again I certainly feel like we learned some valuable lessons about space and privacy.

Anyway we had wanted to leave super early on Sunday morning but as it worked out we got on the road by around 7:30am. We made excellent time to Reno and then to Fernley where we stopped at Love’s (our traditional last gas-up point). At Love’s we met up with Anji and Joe and Leslie, who were driving our mini-van, and also randomly ran into our friends Cory and Rebecca. We were getting excited!

We left Love’s around noon and promptly ran into horrible, horrible traffic, so bad that we spent many hours (!) just stopped by the side of the road with the engine off. We had been braced for the possibility of at least a few hours of that, but this was particularly bad...we didn’t get parked at Pink Heart until nearly midnight that day. We at least tried to entertain ourselves while waiting in line by meeting other people in line and playing music and dancing. I played handpan for a while, mom and I scavenged for basket materials along the side of the road, Rhoda sketched, Josh read, and we generally tried to keep positive. The weather was mild and the countryside was greener than usual because they’d actually had recent rains, so at least it was actually quite pretty and pleasant, just boring. At one point we did see a herd of horses running across the wide open landscape kicking up dust, which was very scenic, and we did enjoy a beautiful sunset and a rising full harvest moon, but yeah it was a long and tiring day of waiting around.

Once we made it in to the gate we got excited again and had fun accompanying our three “burgins” (burner virgins) Emily, Rhoda and Joe through the welcoming and bell-ringing rituals. (They didn’t want to lay down in the dust and make dust angels though.) Then we crawled our way slooooowly through the city, past lots of flashing lights from BLM and Nevada police who were pulling over people for any infraction they could find, and eventually made it to Pink Heart. We had to pause the RV on the street first to go in and figure out where we were supposed to park it in our camp layout, but eventually got that all sorted out and parked in a temporary spot that turned out to be more or less permanent for the week. There was actually surprisingly plenty of space and it was less packed in then we thought, and we did get a nice spot with other friends in RVs so that it felt friendly. We were so excited to be there and see our friends and get settled. Our friend Ray told us that they hadn’t managed to set up any of the Carnival yet, so we knew that the next day would be a big work day, but we were looking forward to it.

The great thing about the RV was that we didn’t have to do much to be able to set it up to sleep in, just toss a few things outside and put together the convertible table/bed that Mom was sleeping on. We did that, and then we went to take a brief look at the front of Pink Heart and the sparkly nighttime playa with our burgins. One of our campmates, Joyous, told us about a cool art installation right near camp called “Simon 2.0: Fire Edition” and that sounded so cool that of course I had to go check it out and play it. It was in fact a big oil drum with a plexiglass top and complicated-looking electronics and lights inside it, surrounded by four beautiful sculpted pillars about 10 or 15 feet away on all sides. It was created like the Simon memory game where you have to repeat sounds in a pattern, and the sounds boomed out of big speakers, which was fun enough, but even more fun was that when you eventually lost it triggered huge gouts of flame shooting out of four pillars overhead. I loved it. I was actually pretty good at it (it was a bit handpan-like, actually), and lasted a long time before I made a mistake and the fire gouts came. I had fun playing with the timing and the sound of the pattern, and making things sound dramatic. I wish I’d gone back and played with it again, but that’s the burn for you...fleeting and ephemeral. Anyway after Fire Simon fun I came back to the RV and went to bed, excited to finally be there and looking forward to getting going on all the camp and Carnival setup the following day.

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{Click here for Prologue]  |  [Click here for Part 1]

[Click here for the full set of 2015 Carnival of Mirrors pictures on Flickr and Facebook]

Monday was a work day, no bones about it. We got up in the morning and after greeting all our campmates and getting our own setup finalized (which didn’t take long), it was time to get building. Luckily we had a lot of help and enthusiasm and the weather was decent (which we would not be so lucky about later in the week). The (Inner) Freak Show and Wheel of Participation pieces, which had been sent up on the camp truck for early arrival, lay forlornly on the playa just across the Esplanade in a dust-covered pile where it had been dumped earlier in the week. We got out our tool boxes and Josh the master builder sprang into action with the able assistance of Ray, Joe, John, Anji and Emily. We got pretty far and got the whole Freak booth set up, but eventually had to take a break at around 2:30pm because most of us had committed to go work a group shift at Arctica (this is the place that sells ice, beloved by all burners).

The Arctica shift actually turned out to be a ton of fun and the three hour shift flew by super quick. Josh was a slinger (moving big bags of ice out of the freezer truck for distribution). I was a Greeter with Anji, Liezel and Kristin, which basically meant hanging out in front of the igloo with all the folks in line, welcoming them and asking them if they knew what kind of ice they needed (which helped speed the process along). We got silly, we danced and bounced and played with people. We got to meet an amazing cross-section of burners. People gave us little gifts. We had a great time. I would definitely do that again.

After the shift we took our free ice and went back to camp. We had dinner and then went back to work on the Carnival. With the able and enthusiastic assistance of Viren, Josh hung the giant heart sculpture that Emily had made out of 2000 cable ties, mesh screening and mylar, at the top of the booth. After that Emily and I got all enthusiastic about putting up all the shiny decorations inside the booth. Tom helped us glue the mirrors (let me just say right now that Strongstik glue is awesome) and then we hung mirror strands and stapled mylar strips and shiny spirals and curtains. We stayed up til something like 1 or 2 in the morning but when the booth was finally finished and the spotlights installed to shine on the heart sculpture it looked pretty damn awesome and we were very proud.

[Click here for Part 1]  |  [Click here for Part 3]

[Click here for the full set of 2015 Carnival of Mirrors pictures on Flickr and Facebook]