Love in the Dust at Burning Man 2014 (Caravansary) Part 1: The Journey, The Arrival, The Storm and The Man
Burning Man! Once again burn time has come and gone, and once again it has taken me weeks to a) physically recover (I swear to you that BMCFS or Burning Man Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a real thing), b) process all the things that happened (or didn’t), and c) put all the rest of the life admin in order and get everyone and everything else to leave me alone long enough to carve out some quiet writing time. But here I finally am, and even though it’s over a month later and the immediacy of the memories have faded, there are still plenty of things I want to record for posterity.
As I’ve said before, if you’re one of those readers who is impatient with the full, overly detailed and admittedly solipsistic story, please feel free to just skim and look at the pictures (but they came out pretty lo-res here on Parentheticals so you might want to click through to the full set on Flickr, here), or you can skip to the end to see my summary of this year’s takeaways. And if you’re unfamiliar with Burning Man in general, you might want to go look at my posts from my first year in 2011, in which I explain some things (or you could just go look at the official Burning Man website).
2014 was my fourth burn, and had its own flavor and character just like every other burn. If I were to summarize (and if you’ve ever read anything I put on Parentheticals, you’ll know I am not the most expert at summarizing or succinct condensation...you have been warned), I would say that this burn turned out to be largely about love, and especially love for and with my life partner Josh, aka Mystic. We spent nearly all of this burn in each other’s company, and it was satisfying, and fulfilling, and yummy, and just all-around great. There was also some good love of self and of friends and of random strangers in there too, which I’ll get to when I get to the detailed report and takeaways. We also had chosen a new camp this year (Pink Heart), which was in many ways all about love, so that certainly did set the scene/create the container for all the love experiences as well.
Now, I didn’t start out with the intention that this burn would be all about love. I actually did some thinking about what my intentions were before the burn started (since I had all that free time not taken up by a giant construction project like last year). Serendipity was the intention I came up with first and foremost. Last year was all about “go big or go home” and pushing myself (and others) to do something large and amazing. This year I wanted to be more “let come what may” and I wanted to stay open to whatever the Universe wanted to present and/or teach to me. And I did have quite a few beautiful serendipitous moments (which I’ll get to in later entries), but apparently what the Universe wanted to teach me this time was love. Who am I to argue with that? :)
So. The lead up to Burning Man this year was much calmer this year, because we weren’t building any major structures or trying to complete any major communal projects. The only things we had to do (in addition to “pack all the things”, which is not an insignificant logistical project) were to make whatever upgrades we wanted to our yurt and camping supplies, and make/acquire any new costume pieces we wanted to bring. That process went relatively smoothly, which was great.
Because the gates opened even yet earlier this year (Sunday at 10am), we decided to leave early Sunday morning with the goal of getting in the gate and to our camp in time to set up our stuff on Sunday evening. That was a good plan, but like all plans, we had to hold it lightly and expect some shifting. And shifting we got! Not only because, well, that’s always what happens on the playa, but because first off sometime in the wee hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning, the actual earth beneath our feet shifted quite dramatically: there was a 6.1 earthquake centered in Napa that woke us up. Josh and I rolled over in bed, looked at each other and said “earthquake!” But it was over by the time we realized what was going on, and when we listened and there were no sirens or freaked out children or any other alarming noises, we rolled over and went back to sleep.
Josh used his spatial dynamics superpower and packed the van to the brim like a giant jigsaw puzzle and strapped the yurt to the top of the van. We set out around 10am from our house, with a brief stop at Ace Hardware to pad the yurt straps so that they wouldn’t vibrate and drive us crazy for the whole drive. Most of the drive was relatively uneventful. We stopped once in Antelope to get lunch, pick up cigarettes for our friends Evan and Mary, and buy rebar and poles for staking down/stabilizing our EZ-Up shade structure (Josh realized we’d forgotten to pack them when we were somewhere around Fairfield). Then around 4pm we stopped for gas and dinnerish snacks at Love’s gas station in Fernley, and jumped back on the road...where we promptly ran into stop and go traffic all the way to Burning Man. We didn’t get off the pavement and onto the dirt of Gate Road until around 8:30pm, and then it was about 3 more hours until we finally made it to Pink Heart. One bright spot about all the waiting around was talking to other people in the various lines around us, and serendipity started almost literally as soon as we hit the dust when we discovered that our friend and camp-mate Aimee was in line with us, two rows over. Hanging out with her during the gate wait time certainly made it more fun.
I had been worried that we were going to roll into camp too late, that people wouldn’t be around, that it would be hard for us to figure out where to go or where to go park our car, but all that proved to be no problem. Serendipity showed up again and made everything easy. We were welcomed graciously and with pleasure, and we joined right in to the hustle and bustle and set up happening all around us despite the hour. We unloaded all our stuff and then handed off our car to the campmate who was the designated “valet parker” to bring out to our assigned parking lot on the outskirts of the city. We helped Aimee unpack too, and then started the process of setting up the yurt (which took some assistance at key points from Aimee and Anjanette). At some point during the setup someone came by to tell us that there was a wind/dust storm expected in the wee hours of the morning, so we should make sure to batten down our stuff. We helped Aimee move all her stuff into the storage container (since she hadn’t set up her tent yet) and then we moved most of our stuff that wasn’t big and heavy into our yurt, set up our bed platform and mattress, and finally had to collapse since it was something like 3 or 4am at that point.
We slept the sleep of the well-worked until around 6 or 7am, when a loud noise woke us up (even through ear plugs). It sounded like something substantial drumming on the roof of the yurt. I muzzily thought “oh, the wind storm’s here and kicking up so much dust that bits of playa are hitting the yurt”. Then I woke up a little more and took out my earplugs and listened again....it was raining. I even got up and poked my head out of the yurt to make certain, and sure enough: the playa was wet, there was water falling from the sky, and everyone was under cover. This was about the time when Josh said to me, “I didn’t finish taping the bottom of the yurt to the tarp...we should check for leaks.” So we leapt up and checked on the untaped areas, which were indeed leaking and making puddles on the floor. Luckily we hadn’t unpacked much or put down carpet yet, and our bed was on a platform, so we just left the leaks alone and tried to reassure ourselves that once the rain stopped it would dry out quickly and we’d be able to take care of it.
Now let me pause here and say that one of my biggest anxieties about attending Burning Man has always been “what if it rains while we’re there?” I’d heard stories about the mud and the difficulties and shut downs it can cause, and the idea of being caught in the wet and mud always seemed like a worst case scenario to me. Dust storms I was used to and understood how to prepare for/deal with, but rain storms? Eeeeek. It had rained oh so briefly back in 2012 the night we met the alchemist [LINK], but that had been barely noticeable. This rain was much different. It was a full on pounding, serious rain (and, we later learned, there had also been hail), accompanied by cracks of lightning and thunder...and the lightning strikes were pretty close, judging by the time between the flashes and the rumbles. I was torn between feeling all Chicken-Little-panicky that the sky was falling and thrilled that we’d pulled all our stuff into the yurt and that the yurt seemed to be mostly holding up fine against the weather. We joked that the burn might be happening at the beginning of the week this time since the Man this year was the perfect shape to be a giant lightning rod. Luckily this did not happen.
The rain let up after a little while, and a few Pinkies came out to investigate including Anjanette, who had brought an umbrella to use as a sun shade but wound up using it for its true purpose instead. We stayed in our yurt and did a little rearranging. We put some dirty clothes and washcloths down to contain the puddles, and tried to reassure ourselves that it would dry out soon.
It continued to rain off and on for a few hours, but we finally got out of the yurt to do some clean up and some more set up in the early afternoon. We set up our stuff and we helped other people set up their stuff and then took a break with Aimee and our campmates Doug and Elena in their RV. Then it was finally feeling dried out enough for us to want to venture out a little farther, so we got dressed in fresh clothes and went to go check out the public frontage area of camp, where the Pink Lounge was mostly set up.
We lounged around a bit and talked to some of our fellow Pinkies, but I was feeling restless and wanted to go explore at least a little bit, so I walked over to an art piece that was right across the Esplanade from the camp next door to us. That art piece was “Talk to God”, which was set up like a phone booth with “Black Rock Bell” and “Talk to God” on top and an actual push button pay phone inside. I’d seen this art piece in previous years and had heard that there were times when someone was actually on the other end of the line or that you could call out on it, but I had never had a chance to interact with it. Now seemed as good a time as any, so I told people I was going to go give God a piece of my mind about the weather and see if I could get the sun back. Josh told me to be “polite but firm.”
As it turned out, when I picked up the phone it started to ring and ring, but no one answered, and eventually it disconnected. I decided to take that as a sign that God was particularly busy right now. While I was fooling around in the phone booth, a young man came by and started chatting with me about the phone booth. It turned out that he was a reporter for some small newsweeklies down in Southern California, and this was his first time at Burning Man. He tried to interview me like a proper reporter and I played with him for awhile and then finally said he could take my picture and gave him my name. (Still haven’t seen anything attributed to me pop up online though.) I asked him to take a picture with my camera too though so now the moment where nothing actually happened has been memorialized forever.
At some point we left the lounge and went back to our yurt to do some more set up, and our friends Mary and Evan came by. We were so happy to see them and reconnect, and we had a nice lounge time with them until they had to take off so that Evan could go finish setting up the projections for the big sculpture project he was a part of called “Between Dimensions”. We agreed to hook up with them later in the evening at the sculpture and celebrate its “grand opening” with them.
It continued to stay dry and the playa seemed walkable/bikeable, so Josh and I made ourselves some simple freeze-dried food for dinner and changed our clothes into night outfits, and headed out to meet up with Mary and Evan via a stop at the porta-potties out on the playa (which were the closest ones to our camp). Anjanette joined us for part of the way and we saw some pretty spectacular sunset with all the clouds still hanging around. The playa felt kind of empty (or at least not overcrowded) because so many people had been stuck in the Gate line or turned away altogether from getting in because of the rain, so there really were fewer people in the city and it was kind of cool.
We had a fun night hanging out and celebrating at Between Dimensions with Evan and Mary and taking little side trips to other nearby art installations. Eventually we all decided to go out and see some playa sights together, but first Josh and I made a brief detour back to Pink Heart to pick up our playa coats, because it was getting pretty cold. Then we collected Evan and Mary and set out to go pay our respects to the Man, who this year was a giant, 100+ foot tall sculpture standing directly on the playa and surrounded by a ring of interactive exhibits under an open tent called the “Souk”, rather than a relatively huge sculpture standing on top of a relatively huge base.
Maybe it was just me and the state I was in when we first saw the Man, but I was almost overwhelmed (and not in a good way) by the sheer massive size and giant-ness of the Man himself. I’ve never particularly felt that the Man was oppressive or looming or in any way negative before (even though the size and scope of the flying saucer base of the man last year was pretty audacious), but this year I did. I tried to stick with admiring the enormous engineering feat that was clearly involved in putting the enormous Man together and keeping it upright in playa conditions, and not get too wrapped up in feeling like big brother was watching me or that a fairy-tale giant was constantly threatening to come stomp us all.
We didn’t really stick around and look into the Souk exhibits, which seemed more like daytime-appropriate interactions, we just went “woah” at the Man for awhile and then left. After a bit more playa wandering, Josh and I eventually bid our friends farewell and headed back to Pink Heart to call it a night.