Dust In The Wind

The blow glanced across my shoulder bouncing squarely onto the side of my head. I spun around quickly, dancing in the bungied harness, arms out-stretched and bringing my 4-foot duct tape hammer hard into alignment with his gut. Metal stars bent around the periphery of my warm amber tunnel vision barely aware of the hundreds of shouting people all around me and clinging to the 30ft high geodesic dome this Saturday night. Our tussle was broken as attendants clad in dusty black leather chainwear grabbed my harness and drew me back to the edge of the circle. About 25ft away at the opposite pole my opponent raised his padded stick and was released, the tension of the bungies suspending him from the apex of the dome snapping him free and hurtling towards me. I charged, my stomach laid out flat to the ground a mere foot or two below, flying with my weapon held before me straining for the sudden impact of mortality and the bittersweet pain of life. We crashed and clashed before the raging crowds alit with fire and oil, dirty and matted and thin and hungry with the saline lust of Burning Man.

After several hours over several thousand feet of elevation, my wife and I finally pulled off the I80 and began the final leg out past Pyramid Lake and onto the white salt flats of the Black Rock Desert. Amidst the darkness were hundreds of red tail-lights extending past and behind us. Unusual for a Sunday night a full week before the end of the event. After much slow progress through the thick, moonless night, we pulled off the highway and onto the playa at exactly 11:23pm Sunday, August 28th. Our car, crawling along at 5mph was immediately enveloped in a dust storm stealing all visibility into it's white noise. The gate greeters were covered in white alkali. Dust masks and goggles and thick clothing were their line of defense against the biblical sandblasting. We crawled through the raging storm, at times losing all visibility, looking at each other with questioning eyes before hitting the brakes to avoid a sudden port-o-potty looming out of the dust 3 feet away. With much steady persistence, like the winds themselves, we found camp fearlessly defended by two friends who had arrived a few hours earlier.

The mid-day sun beat down mercilessly onto the playa surface. The Black Rock Desert is an enormous Y of white, empty sand covering over 400 square miles, surrounded on most sides by high craggy black ridges. The desert floor is the remains of an ancient lake, now filled with over two miles of white alkali sand and soot, extremely fine and dry. Scattered across the surface are cast off little bits of the great black rocks rising out of the earth and lining the vast dead lake bed. Nothing grows on the desert floor and birds and bugs are a rarity.

The ferocity of the sun seemed barely diminished by the raging dust storms that continued throughout the day. The winds had subsided for a while after our arrival the night before. We reinforced the perimeter of our camp, set up our tent in the winds, and guided in a few other arrivals throughout the night. By dawn I was taking pictures out on the playa, already littered with art and activity. But within a few hours we were getting hammered by dust in 50+ mph winds. I spent the day, sleepless, hiding behind crappy goggles and a painter's mask while running around under the baleful sun trying to keep the tents from blowing away. We lost a friend's - it's center pole bent in half and took down the whole tent. I used rebar and duct tape to reinforce the poles on our own tent and lashed repeatedly to the roof racks on our car. It seemed to work well enough but there's really no rest until the winds fade out. And I really needed rest. It's hard enough getting acclimated to the desert in good weather. It's even more grueling in a day-long blowtorch dust storm. 24 hours after arrival I slept.

Tuesday morning we started to raise the dome. The winds were gone and we had a few hours before things got too hot to move. I led the assault and we got the first half together, then took a long break for Red Bull, Vodka, and Red Bull's (The Steamroller). When it gets so hot you don't want to move, and you've maybe gotten a few if any hours of sleep in the last day or two, it's very easy to lie around drinking all day. Eventually things will cool down and the city will start buzzing.

For us the cooling meant a second go at the dome so I took point again and climbed the ladder. Setting up a 15-foot high geodesic dome that's strong enough to hold multiple bodies takes a lot of patient coordination between several people. But by 9pm the dome was up, covered in aluminet sails, carpeted and furnished with three couches and a coffee table. We gassed up the gennie and on came the purple rope lights and blue LED's. Along our street my wife and friend's had put up 11 flags flying from 9ft PVC poles around a central arbor, framing the camp entryway to the communal dome and beyond, past the tent and shade structure shanties, back to the RV's now blocking the prevailing winds.

By a sheer stroke of great luck our camp location turned out to be perfect. We were only a block away from the Esplanade, which made it easy to get out and into the thick of things. The neighborhood itself was very active and each evening brought actual traffic congestion, glowing and neoned and buzzing, down our street. Since we were just a half block up from the Random Pizza Delivery camp, we received at least one whole, delicious, steaming pizza each day. And after many of the camp women removed their tops and set off to join the Critical Tits bike parade, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the whole line rode right past our porch. A few industrious lads from our camp were thoughtful enough to refresh the ladies with cool mist. At 3 or 4 thousand women it's no easy job but someone has to do it. While occasional lechers stole video frames, one couldn't help but wonder at the restriction society places on women's bodies and how ultimately heretical and revolutionary such a simple act as showing them to the world can be.

After dark I rode with a small pack of friends down the bustling Esplanade and it's side streets. Amidst the kaleidoscope of light and sound and sensation one shining piece of light drew us near. Colors and pattern completely broke down, abstracted across esoteric algorithms decomposed and iterated, alien yet seemingly familiar, slowly accreted together to show just enough of the reality it was modulating to understand what was happening. The digital technocolor chaos washing across the 5x7 screen before us shimmered and coalesced into the obvious image of the three of us sitting on our bikes, slack-jawed and gaping. There was a camera just above the screen pointed at the the area before it where we had biked up to inspect the display. As we moved in front of the camera the video feed was modulated by a software layer and then displayed on the screen. As we moved and capered and shone lights at it, the scene would continue to morph through different routines feeding our actions back to us in psychedelic light pools.

Suddenly the entire scene was replaced by large purple cartoon brains buzzing and multiplying rapidly. We were shocked, sputtering exclamations and paranoid accusations. It was too much, the fear was mounting and it was time to flee. The acid was clearly working, and it worked through sunrise the next morning.

From this point the tale grows fractured and non-linear. Camp had been constructed and obligation thinned. Hot days came and went. Warm nights were alive and raging with a seemingly unmatched tenacity and jubilance. The crowds were thick and wonderful and friendly and freakish. Tuesday night seemed like a Thursday night, it was so huge and ecstatic. A few times we rode around on a friend's art car that was a golf cart built up to look like a large thatched raft lashed together floating across the playa. It could carry 7 or 8 people. We bopped around BRC bumping mad sound out of the raft's speakers, beer cooler in tow. In a city that's over three miles across it's essential to have some good transportation.

On Wednesday, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary with all our friends over champagne. After a fun vanity photo shoot, the two of us walked out to the temple together, hand in hand, binding again for love and life in tears and smiles. Our's is the Law. Under human will cast out with joyous playfulness onto the blank slate of this ancient lake bed, minds and souls spilled out and twisted into celebrant forms of imagination, given of love for free to all in this ephemeral moment of eternity that each year we call Burning Man. When I'm there I've never left. It's my alter-land, 6 or 7 days at a time stitched together across years like a very dusty and psychedelic family afghan blanket.

The black faux fur jacket I had recently secured grew more and more nappy but continued to shine in it's ability to keep me warm at night. There are unique Burning Man fashion trends developing across this growing community. The desert cowboy look is common pairing piercings and tattoos with dark cowboy hats, weathered vests, black pants, and leather boots. The dread-locked firespinners wear earth tones and black mixed with chains and ear plugs. Playa bunnies run around in hot pants, thigh-highs, and small mesh tops, hair neoned, wig or dyed. An afternoon at The Deep End had hundreds of them all, mostly half-naked baking beneath the late sun kicking up impossible amounts of dust under their dancing feet. The sound system was perfect and the deep, progressive house beats called me off my bike and into the throng. It was the best sound system on the playa, wonderfully buried a few blocks in from the Esplanade, but absolutely rocking with hours yet to go towards darkness.

I randomly made my way to the MAPS dome just in time to catch the end of Daniel Pinchbeck's talk, then ran into Paul Hughes outside. Paul and I hung out and chatted for a while then pressed in when some of the crowds cleared out after Daniel's talk ended. We listened under the massive dome, covered in an olive military parachute and hung with vaguely tibetan batiks, to Erik Davis speak about Burning Man and imagination and the myth of Psyche & Eros (this year's event theme was Psyche). Paul officially introduced me to Daniel and it was nice for each of us to have a face to go with the name and email. He was very friendly and we spoke earnestly of shamanism and the necessity of business, and the act of manifesting one's will in the material world. When it all boils down, magick is about making thing's happen. Daniel was thronged by people wanting his time so we broke off and Paul & I careened across the playa through another thick dust storm chatting and laughing.

I think it was Friday night. Amidst no watches and infrequent sleep, time really starts to bend out there, especially when you're dancing under toadstools all week. Many clusters of our camp were breaking away to head across the playa to 10:00. This was the far strip where many of the largest sound systems were set up. Burning Man is about a lot of things and one of them is dancing to the best music you can find. The sound camps are the biggest parties on the playa. My pod left our camp a bit later but we managed to make our way over and find the best music. It was at Green Gorilla, my dancing wife and all of my friends were there, and Jeno was spinning in a half hour. With Dax and Little John on the scene, it was like being back in SF. The bar was flowing, everyone was smiling inside the domed dance floor, and the energy just grew and grew. Jeno's set was hypermodern and visionary. By 4am I was beat and a few of us straggled back to camp leaving the others behind to face another sunrise.

The night of the burn was spectacular. I think the crowd was the biggest yet, ringed by a bewildering array of art vehicles and mobile works. Many held raging sound systems, others released great fire cannons into the sky. The Man lit up suddenly and within moments was engulfed in flames under a canopy of explosions and stars, lit up by a thousand flashing rockets. He burned, raged fiercely at the ceaseless dance of Life and Death, then acquiesced, collapsing into the inferno of his phoenixed futurehistory, engulfed and transformed to be free. His demise was joyous and cathartic resounding in the wall of cheers rising from the arrayed masses who, unable to further restrain their own desire for fiery re-union, push in towards the flaming pile. On the inner edge of the fury my face burns like my skin's melting, like my head's in a furnace. Keep moving. Dive back into the crowd then push inward for another run around the caldera. 5 laps later and I spin off into the night, the bottle of red wine in my hand almost empty, now mixing with the fungus and guiding me onward with the inertia of a deep seeking. There is no room for intellectualization here. It's all experience. Soak up as much as you can and watch it bubble to the surface of your life over the next year. It's a week-long trance of metaprogramming, yourselves and each other. It's timeless proof that humans, given the ability, will play as hard as they can with every tool at their disposal just to turn each other on, just to grasp that reckless inertia of Creation and mould it into something new and cool for however brief a moment.

That crazy inertia spun me out across the playa under the eyes of the Mother and Child, so much Soul impossibly embodied in so much steel, massive flaming footsteps behind them both each glowing phosphorescent and slick; sent me to the Phoenix to watch it burn one last time, it's massive driftwood chest ablaze when only hours before it was covered with grooving human apes piled on it's breast among the steel feathers grasping at the sky like talons, alit with propane fires blazing and bursting; landed me in Thunderdome a couple of hours later battling my oldest friend's fourteen-year-old son who's already taller than me and wants to join Death Guild asap; then found me up on a platform swaying and gyrating with my wife among a few hundred late night ravers grooving to tribal progressive beats under the fires at Opulent Temple, before finally returning to our dusty playa bed once again in this eternal carnival of night and love and struggle and community across this ancient dead lake bed and beneath the spinal Milky Way carving through the black sky above, perhaps the home to other beings equally alive and aware and longing to spill their hearts and heads out onto the great canvas of Time.

If I returned last year somewhat calloused and underwhelmed, this year reset the balance and delivered an absolutely wonderful Burning Man. The art, the people, the friends, the parties, the communities and collaborations - everything was just about absolutely perfect. Like a dream it's come and gone in the blink of an eye. But in that moment it's eternal and realer than real and in some deep unnamable way, possibly far more important and vital and meaningful than the waking world.

Posted by LVX23 at September 8, 2005 06:39 PM