Adventioneering

SATURDAY

So we end up pulling out from Kansas City around
2300 Friday. Stopping to eat at a Denny’s in Junction City, KS,
a place that seemed wrong when we parked and rapidly
got stranger and scarier. For starters
there was a rent-a-cop who happened to be there who had no
gun; but he was wearing a bulletproof vest. That had to be
nice.

Also there was this group behind Jason of, dare I say it,
African-American people and he overheard one woman give
another the advice “Damn girl that’s no way to treat your nigger,
you’ll get shot”.

We left as soon as we possibly could.

The drive across Kansas was predictably dark, boring, and miserable.
Thunderstorms were rolling through Kansas, and we drove towards
thousands and thousands of lightning hits; to say there was one
at least every few seconds is not an exaggeration.

Eventually we hit the storms and it was rain, rain, rain, as far
as the eye could see, which wasn’t far. Eventually around 2 or 3
I finally called it quits and we pulled into a rest stop, the rain
pouring down. I pulled my sleeping bag out of my duffel and headed
out into the little picnic area; the tables were under cover so I threw my bag
right on the top of the table. Jason soon followed, and we slept out
the storm. It was dawn when we finally woke up.

Refreshed, we easily made the drive to Denver, and we headed
up I-25 to Cheyenne, which is about as scary as Junction City. We spent
an hour there waiting for “Grease Monkeys” to change the oil in the Jeep.

On I-80 we start to point out cars with things strapped to roofs,
blue tarps, bikes, etc. We wonder if any of them are also going to
Burning Man. Jason makes up a sign – “Burning Man?”.

The first
car we show it to was a dead giveaway; it was loaded with crap,
and the icon of the man painted on the back window along with “BURNING MAN”.
That’s before you even get to the girl driving, with her crazy red hair
and multitude of facial piercings. Jason flashes the sign and we get
a thumbs up.

Later on at a rest stop on I-80, we are eyeing this woman’s car load of crap,
trying to decide if she’s going to the Burn when she catches site of our little
sign on the dashboard. “Burning Man!” she screams from across the
parking lot. She’s positively ecstatic to have run into another set of people who are going. Apparently earlier that day in a Wendy’s she had run into a guy with hippy necklaces, so she had sidled up to him and asked conspiratorially, “Burning Man?”. He thought about it and replied “No…”.

So we got to be the first. As we came to find out, ‘Mo is a veteran burner
from Denver, and runs Mo’s Cafe, which apparently serves one meal a day if you happen to be there at the right time (whenever she feels like it, from the sound of it). She hopes this year to camp around 5′oclock (in old burner parlance) as close to the esplanade as she can get.

After learning that we were Burning Man virgins, she tells the story that
she broke her leg on her first trip. She had been riding out on the open
Playa and her bike hit a piece of rebar that someone had left sticking
out of the ground. “I hadn’t realized it was broken”, she said, “until I left
the Playa which is another universe”. Once back in the real-world after
driving the two days back to Denver, the problem had made itself
known.

It certainly hadn’t done anything to damper her enthusiasm or her bike
riding, as her gnarly coaster was sitting happily on the back of her vehicle.

Eventually near Salt Lake City we end up stopping in this little nook of a town,
Echo. The gas station was closed up, but the sign said to go to the cafe; so we go over there, and here is this guy who is about a grillion years old. He rides his *bicycle*,
a crazy old coaster affair that it looks like he bought new, over to the gas
pumps to take the padlock off them. And what a bargain at $1.79 a gallon.

Later on we run into another truck that looks suspiciously laden with burner
gear. After a couple unsuccessful attempts to flash the sign, Jason in the passenger
seat finally gets the message across. All we got was a quizzical look as the driver
mouthed “Burning Man?”. Guess not.

We spend the night at a motel in SLC, and decide that we are going to skip the
entire California pretense and head directly for Burning Man. California you
can see any time, but the burn is fleeting. That is exists for so short
a period says something about it I think.

No one ever mentioned to me that it might be a good idea to write BURNING MAN
on the back of the car. I hadn’t even heard of anyone else doing it, although it
was something that seemed really obvious the moment we were on the road
wondering about all those people with stuff on their cars.

Why wait for Burning Man to connect and socialize
with people. After all, isn’t that the entire point to Burning Man, to present a culture
that people can deal in social commodities rather than material? Why does Burning Man
have to be limited to the Playa, or to certain events like the regional burns that happen
at certain times? Why is that culture that it presents so fleeting, since most people
who go claim it’s so desirable?

Welcoming you with open arms, Larry and Burning Man have a special promise; that for
one week in the desert they will show you an alternative economy, a gift
economy. Larry (the founder of the Burning Man event) like many people has realized
that capitalism and commercialization by it’s nature removes social interaction.
The act of commodifying things simplifies their transaction to be little more than
the act of purchasing from the source with the lowest price, consuming. When was
the last time you really said more than a few words to the person at QuickTrip?
And really, did you want to?

Technology furthers this even more by directly creating regionalization and
globalization that by it’s nature of providing fast, cheap transportation.
Globlization of course also removes social interaction from the act of purchasing
goods, such as how in just one example I’d rather order photography equipment
from some place in New York I’ve never seen via the Internet (which in itself doesn’t
even require talking to anyone), rather than use a local store which would at least
have some minimal form of interaction, all because I save a few dollars.

Burning Man tells us that the gift economy is a way around this problem of commodification
and the consumer lives we live isolating us; The sheer act of giving a gift without
expecting a return causes human interaction and forms a social bond, the simplest of Pavlovian learning.

What Burning Man forgets to tell us is that it doesn’t seem possible for it to
exist for more than a week at a time. To go to Burning Man, like most people, I will
have spent hundreds of dollars in admission, travel expenses, and food and supplies
to safely enjoy the event. That’s before I even attempt to contribute to the
event other than by supporting my camp in the most basic ways. It’s easy to see
how not a few people spend thousands to bring their art and other more practical
installations to Burning Man.

In it’s very nature, Burning Man is parasitical; it feeds off the larger succesful
capitalistic system in the way that all the people who go contribute resources
in order to attend and make the event a possibility. Another way to put it is that
Burning Man is not self-sustaining, it can not survive without a steady influx
of cash because it does not attempt present any solutions for basic community
supply and demand issues.

On it’s surface this seems to leave Burning Man as kind of a freak thing, a novelty
that has tertiary benefit but doesn’t really aim to actually solve any social problems
or truly provide a new viable example for the way that communities should form, in
contrast to say Soleri’s work with Arcosanti.

Does this leave Burning Man as really what they claim to be, a social archetype for a possible
future, or is it just a fancy way to meet new friends?

SUNDAY

We woke up late, around 10am, having gotten nearly 11-12 hours of sleep. And then it
was I-80, for a really long way. It was on I-80 that we started to run into a lot of
BM people, lots of cars. Our little sign was getting a lot of hits, some more obvious
than others; the minivan that was covered in a thick artifical grass managed to stick
out, as did the people pulling bikes and huge tanks of water.

Out of Salt Lake we stopped at the great Salt Flats, which is pretty much a must. It’s
hard not to be impressed with that much of anything you pay for laying free for
the taking on the ground.

Jason gets the credit for driving more than 400 miles through Utah and Nevada,
a job that I wasn’t really enthusiastic about myself. I picked it out of Reno
and drove us in.

We needed some little things; like, say, water for nine days, and food for me.
Not to mention other things like extinguishers, because the Burning Sky people
like to, well, burn things, and that’s before we even talk about the
bicycles. So we head of course for a WalMart.

My God. I can’t even express to you how strange that was. There was no
one in the store that wasn’t from Burning Man; we were everywhere, buying
doritos, gas cans, and bikes. The WalMart people had no clue and were just standing
around wondering what all the hell these dirty hippies were doing in their store.

We finally aquired everything and loaded it all into the Jeep. The loading process
was intense and caused much fear. If it has a cargo capacity, we exceeded it.
In order to make room in truck for all the stuff, I had to lash my two larges
bags to the roof; along with the conduit dome, and the bikes, and their front tires…

Needless to say I took it slowly as we drove up the quiet highway to the event
itself. The road was empty except for the odd vehicle that was clearly also
rapidly enroute to the event. Eventually we got within about 10 miles and saw
the lights of two towns; Empire and Gerlach. Driving through gerlach showed it
infested with Burner’s standing around their vehicles.

Driving in we had noticed an odd bright light off in the distance, and had wondered
if that was the man. As we drove from Gerlach and saw that it was, the excitment
was hard to contain. Finally over that last hill, we could see the man, and all
of the event was laid out. It’s huge!

Arriving at the entrance, we were quickly relieved of our tickets and drove up to the greeters.
All was going well with our gayful greeter when he realized that we were virgins. Out
of the car, he screamed! Get out of the car. We knew we were in for some trouble now.

I was lead up to a chair underneath a bell, and commanded to scream out as loud
as I could; “My name is Alex and welcome me to black rock city!”. Everyone nearby
shouted out a greeting. Right after that, two girls simultaniously administered the spanking.

We’re going to leave the dome construction for the morning, so we’ve pitched my two
tents, and I obviously managed to get Internet access, which required getting a remote 802.11
antenna up high. Props to those Tachyon boys for making this work.

After getting a camp setup, we road out to the man, and then to the masoleum
where we split up. I road around 250 or so and then cut across the circle,
a trip I can make in about 10 minutes with the aid of a GPS to navigate over
the open playa with.

No words can describe this place, though, and my pictures won’t do the job. You have
to come here.

Everyone has to come here.