'Bred Crumbs
08.31.04
No Sleep Till Gerlach
06:59 PMIt's starting to hit me: in five hours or so, I'm joining a not-so-mighty convoy truckin' through the night, under a 95%-full moon, into the Nevada desert, to mingle for days with 30,000 people in varying degrees of nudity, substance-use, and granolatude.
Burning Man. Newbie.
Up to this weekend, my mind, negative creature that it is, has fixated on the ordeal of preparation. But that's nearly done. The only unsettling moments today were brief flashes of sticker shock as I acquired the last few necessities (foot lotion, glow sticks). But I remind myself: for five days, I will be eating and drinking like a fish (if a fish frequently drank alcohol along with its constant, vital supply of water), and I will be spending no money whatsoever to do so. Not even if mobile spaghetti dinners or popcorn should happen to come to my tent door.
One pleasure of preparation has been deciding which clothes I will sacrifice to the playa (in addition to the cheapies I bought just for the trip), because everyone says the dust never really comes out. Selecting the discards provides a nice Clean Sweepy kind of feeling.
I'm hoping the weather at Black Rock City will hold out the way it has the past couple of days there, avoiding the fabled extremities of heat, cold, wind, and rain. But I'm not counting on it, and I'm prepared for it.
This adventure will bring me a lot of firsts, as any adventure should. They began two weeks ago, when we did a test run of our camp setup. I think it was the first time I've ever been camping. But the conditions were hardly those of "real" camping, and nothing remotely like Burning Man. We camped on a friend's ranch, in the well-manicured yard of an empty house, whose gingham pink bathroom was at our disposable. Godawful ugly, but hey, plumbing.
But we did meals the way we will at BM, complete with ramen for breakfast. Another odd personal first: ramen. Never had it in college; didn't even know it existed. I guess Murray State just wasn't a ramen kind of place.
Comfort and noodles aside, the test was still valuable. We all learned how to set up our camp's 10-foot geodesic dome, a structure of low-tech genius – 25 PVC pipes joined together by rope threaded through holes at the ends of the pipes, all covered with a parachute. And we've got a cool scheme for parking our tents around the dome, emptying into it, making it a grand foyer for our humble five-person contingent.
Now we just have to repeat the feat of setting it all up – tomorrow at dawn, after an all-night drive, in the desert, at a much less leisurely pace, before the temperature goes from its comfortable or nippy 6 a.m. low back up to frysville.
When that's done we'll have our address (near the intersection of some time and some planet) in a city that didn't exist three weeks ago, and won't exist three weeks from now. It just appears every so often, like Brigadoon. On Ecstasy.
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