The dust settles
9 September 09
I arrived back home last Monday night, after a week on the playa at the temporary city of Black Rock, Nevada. The playa is a great white expanse of emptiness, miles and miles of ancient lake-bed, long since evaporated to dust and ringed by stepped ranges of rugged hills that change colour during the course of the day. During the first hours of the dawn the world glows golden, but greens and purples creep in as the sun climbs. The light reflected off the baked earth of the playa is blinding by midmorning but by then the city is moving again and there are other things to see.
The centrals tenets of the community of burning man are self-expression, self-sufficiency in the environment, and leaving no trace. This translates as the creation and often burning of art on an unimaginable scale, the donning of strange and unusual costume or the lack of same, the building of bowers and nests and shelters of every conceivable description and equipping them to feed, hydrate and accommodate a city of 40,000 people in the harshest of conditions. The days are very hot, the nights can be cold. When the winds whip up the dust visibility is reduced to a few meters. And at the end, everything has to come out again.
Our tiny camp brought tents, my two friends and I. Pretty minimal as far as shelter goes. Lacking engineers this year, we brought shade sails but nothing to attach them to. We were lucky though, as the street where we located our camp on arrival late Monday night turned out to be home to some wonderful people whose shade we borrowed on occasion, in addition to the pleasure of their company. We bought blankets with sleeves in San Francisco on our way there, and christened our camp Blanket Statement as we put it together.
The week went by. We danced during the nights and sweated during the days. We ate canned oysters and dried apricots when left to our own devices, and ate delicious meals when the neighbours invited us over. We wandered through the playa on bikes or on foot, seeing beautiful things by day and by night. We visited clever and funny camps and invited everyone we met to our own little event towards the end of the week, a (Shit) Wine Tasting for which we handed out invitations. It was fun to see people we met during the week show up again on Friday evening to our soiree (located on our chair-limited, pegged-down tarp). A success.
We watched the Man burn on Saturday night and packed up and left Sunday morning. I’ve washed the playa dust out of my hair by now but that Yeats poem I posted earlier is still echoing around my head. I begin to understand why prophets and madmen go to the desert to get closer to their gods. Things are stripped down there, living closer to the edge opens eyes and ears and pores. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone there nor the first time I tried to take lessons away. I still wonder how to maintain those attitudes while I inadvertently close down, as people become strangers and eye contact is avoided rather than openly sought out with smiles.
I write this. I felt it. I was there.
