Home, Safe
We're home and safe, thank goodness.
Burning Man was an extremely trying experience for me and Leah. The good parts were amazing -- the art was indescribably incredible, I made wonderful new friendships with great people, and the sheer scale of the thing was amazing. Forty thousand people came this year! Words fail me to describe the scope and grandeur and beauty of the art, and words don't fail me very often. There were amazing workshops and events and so many people put effort into making it the biggest weirdest show on the planet.
Unfortunately the bad parts were quite upsetting, and cast a pall over the whole event for me, so that I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I should have.
I've told this story half a dozen times now at least and I need to stop telling it because it's upsetting me. I'm going to write it down and then just refer people to this.
We drove down with our friends Mark and Becky Friday and Saturday. We arrived Saturday night just before sunset and worked like crazy to get everything set up -- Mark's tent, Becky's tent and our tent went up under one of those 12 foot by 20 foot shade structures that you see at outdoor markets -- to keep the heat of the day off the tents and give us a place to keep our stuff. We got everything together just as the light was fading.
The ground surface is called "playa" and is an alkaline, sterile, cracked, dusty dry lake bed, and the winds can get up to 70 miles per hour, certainly strong enough to rip ordinary tent pegs out of the ground, so we staked everything down with half-inch diameter, three-foot long lengths of rebar bent into tent pegs and hammered in with sledgehammers. We collapsed, exhausted into the tents.
Unfortunately, some aggressive socially maladapted idiots over at Department of Public Works decided that if they couldn't sleep -- because they were working all night setting up the infrastructure of the city -- neither could anyone else, so they blasted music loud enough that I couldn't sleep even with earplug in, through most of the night.
We then spent all day Sunday getting our place in order and helping people put up the really large structures that we brought with us -- several 40x40 tents, a dance floor, couches, a 30 foot tall lighted beacon pole with a 3000 watt spotlight on top, it was a huge amount of work. The event actually begins on Monday but we were let in early because we had so much stuff to prepare. Then Monday rolled around and everyone else arrived so we spent that day helping other people set up their stuff.
All of this work was of course done in 100+ degree heat. You have to drink constantly, you have to pee constantly, the portapotties were two blocks away. It is a very physically taxing environment for labour.
Finally Monday night we stopped working and started to relax. Around sunset Leah went to do some swing dancing on the dance space we'd built and I went to have a little lie down in our tent for a few minutes. A wind came up -- not a severe wind by desert standards, maybe 20-25 knots. Next thing I knew, the two shade structures which had been put up that day next to ours but NEVER PROPERLY GUYED DOWN lifted up off the ground and came crashing down, completely destroying our brand new shade structure, completely destroying our brand new tent, and landing about eighteen inches from my head.
Thankfully no one was hurt at all in the accident. I started yelling that I was trapped inside but unhurt and about thirty people immediately rushed over and lifted the structures up enough that I could get out. Of course, this was at night, in the desert, in a wind and dust storm so we immediately set about finding work lights and moving cars and putting on dust goggles and disassembling all the destroyed equipment so that Mark and Becky could get to their tents, and throwing loose things into bins.
Leah, understandably, went to pieces, seeing me almost badly injured and all her hard work from the past two days destroyed. I was the only person who remembered enough about how everything had been put together to be able to take it apart again in the dark, so I had to wrangle all of these people to help out without going into shock myself.
Thank goodness we were camping with people with professional structural engineering experience, because they immediately started running around making sure that nothing else in the area had been insufficiently secured. Other people found us extra tents to stay in for the night, lots of people really pulled together, which was great and very much appreciated.
The next morning Leah and I went out for a long, long walk while our friends who had put up the structures without guying them down took care of getting out the spare structures and jury rigging us a tent and all of that stuff. They were incredibly embarrassed of course -- these were people with many years experience camping in this environment and they put their trust in one person to guy everything down safely, and he simply neglected to do so for no adequately explained reason, and no one was in charge of reviewing whether the work had been done or not.
So obviously I was alternating between incredible anger at the incompetence of my friends whom I assumed that I could count on totally to put safety first, and anxiety over coming so close to being badly injured. We went for a long walk, saw some incredible art, flew kites out on the open playa, and had a delightful lunch with good friends of ours who were camping with the volunteer firefighters. They deal with far more serious accidents every day. Jesse and Allegra were very supportive and helpful and totally knew what to do to calm someone down who had been through a bad experience like that.
Eventually I calmed down and got through it and so many people were supportive and helpful. But it totally cast a pall over the rest of the event for me. Leah and I had a storytelling project that we really didn't feel much like doing anymore, I didn't really feel like going to any scheduled events or taking any pictures of the art. I decided that my project for the rest of the week was going to be making for damn sure that the infrastructure of the camp was as solid as possible, so I spent a lot of time dealing with food and wastewater management and keeping the shower supplied with fresh water and all the other stuff that goes into keeping 70 people alive and happy in the desert for a week, and I felt pretty good about that. I spent a lot of time in camp just trying to relax and get to know some of the new people in the group better, and that was lovely. I made some deep and intimate friendships with some wonderful people in a short amount of time, and that will last far longer than the stress of one really bad day.
But it still was not a very relaxing vacation, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. It'll take some time to process it all and figure out how much of the stress I experienced was due to the accident (which was, after all, an accident, albeit an entirely stupid and preventable one) and how much was due to the nature of the hot, dry, dusty, noisy, crowded, constantly overstimulating environment.
We are definitely NOT going back next year. Leah and I would really like to get access to the cottage again next summer and take a good long vacation and hopefully bring some of our Seattle friends with us.
I'm glad I'm home. It's nice to have a quiet room, unlimited running water and a bed. These are things you take for granted until they're suddenly not there! We'll get back into the groove of things again soon and it'll all be good I'm sure. But right now I'm still a little short on sleep and messed up by the whole experience, so don't expect too much coherence for a couple of days if you see me!