I'm going to try to describe Burning Man, which is going to be impossible. The best I can do is give a good approximation of my experience and I know when I get done writing it there will be a lot of important things I left out or was unable to fully describe. You've probably heard something sometime about Burning Man either from people who have been or think it's a worthwhile thing or from people who don't try to understand it and want it to disappear, or from the news which tends to generally distort most things to be sensational anyway.
Burning Man is essentially about two things. First, it's a social experiment of a community where commerce does not exist, where you try to give unconditional love to strangers; kind of a big commune where everyone looks out for each other. Second, it's a blank canvas for artists and everyone else to basically try whatever they want. People seem to drop the roles they've acquired in "normal life" and take on whatever seems to fit them at the moment. People generally accept you at face value with an open mind, and you are absolutely guaranteed not to be the weirdest kid on the block. It took me a few days to get used to it all. Burning Man has a reputation for drug use but really it's weird enough on its own, no chemical supplements necessary. There's also this omnipresent quasi-dark sense of humor underneath everything; deep down, everything is all an elaborate joke. And there's 50,000+ people there, so almost everything that could be happening is happening somewhere.
There was a giant Mad Max style Thunderdome the audience could climb on top of and watch participants strapped to bungee cords beat on each other with giant foam sticks. There was a giant grilled cheese diner that moved to a new location every night so it was always a surprise. There was a camp that would outfit you with any costume you wanted as long as you walked down the runway and they insulted you after you put it on. There was a phone booth where you could talk to God (he's a lot more reasonable than you'd expect). There was a sarcastic fortune teller in a box who moved around the playa. There was a roller derby on the playa. There were "art cars" driving around the playa at night; everything from flying carpets to flame-throwing pirate ships that you could just hop on and join the moving party (most had a bar, though you had to bring your own cup). There were talks and classes going on and people handing you sake and bacon as you biked down the street. I did a barrel roll in an airplane at 11,000ft. I took a "shower" by running behind a water-spraying truck. I lost my bike one day and following the advice of the advice booth man sitting in the middle of the desert, I wrote "I need a bike, I lost mine" on my chest and had a new one withing a few hours. People are just waiting to bend over backwards for strangers in an environment where it's allowed and encouraged (it also helps that the festival lasts only a week...). You may have seen the van's new paint job. It came from people walking down the street in Black Rock City, I brought paint and told them to paint whatever they wanted, meanwhile serving margaritas out of my solar-powered blender. The last few days there were dust storms so bad you couldn't see 3 feet in front of you and needed a mask and goggles to get around. Your hair turned into a big grey dusty mass. There's still plenty of playa dust in just about everything I own.
So that's what the attitude of the place is like (really that's only a very very small cross-section). I met some amazing people there (one in particular) who I know I'll keep in touch with. It was nice to have friends especially after 4 months of travelling basically alone except for Robert. You make friends fast on the playa and everyone wants to go try everything and just generally hang out and get to know each other. My camp was called Wanderlust, a group of couchsurfers and travelers from everywhere: Wisconsin, Laguna Beach, Nevada, Canada, Germany... Before I went to Burning Man I was losing my wanderlust in favor of a more socially acceptable (but less personally acceptable) and safer stationary and career-oriented life. Long story short, I was re-inspired to do what I want, not what everyone else wants. I saw people there who were just genuinely happy living how they wanted to free of the normal artificial constraints people let others impose on them. Accepting that uncertainty about the future and really opening your mind to enjoy the infinite possibilities available, taking each day as a new exciting adventure, not rushing along hurriedly towards the end, but really enjoying the ride and every step of it for how much more exciting and unexpected it is. It's much more fun that way.
The main event is the burning of the Man. On Saturday night, the 200ft tall wooden Man is packed with explosives and fireworks and is lit on fire. It's the biggest bonfire I've ever seen. I dance around it with Shar after the Man falls down into a large pile and the crowd pushes me towards the fire. In a week, I've experienced a lot and in the end it's all burnt to the ground. Gone. The city starts to disintegrate and people head back towards the "default world". Sunday night the Temple burns. The Temple this year is a collection of wooden "dunes" and people come to write messages and names of those they've lost, of things they've lost, or of things they want to let go of. Then the Temple burns. It's not a party like the burning of the Man. People are quiet, watching the embers fly up into the air, each one an intensely emotionally charged piece of someone being released. I wrote in the Temple. It worked, I let go of the past, I opened myself up to the future. The sense of humor is much darker now when you realize the whole festival is about the temporary nature of everything. It all burns. You leave no trace. I'll be back to Burning Man, I know that.
We took some hitchhiking Canadian girls to San Francisco directly after the Temple burned. I drove all night and ended up on a run with Caitlin. It was weird adjusting so fast to the "real world" (even San Francisco!). We had a nice day in unusually good weather in a park in the city. I slept well that night. After catching up with Peter Felton from High School in Santa Clara and having some good home-cooked meals his mom served us, we headed back East, for the last time this year. We spent a day in Fallon, NV with Shar from our Burning Man camp. Feeding some cows, driving an ATV, exploring a cornfield, and saying goodbye as she headed to Australia and we headed to Montana. After an uneventful stop in Boise, we made it to Missoula, MT where we couchsurfed with Lauren who, it turns out, went to UD and knew some of my friends there. She was a lot of fun and since we happened to be visiting on a weekend full of festivals in Missoula we hit them all. Missoula is like a little hippie town centered around the University there, really fun and unexpected from Montana. You can check out my pictures from Glacier NP on Facebook, I'll put them up soon. But we spent 2 days there and then planned to head to the Canadian side to see Waterton, Banff, and another Burning Man friend from our camp who lives in Edmonton.
We arrived cheerfully at the border crossing at about 10:30AM, knowing that our psychedelic magical mystery van might make us the target of some extra searching or questioning or whatever, but we were not prepared for this. We were told to pull aside, then step out of the vehicle so it could be searched. It was not only searched, everything that could be removed from the van was X-rayed, swabbed, inspected. It was torn apart.
For 2 hours we had at least 4 customs agents dealing only with us. While the van was searched, I was separated from Robert and questioned, starting with the usual: where were you born? what are you going to Canada for? have you ever been arrested? Then getting more obscure and accusatory: have you ever used recreational drugs? who is this friend in Canada and how did you meet him? how long have you owned this vehicle? has anyone in your family ever been involved in a secret government organization? where were your parents born? what is that scary looking piece of electronic equipment in your van? are you SURE you don't have any drugs on you? really? even in THAT van? After assuring the customs agent I was not a drug trafficker, I was just weird, he passed us on to his supervisors. In the end, after collecting information on our previous employment history, verifying the balances on our bank accounts, taking our social security numbers, and just about everything else we could give them, they decided not to let us in because we did not have "enough ties to the US" Ties are defined by the Canadians as A) a wife in the US B) a job in the US or C) a mortgage or rent payment in the US. "But that's the WHOLE POINT! me not having ties..." He advised us to get married, find a job, or buy a house if we ever wanted to return to Canada. We were denied entry to Canada. Seriously. Really, Canada? "Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park" my ass.
After reassembling our van and what was left of our dignity, we headed back to Montana. The real reason we weren't let in was because of the van and the way we travel. We don't fit the mold of normal tourists. We're not going to spend money on lodges and restaurants, we confused them by not having jobs or W2 forms, we intimidated them because they couldn't categorize us into a safe, border-crossing acceptable category like all the older couples driving right thru the gate (equally unattached to the US I'd argue, retired with no job, taking thair wives with them, and having no fixed address aside from the monster fifth-wheel trailer towed behind them). It left me feeling terrible, somewhere between being raped and arrested. But at least those noble customs agents were able to prevent the peace love and happiness bus from threatening the national security of Canada. In contrast with Burning Man, I had the cynical feeling that strangers are suspicious and afraid of you and even hostile to you until you start paying them for something, at which point they become wonderful, loving, caring people, willing to help however they can. I hope I don't actually think of the world like that, but sometimes it seems a close approximation. Those are the situations I need to get out of. Then last night, sleeping in the van, some drunk idiot fiddled with our bikes trying to unlock them from the rack to steal them. I watched him thru the window for a few minutes, contemplating grabbing my 5-iron and jumping outside (I knew there was a reason I brought that) but in the end just looked at him and said "what's up?" "What's up?" he said, then "shit, peace..." and jogged away. People can be real assholes sometimes too. I'm trying not to focus on that though... For the most part everyone loves the new van paint. We get people asking to take pictures, asking questions, waving, and telling us the van just makes them smile. It's difficult to stay disenfranchised with humanity for long when everyone is smiling and waving excited peace signs at you when you drive by... On to Yellowstone, Denver, and Texas!
20,094mi
132 days
18 states
$5000 spent on gas... ugh
No comments:
Post a Comment