The Gate Road Pregame
I open my
eyes. The light is the pale blue of the early morning, before the sun has begun
its ascent. No, bluer than that, as blue as it can only be when it’s raining. I
hear drips dropping onto the windshield of our car. I look around me and see we
haven’t moved an inch since the last few times I woke up. We’re surrounded by
other sleeping cars. We’re in a 14 lane wide traffic jam. I remember the number
from last night, carefully winding off a mental thread to find my way back from
a pee excursion. We are stranded with tens of thousands of cars in the middle
of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, because of rain. But I’m still too tired to
contemplate the bizarreness of the situation. I close my eyes again.
The next
time I wake up, life is stirring. People are clomping around on the desert
floor, which has turned into a colossal mud flat overnight. The very alkaline Black
Rock Desert was once the floor of a Pleistocene lake. Wet, it remembers its
ancient past and gets nostalgic and clingy, caking onto your shoes till the
sheer weight pulls them clean off your feet. The gate to Black Rock City was
closed at 6AM, to protect the wet desert surface from getting ripped apart
under the weight of moving cars. By this time, we’d been inching through the
desert night for five straight hours. This year’s theme is Caravansary. How
fitting. In the morning people are grumpy, exhausted and bummed about being
caught just outside the gate to Burning Man. But as the day wears on, people
resign to their fate and switch over to what humans are so good at: adapting.
They bust out kites and bikes and camping chairs. They introduce themselves to
their neighbors, go for walks along the car caravan which stretches from one
end of the horizon to the other, and climb on top of their vehicles to bask in
the sun. One RV nearby hoist their stereo installation onto the roof and start
up a full blown dance party. People swarm in from all directions. Burning Man
has already started. The Gate Road Pregame.
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At the end
of that day, a good 24 hours after we started our journey, we pass by the
Greeters, and find our camp in the dark. Miles was in a different car, so
waiting for him, Gabe and I go exploring. We climb onto a giant carrot top
shaped dome, and a wild scene unfolds itself below us: utter darkness, were it
not for the vast sea of bright flickering neon lights, a total traffic anarchy
of people and bikes going crisscross in all directions, interspersed with giant
Dragon art cars, pirate ships on wheels and poof ball golf carts. Loud beats
and noises blending into one big cacophony. Utter kaleidoscopic chaos, a
fluorescent apocalyptic dreamscape. Where are
we…
Dual experience
We’re camped
on the outermost street of the circular Black Rock City, in the walk-in
camping. Perfect spot. It emphasizes the duality of the Burning Man experience.
On our left, there’s the sickest multiplicity of parties of our lives, the
crazy social experiment of the Black Rock City, a temporary society made up of
70,000 eccentrics that unleash their wildest fantasy and imagination onto the
bare desert floor. The Black Rock City never sleeps, never takes a breather, it
pumps and fumes and raves all day and all night long. On our right hand side,
there’s nothing. Desert. Distant mountains and blazing sunsets and porta
potties a quarter mile away (so we share a pee bucket right outside our tent).
The Festival of Festivals though it may be, Burning Man is also the largest
Leave No Trace event in the world, founded on respect for the desert’s
ecosystem, and based on principles of complete self-reliance. All three of us
are ‘virgin Burners’, but I’m camping with two seasoned outdoor adventurers,
and we’re crushing it, out there in
walk-in, figuring everything out all by ourselves. We got plenty water, amazing
backcountry meals, two of each of the backpacking necessities: camping stoves,
first aid kits, pocket knives…
While
roaming the streets and plains of the festival, your primary needs are
constantly on the back or forefront of your mind. You can’t carry enough water
not to feel perpetually dehydrated. And then there’s the glaring sun,
compelling you to always be on the lookout for shade shelter and nap spots. Life
is water, food, shelter, dancing your brains out, rest, repeat. And then the
Playa dust, which gets into everything. Since we set up our geodesic dome on
the very outskirts of the city, with not enough fabric to cover the whole
structure, we are one with the dust. It cracks your feet and lips and gives you
a clogged and bloody nose for the entire duration of the event. Try combining
partying like you’ve never partied with confronting your own immediate
survival. Quite the experience. It pulled me right into the moment and didn’t
let me go until I was well a ways away from the sweltering swirling desert
flats.
Unlocking the Playa
But despite
the acuteness of the moment, it took me some time to tune in to this gigantic
magical madhouse, find the mental portal that would lead me in. As a newcomer, you
look around at this swirling insane merry-go-round and wonder, ‘What do you
want from me?’ The thing to realize is that the people themselves make the festival. There are no main
stages, no line up, no central programming of any kind. All it is are camps of
participants that organize their own fun, and invite everyone. And there are
many, many camps. The potential for adventures is infinite, and the course of
your wanderings is as erratic as a hoverfly on acid. You have to resign to the
fact that you will never come close to getting a fraction of it all in. That’s
one of the main reasons I think why people keep coming back. I felt it: ‘I
missed the Great Butterfly Migration and the cross-Playa Unicorn Stampede!’, or
‘I didn’t have a tutu for TuTuTuesday!’, and ‘They had a ballpit? I’ve been missing those in my life ever since they kicked
me out of the one in IKEA because I was ‘too big’!’ But that’s its nature: there’s
enough crazy shit going on to provide 70,000
people with a unique experience, a unique trail of zany sights and play
sessions. I myself, a little bug in this whirling anthill, had such a great
time with my collection of moments. Gradually, with the help of a little
medication, the Playa unlocked itself to me and I sank right in. My favorite
place was Deep Playa. It was the vast dusty expanse behind the Man where the
line between reality and the dream world, as well as the horizon, blurs. It’s
the place where by day I choked in dusty white outs, found free ice cream
stands in the depths of my overheating, stumbled upon giant hammocks, mutant bikes
materializing from the dust, and stray hair dryer chairs. It’s the place where at
night I swerved from thumping dance parties on towering pirate ships suddenly
looming overhead, to a ‘Hug Deli’ in the middle of nowhere, to an amazing live
funk show on a portable porch far out in the dark nothingness that every last
person in the audience had just happened upon in their wanderings, to a revolving,
human powered steel globe that evoked the ecstatically wide-eyed, agile,
tireless monkey in me, one of my very favorite alter egos. That’s one deep
piece of my heart that the Playa gave back to me, and Gabe saw it: “You are a
climber at heart.” That would make my family proud!
Burning Man
is a larger than life tribute to and product of human imagination and creativity
in its wildest freest form. People get to do something they’ve been missing
most in their lives since society told them they were too old for it: pure
unbridled PLAY! It was evident to me that if Burning Man was about anything at
all, it would be that. People danced and frolicked and adventured and climbed
in every little thing. There was a strong emphasis on lust and sexuality, but
all so silly and innocently. From free spanking booths to workshops in arguing
naked to genital puppetry camps. Haha! A giant summer camp for wayward
children. In that respect, certainly, a dry and dusty paradise! The little
moments did it for me: chasing MOOP (matter out of place) down across the
expanse, howling at the sunset in a scattered choir of a dozen invisible voices
every evening, me and Gabe pretend-tripping on our trike over an imaginary
tripwire that two people on either side of the street were pulling taught.
Our crew
Gabe the
risk-averse camp instructor, the well-spoken orator, the brilliant musician and
bestest dance buddy. And Miles ‘get-your-shit-together’ Ryan, the dogged
einzelgänger, the rugged mountain man. And me, Playa-named Sunset Moment, the
excited monkey and ranting philosopher.
For an
unexperienced trio that faced a number of obstacles to get here (finding our
tickets 4 to 5 days before the start of Burning Man, car issues and a 24 hour
long drive), camping together in a small geodome in the desert, we were an
amazingly functional team. I loved waking up in between my boys, covered in
white dust and the sunrise in my eyes, fixing up great breakfasts and dinners
together, unplanned afternoon pit stops in the dome, our occasional little
house meetings where we talked about feelings and adventure plans and where to
store the car key. We struck a pretty ideal balance between letting each other
free in doing our own thing and bonding over joint adventures. There were
enough times spent roaming the vast city alone, with weird scenes left and
right that popped your eyes and blew your mind every 10 feet. And enough time
spent together in pairs, exploring the Playa or visiting jam sessions or
parties or workshops on our blue two-person trike. And there were a few
precious, colorful, crazy nights where the three of us stuck together and
pedaled up and down the Playa from art car to art installation to dance party
or Jazz café on both our trikes, circling round each other and freestyling and
shouting and romping around, high as kites.
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The Eternal Return
I owe that
last title to Burn night. It was after the Man burned, and the enormous crowd
had started dispersing across the hundreds of nightly raves and adventures. We
had lost Miles, but our friend Dom, Gabe and I had wandered to where all the
art cars blasting their music were lined up for the occasion in a large circle,
enclosing the perimeter of the Man. Our dances became wilder and zanier as we
hitched a ride down a freeway into the Playa state of mind, until the world was
whizzing so fast we broke loose and skittered off into the dark of Deep Playa. We
stumbled upon the large spinning globe again. Clambering in that thing swung
outwards by the centrifugal force felt like thermal currents lifting you up by
the wings. We scrambled off into the dark again, until Gabe called out, “The
garden of galaxies!” I looked up, and sure enough, on large poles perched in
the night sky, a dozen twinkling miniature galaxies, buoyant over our heads. We
came upon a giant Lite-Brite, swirling star storm projections on the sand, and
our own shrinking and stretching grinning shadows. But OH! adventure kept
calling us on. “Onwards!” We moved along, but this time, looming at the horizon
straight ahead, something caught my eye and mind that wouldn’t let go. As we
approached the metamorphous lights, I saw spirals morph into parrots that
morphed into monkeys and into cranes and into human shapes in such mesmerizing graceful
fluid motions. What mid Playa mystery was this?
By the time we got close enough, the lights had been quenched and the
movement had stopped. We saw people grouped around what looked like a large
whirligig. It was a giant, 3D zoetrope of an acrobat swinging around a
gymnastics bar. Circled underneath it were a number of old-looking dust-caked
rowing machines. What were we supposed to do? “You have to row, that’ll turn it
on!” someone in the crowd said. Some of us took place on the seats, while
others stayed and watched from the sidelines. We rowed and rowed, but nothing
happened. “You have to synchronize your movements! I’ve seen it work!” someone
from amongst the spectators shouted. We tried syncing our movements, still
nothing. Then all of a sudden, at a seemingly random moment, the strobe lights
zapped on again, and the giant zoetrope geared into motion. We looked up. It
looked absolutely magnificent from down below. “See! You did it!” Who said
that? Why were they so sure? I felt wary. Something was off. It didn’t seem
like we were making anything happen. Those handlebars weren’t attached to
anything… I didn’t feel any resistance in my rowing seat. It was dark, and I
couldn’t see it properly, but my suspicion grew steadily. I leaned over to
Gabe. “Gabe! Someone’s messing with us! This doesn’t do anything, we’re just
making a fool out of ourselves and the whole audience is in on it!” “No no!
This works,” people kept assuring me. But my suspicion was headstrong, and I
wouldn’t buy it. Some of us got up from our seats to inspect the axel. Sure
enough, the cords coming from our rowing seats weren’t attached to anything. In
some seats they were missing altogether, while in others, they were cut off halfway into the engine. “See! See!” I shouted. What
kind of joke was this? I peered at the spectators. My suspicion was reaching
fundamentalist proportions. Someone, perhaps all of them, were in on some
conspiracy. I bolted towards them, shouting I wasn’t buying it. But every
person I approached assured me they didn’t know how that thing worked, and that
they thought we, the rowers, did. Two spectators came with me to inspect the
engine again, in disbelief of my reports. The girl was just as puzzled as I
was, and walked up and down with me, trying to figure out the mechanics. “See!
There is someone in the audience with a remote control! Someone’s just pushing
a button and sniggering at our plodding!” But none would come forward, and
every person around me really looked as puzzled as me. The zoetrope behind us turned
off again. Suddenly, it struck me, like lightning. I gasped. Wide-eyed, I
gathered Dom, Gabe and the two spectators around. “I figured it out!!” I hissed. “There’s no-one with a remote
control! No-one pushing a button! And we’re not doing anything either! It’s on a TIMER!!!” The realization sank
into me with a loud clunk! and the
momentousness and conviction of a revelation.
“But if it’s on a timer and the people aren’t the ones that power it, I
would notice that if I stood here all day,” the spectator girl countered.
“Aaah! BUT, have you been here all
day? Noooo! See, no-one stays here all day. Once they’ve figured it out, people
grow distracted and take off into the desert again!” And there, looming at the
horizon of my consciousness and rushing towards me, was another revelation.
Waves of understanding kept washing over me as I ranted on at my little
audience of four. “It’s not about the art at all! It’s one big social
experiment! It shows what happens when a group of people splits itself in two,
the rowers and the spectators, and one half takes agency while the other half
watches, and both halves think of the other that they know what they’re doing.
The spectators are shouting instructions and encouragements from the sidelines,
while the rowers have to believe that
they’re making something happen, or else they’d just be making a fool of
themselves! And as both sides convince themselves the others know what’s up,
the aggregate of the whole group believe they’re in control. But then one
person becomes suspicious, starts questioning their perceived control, and
starts investigating, trying to figure out how this thing really works. Others
join them, and the group slips into a new stage, the stage of critical thinking
and asking questions. Then they discover they’re not in control at all! Their
ropes aren’t attached to anything! In fact, they are severed at different levels, some early on, some deeper into the
core of the machine, but all of them have been cut. That was the plan all
along, all done to give us that illusion of control. It’s all a big joke! So
the people become upset. Who’s fooling them?! Where’s the trickster?! Is it
someone among them? Is it someone outside of them, who’s not immediately
present? But no-one seems to know what’s going on, and they can’t find a
culprit. By now, the two halves of the group are reunited once more in their
collective search for answers. Then, all of a sudden, it hits one of them… No-one is in control. None of them, no
third party amongst them, not even anyone outside of them. No-one. It just
happens… with time… And as the group reaches this final revelation, this
collective enlightenment, they rest their case and scatter off again into the
dark night. And then a new group
arrives, oblivious to the process of the previous group, and the whole process
repeats itself!” “And get this,” Gabe interjects, “This art piece is called
‘The Eternal Return’, which is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that
everything in history repeats itself into infinity…” “YES! Exactly! This is
about existence itself! One after
another, clouds of consciousness, entire universes, enter into the space-time
dimension as the TIMER (get it?!) turns on, and go through the whole process of drawing up boundaries,
naming, splitting apart into dualities, rowers/spectators, male/female, day/night,
life/death, and so on. Then they fall under the illusion of control, but being
the unruly rebels that humans are, they start questioning ‘Who’s got the remote
control? Someone amongst us, someone outside of us? Is there a Jesus? Is there a God?!’ And they discover there’s no-one,
life simply happens, and the
trickster, that third party with the remote control, is as much of a fool as
all of us, for as we thought Him up, He Himself started thinking He existed! He
was tricked into existence!” That,
right there, is the story of Samael, the blind god, who made the mistake of
forgetting that He was a metaphor for the Unknowable, the Unnamable. And as He
pronounced, “I am God”, by naming Himself, *poof* he negated Himself, and God
was no more (thank you Joseph Campbell). “And with this final answer, they
dissolve into the Original Unity again, fana, enlightenment, liberation from
samsara, and float off into the dark void… And
there comes another wave, and IN washes an entire new universe, oblivious
to all the understanding, or even existence, of all its predecessors and
successors, with no-one left to recount the infinite repetition of insights and
revelations, and we’re back at the start!” This, my friends, is nothing less
than what Joseph Campbell calls the Foundational Myth, the story of existence. I figured it out. I couldn’t believe it.
I f*cking figured it out! And all this washed over me, wave after wave of next
level understanding, after I’d lived
through it bit by painful suspicious bit, as a single partaking unit of consciousness
underneath the machine of life. I was the rower with the nagging scepsis. I
taper down, and the three of us walk away into the night again. I’m dazed. My
thoughts keep going back to that episode of just now. I turn to Dom and Gabe
again, “Guys, five words, Isaac Asimov’s
The Last Question” WOW! My head
is still whizzing, Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts seem to be smiling down upon
me. I could keep thinking about all this stuff forever! Humanity has been thinking about this stuff
forever. “You should rewrite the Bible,” Dom comments. “I know!” And then I
hear myself. The term ‘Jesus complex’ flashes through my mind. Oei, that’s
enough. Bad things happen to people with that.
But Man, that was powerful.
The human mind is a vast and wild, wild place. And all that triggered by a
piece of art. I am astounded. What I find there, that night in Deep Playa, is a
profound new appreciation of art. And a new understanding of what kind of art I
love: the kind that invites engagement, interaction, play. Like all the art on the Playa. This, I
realize, is how I think they meant for Burning Man to be experienced. This is
where you go when you ‘go Deep Playa’. I’m there right now, this is the Playa
state of mind, this is the flow.
The John Muir Trail
With all
those magical moments and crazy sights in my pocket, far too many to document
up against, and the night of the Eternal Return as the icing on the cake, my
first Burning Man was a solid gold one. I’ll be chewing on all the impressions
for a while to come. But it didn’t stop
there. We left right after the Temple Burn, driving through the night once
again, with a pit stop at 8AM at Mono Lake, an ancient alkaline lake just like
what the Black Rock Desert must once have looked like. (“Where are the neon
lights? Oh I miss it already, I miss our dome,” goes Gabe.) We meet up with
Gabe’s friend Naomi in Mammoth and spend the next week preparing for and
backpacking the first section of the 200 mile long John Muir Trail. Miles is
bagging the whole thing in three weeks’ time, from Yosemite Valley down to
Mount Whitney. We’re here to send him off in style, hiking with him the first
four days, from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows. What a beautiful,
beautiful place. The sweet smell of the pine forests, the bear cans and our
excellent backcountry meals, identifying Ponderosa and Lodge pole pines,
Mountain Hemlock firs and Incense cedars, spotting deer and coyotes and sage
grouse and a wide variety of chipmunks and squirrels. Reading the map, telling
stories, reminiscing our Burning Man days, campfires, and swimming almost every
day, in hot springs, lakes and rivers. This is the life.
We even
climbed Half Dome, I, because I hadn’t thought to bring the right shoes, barefoot. Excellent decision. I had
great grip on the almost vertical granite wall and it brought out that nimble little
monkey in me which made it all so much less scary and so much more fun. And I received
about 30 comments on the way up and back down again about my bare feet, and how
bad-ass it was. I feel so grateful for my young fit body, and that the two of
us together can feel so alive! Oh,
what luck, to be able to put my newfound identity to practice so soon! I am a climber, I’ve been one all along. I
just needed the environment and the people to bring it out again!
Find your tribe
Speaking of
which… this still is one of the things I value most about my time here in
California. I love backpacking. In fact I think it’s one of the things I love
doing most. The stunning wild scenery, the feelings of adventure,
accomplishment, attunement, calm… It is and always has been such a big part of
who I am. But for many years now, with the lack of a tribe of like-minded
people in this respect, it’s been pushed to the back burner. One thing I love
about the Californians I know is their intimate connection with their outdoors.
I’ve never been surrounded by people my own age who understood so well just how
important nature is to me, and even know it better than I do. Many of my
friends are ecology or plant science majors, knows lots of plant names, have
their Wilderness First Responder certification, have instructed at summer
camps, work at Outdoor Adventures on campus, have gone to tracking schools and
wilderness survival programs and so forth. It’s so inspiring to me, and an old part of me is lit back up again. And the
great thing is that it is transferrable. I can take this fire and experience
and skills back home, and with my altered perception of distance and soon with
my Californian driver license in my pocket, I can’t wait to explore more of
Europe. It’s been such, such a good
decision to stay longer. Last time I had only three months left, I would be
overcome by feelings of claustrophobia and time pressure when I heard a plane
passing over or counted my days. Now, I have actually started looking forward
to all the great things I can do back in the Netherlands, all that’s waiting
for me there if I take the trouble to find it! Now, I can actually see myself
being ready to go home in three months!
Another
related and greatly empowering thought is the knowledge of how FREE I am! I am
graduated, untethered to anything or anyone, and I’m spending a year drinking
in all this delicious colorful LIFE in a distant land while my life back at home
is undergoing a self-cleansing reboot, stripped to its bare essentials. When I come
back, it’ll be free and open to build it up again exactly as I want. What a rare and fine set of circumstances. And
what an extraordinary blessing to feel so clear about what I want. I know exactly what social circles I want to
fill my life with, that’ll rekindle and challenge parts in me that haven’t seen
broad daylight in a long time. Agency! Turning towards different parts in me to
continue becoming the well-rounded, self-actualized person that’s in my future!
Oh, the potential! The possibilities! Oh, the joy of living! Oh! The places I’ll
go!
So you see,
I’m still a gleeful happy camper, with the wildest two weeks behind me to top
off what may well have been the best summer of my life so far. And now, buckle
up again, and settle down for the final bumpy ride! The last leg! Fall in
Davis, in Bro-op turned Shakti-house Pierce co-op, with old friends, and new
friends, with near and with far lands, I’m ready for this! To keep going,
going, going! No point looking back too much, no point getting stuck in the
muck or in some wonderful spot. I’ll make sure I’m well-fed, listen to all the
important things said, but onwards I’ll be going, cause there’s so much ahead!
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