Burning Man and the John Muir Trail - two wild weeks to top off the bestest summer

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.

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.

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!