burning man

just rediscovered some notes on burning man 2007 (the green man):

i packed for burning man in one day, but it was a day of lists and traveling from place to place being foiled in my intentions by people who had been there before me and purchased the last campstove/camelbak/tube of dr bronners/etc. rainbow grocery was full of people wheeling about dollies stacked with 2.5-gallon water cubes and looking pensively at serried ranks of dried foods. we drove out into the desert heavily laden with the stuff of life.

burning man, when i finally got there, was a place of rich contrast. by day, the light permeated everything, and so did the dust. the oobleck in the trough up front fermented slightly in the heat and left our hands stained a pale but persistent green. at night, the light came in neon shades of green, blue, and red, from electroluminescent sheets and wire and many thousands of glowsticks, but was immediately swallowed by the desert. periodically, huge gouts of flame would erupt into the sky and everything would suddenly look as if it was illuminated by sodium streetlight. giant art cars sailed slowly through the darkness in pools of light and music, heading for no destination in particular.

in the vast open space at the center of the city, someone had constructed a radial matrix of full-spectrum LEDs and turned it into a pulsing cylinder of light—i sat there for an hour watching these thousands of lighted spheres on the cubitron cycle through a series of displays. one night, we walked out at 2am into the eastern expanses of the playa and climbed up inside the giant sculpture made of cut-up 18-wheelers, then found a mirrored room hung floor to ceiling with strings of red lights such that, after climbing in, you seemed to be adrift in a matrix of dim red points stretching away into infinity on all sides.

a distant black lump in the night turned out to be a clump of couches under palm-frond umbrellas. i fell asleep there and woke up just as the sun rose over the mountains in the east. i saw more utilikilts than i'd ever seen before and made pancakes one morning with nothing more than flour, baking soda, powdered milk, and water. (they were decent, though dusty.) mike, from the camp and from deep springs, is a more accomplished cook than i. thanks to him, we had, one night, fresh sweet potato fries and a smoky, cumin-scented pot of lentils and carrots.

we left several hours before the temple of forgiveness was scheduled to burn, and took three hours to get to the edge of black rock city (a whole mile). by the end, we'd shut off the engine and put the car in neutral—rolling it at 0.3 mph wasn't hard. twelve hours after leaving the camp we got back into mountain view and then i drove back home to a city washed in morning sun.