Stray Mailer 27Oct04 part 2 - the terrorists hate our freedom fries.

Though it didn’t really start out that insane. We left
(Me and my mates Dale and Emily, and some other guy)
before dawn on Monday morning, so as to avoid the mass
exodus. It was a good tactic. In fact, the whole way
back to San Francisco they were saying how
unheardofedly light the traffic was. The four days I
was there where also, apparently, some of the best
weather they’ve ever seen in the little microclimate
in which they have their home.

Mostly I just hung out and relaxed, the technical term
in Burner lingo is Decompressed. Read some good books.

Emily took me out driving through the hills and bays
in her little silver convertible with the top down.
She drives like a lunatic, and has the skills to back
it up, so it was good fun.
I was amazed by how undeveloped the area around SF is.
If I was to live in the U.S., it’d be in the sanfran
bays.

The second to last night we were invited out to the
home of a friend of theirs, a fellow burner. The
property was once an infamous hippie commune, now it’s
yours for only one point six million American dollars.
We spent the evening eating, drinking and smoking, hot
tubbing and hunting for the seven known hidden
compartments left by jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg
when they lived there in the sixties, which they
started painting with mushrooms before presumably
getting distracted and leaving each one half finished.

The previous night Dale and I had visited a very
expensive looking house to play role playing games
with three of his friends, one of whom has a Taliban
bounty on his head.
He’d been in Kazakhstan last year with five other
people helping the country to get its civil emergency
response in order, which also meant upgrading the
infrastructure and military access to remote areas.
Like the bit just above Afghanistan where all the
heroin goes through, as run by the Taliban, who get
really pissy if you’re someone who helps soldiers get
in their way.
Of the six, he was the only one who made it out alive.
He’s about my age.

And my last San Francisco anecdote from the night we
arrived; I watched my first North American television.
It was a documentary about Cuba, on the Discovery
channel, and I’d actually seen it before in Australia;
as an even handed look at what’s going on in the
country, good and bad. It took me a while to recognise
it though, as they’d cut out everything but the bad,
re-edited the interviews to make people say something
else, and very carefully avoided mention of embargoes
and other reasons the country might not be doing so
well.
It was followed by a very sentimental doco about how
great the explorers Lewis and Clark were for American
expansionism.

I didn’t particularly want to hitchhike in America. So
I lined up a guy through the internet who was driving
from Santa Cruz to Vancouver. There was also a girl
who was supposed to come with, but the guy pissed
around for a few days and she was in a hurry, so we
ended up with another, slightly weird obsessive
compulsive type who really reminded me of Mad Jim, the
homeless guy in Edinburgh who got into my flat and
took me three days to get out again.
(We’d run into this guy one night in the park, and my
flatmate Ross said he could stay. Then we went out
drinking, forgetting that our other flatmate, Aideen,
was home alone. She lets him in, he immediately
unleashes his full (but quite harmless) weirdness on
her and she locks herself in her room. And he just
_would_not_leave_. Finally, after politely helpful
doesn’t work, I settle for verbally aggressive and
yell him out of the house.)

We leave late, in possibly the most rusted car I’ve
ever seen, and make it to a national park where we
camp near a logging road. During the night the strange
man vanished.
We woke up to a note saying he was going to visit a
friend and pick up his passport.
So the two of us carry on north. I’d thought we would
go up the coast, through the redwoods, but it turned
out we were just taking the main boring as hell
interstate, stopping at every rest stop, and the guy
wanted to do a tour of every single hot spring in
Oregon.

I have a fetish with movement. Progression is life.
Stagnancy is death. If I stay in one place too long I
get twitchy. If I’m not moving spatially or
emotionally or careerwise I just pack up and run away.
When I’m driving somewhere I don’t want to stop for
sightseeing or stretches or food or sleep, I only want
to keep moving and moving and moving until I get to my
destination and then I’m disappointed because I’m not
moving anymore.
I didn’t resent the fact that the guy wanted to take
rests or hit thermal pools, thermal pools are cool,
but by the time we crossed the Oregon border I’d
decided that I was jumping out and heading up the
coast. If I’m not shooting through I’d at least want
to be seeing nice countryside, and we were doing
neither.
So I gave the guy an extra ten bucks (he’d counted on
two riders to pay for petrol and now had none) and got
let off in Eugene.

At times over the next few days I’d stop and the
thought would hit me; I’m hitchhiking in America.
There’s something I should know about this venture.
Some kind of infamy.

The first guy to pick me up, which didn’t take long at
all, was an ex New Zealander who’d been living in the
States for twenty years. He told me to watch out for
bad people. Look at their eyes, he said.

There were two big rednecks trying to hitch where he
let me off, they’d been waiting four and a half hours.
Soon after I took up position a ways past them, a
fancy little sports car picks up all three of us. Guy
driving was drinking a beer and talked like someone
doing a very poor impersonation of a hillbilly.
He was twenty years old, the car was his wife’s,
they’d just had their month old son circumcised that
day. The other two were off to pick mushrooms.
Somehow we got onto the topic of drugs. Somehow I got
onto the topic of drugs with every single person who
picked me up. And it was never me who brought it up. I
think Americans may take a lot of substances.
Driver was telling us about his buddy who was
currently doing five years for shooting a guy in the
back of the head, once in the shoulder, and stabbing
him seven times over the sale of five pounds of
methamphetamine. Pacemaker saved his life. Point of
the story turned out the driver thought he should have
gotten a longer sentence, he was charged with
aggravated assault instead of attempted murder because
he was hopped up on a lot of speed at the time.

In America, if you give someone a drug and they do
something like commit a murder, you are legally
responsible for that murder.
If in America you take a drug and do something like
that, you are not.
No one’s saying it necessarily makes sense.

That wasn’t the only time the subject of murder came
up over the next few days, but it was one of the guys
in the back seat who uttered the only pro republican
sentiment I heard the whole time I was in the U.S.,
and that was simply that they were tougher on crime.
And though its true that between Burningman, San Fran
and hitching I wasn’t likely to meet too many
conservatives, I think it’s notable that every single
person I met was pretty unhappy with America in its
current state. If I can make two sweeping
generalizations; Americans are suspicious, and it
seemed to me, bracing themselves for something.

That night I managed to half pitch my tent in an
extremely narrow and convoluted path that ran the
fence of an RV camp. I slept surprisingly well
considering the situation. The next morning there were
a lot of gunshots going off nearby as I quickly packed
up, but too many to be anything really bad. Who knows?
It’s America. Could be someone changing channels or
punctuating a sentence for all I know.

Took me over an hour and a three km walk to get my
first ride, but after that the rest of the day was
surprisingly plain sailing. Large black guy in an SUV
picked me up and flirted outrageously with me for the
whole trip, but not aggressively and he was actually a
really nice guy. Said he was openly gay and a closet
smoker, told him if I was either I know which I’d be
ashamed of. (Smoking is a terrible habit.)
Then a guy who thought the space missions were a waste
of money and unnecessary risk of unleashing martian
space viruses. Then a guy in an SUV who drove me way
past his turn off just to be nice. Then bouncing round
the enclosed back of a pickup truck with a couple, guy
mentioned he’d been in prison for something, called
each other Ma and Pa.
Then the RV picked me up.
Not a huge one as RVs go, it was plastered with
American flags and other patriotic sticker type
things. Oldish couple, had been large scale cannabis
growers for the last six years until their cousin and
some of his friends broke in one night, tied them up
and ripped out all their plants. Cousin’s apparently
now a junkie and one of the other guys is doing a term
for murder. And that was the last time murder was
mentioned for that trip.
So they retired. Soon after I got on they picked up
another hitchhiker, a young guy on his way back to
study in Portland at a lefty college George Bush had
personally tried to shut down because it was “a
breeding ground for terrorists.” (The hippies hate our
freedom.)

Daniel.

11Oct04 part 1 - matter out of place.

Is this Earth?

I think I’ve gone too far. Where am I?

Jupiter? How the hell did I end up on Jupiter? Crap, have gone too far. Ok, Jupiter and seven, I’m looking for Earth at eight thirty, so that’s two manwise and three clockwise. Is that widdershins or deosil? I can never remember.

No one would know what I was talking about anyway.

I knew I would need a bike for Burningman, but a half decent cheap one was proving hard to track down. The one I had already was lent by a friend and the desert has a habit of destroying these things. So Saturday morning, the morning I’m due to leave, I’m tearing round all the garage sales in the neighbourhood looking for what they call here ‘a beater’; a bike you plan to destroy.

I’d given up and was on the way home, somewhat dejected, when of course I see one last sign, and of course they have a bike with gears that mostly work, big fat tyres and already rusted as hell, and the guy couldn’t but let me have it at half the thirty he wanted, and so soon I’m elatedly trying to ride two bikes at once down the hill to home so I can rush off to the other side of town to catch my ride several hours late.

So begins the trip. The next two point five weeks saw me into America, dust storms in the desert, casino knife theft, tearing through the hills of San Francisco with the top down in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac, talking murder with two rednecks and a hillbilly, hitchhiking through the u.s. of a.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

The ride down was smooth enough. I’d hooked up with a guy also named Daniel who had a van, he’d lined up two other guys from Toronto. He did all the driving, we got excellent mileage.

The first night we went looking for a camp ground, since in the states you can’t camp anywhere else. But the only grounds we could find forbade tents, RVs only, effectively making it illegal for us to sleep. We ended up driving into the hills, looking to take the law into our own hands, when we came across a bonnified redneck karaoke bar, and were screamed at by the peroxided bartender that eight miles up the road, sleep had been at least decriminalised.

Waking the next morning and looking around the logging road culdesac on which we’d spent the night, we found enough car window glass and bullet casings that the only thing that could’ve happened there was a series of cars parked and blown all holy hell out of by various handguns, shotguns and rifles.

Barring three missed turns and the half hour it took to realise we’d missed them, and some overly politicised conversation, the rest of the drive passed without notable incident.

Ok there were a few little moments, like when we were having breakfast (for budgeting reasons, I opted to starve) in a little place with a sign on the wall saying ‘please do not profane the Lord’s name here’ and I’ve just asked the guy if he likes Ani Difranco and he quite loudly proclaims that that sort of thing he likes to call Stinky Pussy Music, and I just bunker down and wait for the lynch mob. Apart from that and things like it.

I found myself subconsciously refraining from swearing while talking to Americans. I realised I was doing it when I caught myself actually saying holy cow.

So we arrive on the Playa (ply-er; technical name for a dried lake bed, also used to refer to the dust). It’s midnight, five minutes before the gates officially open. Its very still, the sky is clear and dark, there isn’t a city for miles to light it. In the distance the hills are silhouetted black. I don’t remember if it was loud or quiet, but there was a long line of cars and the people seemed exited to be there. I think there were spotlights on the road.

It was cold. Our van was checked for sneakers-in, but even the girl doing the checking had to admit with the amount of crap we’d brought we could have six people in the back for all she could tell. Me and Daniel were Playa virgins, so we had to be spanked.

I don’t know, it’s some ritual thing. Drop trou, couple of bare handed smacks from drunken greeters almost mostly wearing schoolgirl uniforms. Later I found out we were supposed to have a choice: mystery prize (spanking), or ring a bell. They must’ve been in a spanking kind of mood.

Drive out across the Playa with the side door open and me standing on the edge, to somewhere in the vicinity of eight thirty and Saturn (radial streets are named for hours on the clock, concentric streets, this year, for planets in the solar system. Ahh… it’s starting to make sense now, isn’t it?) to set their camp and shade structure. I was to camp with the Lamplighters, much nearer the centre. The shade took a while to set up and soon after, blew over.

There were two first nights for me; the night we arrived, and the next, which was the official first night of the thing. In many ways they were both the nights I enjoyed the most. The very first because it was the weirdest. Rolling quietly through the town, the ground slipping beneath me as I leaned out of the van watching people slide past, quietly or raucously preparing their camps and mutant vehicles and impossible structures. It may have been a little less ethereal at the time, but that’s how I have it now.

And the second because it just fucking well rocked.

We’d spent the day setting up our camp’s shade structure slash lounge slash water feature; a fairly considerable pavilion with seats, walkthrough waterfall and freeflowing bar, which had required a lot of lifting and carrying, so we had a little party. Just the eighty of us, two hundred friends, four hundred members of the extended community, and anyone passing by.

I liked it because the vibe was right on. Everyone was in a good, excited mood, there was unlimited sangria (free, of course), and because at one point a girl crouched down behind me and whispered in my ear that she really, really wanted to make out with me.

Well, I kind of said I’d go on a bike ride with this other girl over here, but I can probably spare you five minutes.

Or I may have said “Ahurr, hur hurrr (yur perdy).”

Hi Grandma. (She reads this.)

Lamplighters. We light the lamps. Every evening we get together to clean, refuel, light and ultimately place the eight hundred kerosene lanterns that light the major streets in Black Rock City. There are three subspecies: the Bearer, the Lifter and Support.

Bearers carry long poles across their shoulders with twelve lanterns hanging off them, kind of heavy but the biggest pain is in keeping your arms from going to sleep.

While we’re processioning Supporters run round removing lanterns and putting them on the very long hooked poles that the Lifters use to place them on the tall spires that line the street. And we do this in long white robes, proceeding solemnly as every single passer by screams We Love You Lamplighters! Woohooo!

Because we mark the nightfall. When you see us you know the fun is about to start.

In exchange for doing this every night I got fed and inebriated. I barely touched the food I took down with me. Volunteering is good.

And what did you learn today Daniel?

Too-daay I lerrrned… that gifts are better than barter, that Playa dust gets into everything, and that watching other people have sex is really creepy.

It is. Some things are just personal. Damn you Orange Dome. Ew ew ew ew ew.

It’s all about the little ironies. Like how a festival at least largely based on awareness of your environment (leave no trace!) takes place in one of the most inhospitable, dead and deadly environments on Earth, where everything you see other than dust is completely artificial.

And like how to get the things I needed I had to shop at big box stores like Canadian Tire and Home Depot and Walmart.

And how with everyone getting down there and around and back, and all the generators and mutant vehicles, we must’ve gone though an entire Alaskan national park worth of petroleum products.

Ironic that the supposed focus of this writing, the Burningman festival itself, will not have the most written about it this mailer.

Case in point. The second to last night the man burned. We were sitting, watching from the Lamplighter truck, but as he fell (sixty feet tall of wood and metal) and the crowd rushed him a few of us jumped down and rushed him too. The ritual states, run a circle around the fire until the fire has burnt away.

I was three quarters of the way around, ducking in and out of the inner ring of two thousand people running, shielding myself from the intense, intense heat, when I stopped and actually looked into it. It was like looking into hell.

But not hell.

Later I would try to describe it. I can only attempt to express how it feels now to have been there at the time. All I have are what the memory and idea of it has become. That’s not how it really was. That isn’t what really happened. Maybe you’ll understand if you were there. I wish you’d been there.

Let’s just say that it was pure.

It was very pure.

I was keen to talk to people about how their festival was going for them. Thirty-five thousand people, and each one experiencing the thing in a different way. That’s a lot of burning men, a lot of Black Rock cities.

For me, the majority of time was spent exploring. There was always something to see. One night I made it out to the perimeter. There was a false tree standing in the desert. A handful of people were silently placing prayers and mementos of lost ones on its body.

It was freezing cold that night, I rode back with my lights turned off and the dust glowing silver beneath my wheels. I thought about crossing the fence and just picking a star to aim for, out towards the distant hills. I had no desire to actually do it, but the knowledge that I could, if I chose, is what keeps me ticking.

And that’s probably pretty much all I have to say about Burningman. I’ve learned not to write about ‘you had to be there’ type experiences. There’s no point. A few of the more important things I can try to describe by way of excessive lyricism, but that gets dull.

So yeah, it was really cool. Not earth shattering or religious or anything, but a bloody good time. I’d go again, and I’d travel a ways to do so. I’ve been thinking about some things I’d like to make, articulated solar funnels and reclaimed water shower stalls and giant sandworms that really breach and suchforth.

I’ll see where I’m at next year.

The man burns in 326 days.

And from the Lest we forget to be cynical file, there was some bad stuff.

Like apparently there were some people putting things down the porta-loos to block them, piss off the porta-loo people and get the whole thing shut down. (Because if we don’t deliberately shove things down the toilets at Burningman, then the terrorists win.)

And there was stuff getting stolen, but not nearly as much as most big festivals, and that which was was apparently mostly by Nevada locals who get tickets for cheap.

The voyage home was kind of insane.