Burning Man
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Camp Abbesses
We were Camp Abbesses. That's the name of a Parisian Metro station, which we wanted to clone in the desert. The plan was to offer Pastis and lots of nice things, which people could be creative with and attach it to their costumes. We had gloves, all kinds of fabric, glittery stuff, and so on. Debbie, Eric, Noel and the others had done a fair amount of preparations beforehand. They had made a construction drawing, cut all the lumber, painted it, made stools and tables out of lumber (which Noel was particularly proud of because he'd never fashioned furniture from scratch). We had met at Noel's for a preparation meeting, where we all got familiar with the construction and helped finishing the components, running on some delicious veggie lasagne which was left over from some lasagne cooding contest. So setting the whole thing up shouldn't be a problem. It was.
I guess the main problem was the heat. We had to work fully exposed to the sun, and that's no fun in Black Rock City. Eric, who was the master builder since he had designed the construction, quickly entered a kind of delirious state - his head quite red, covered in sweat, muttering barely understandable commands, wearing his bath robe all the time. So by the end of the second day I guess the 4-by-4s forming the socket where up, pointing as high as 10 feet. This had cost a great effort already, because all the difficulties that just happen. Too few tools, some components had been lost, we didn't pay attention to the meter (did we have one?) so somethings ended up to be quite leaning. At some point during the third day we suddenly noticed that the roof was still sitting on the ground, a gigantic and heavy construction which would gain stability only when mounted on the socket. So how were we supposed to get this thing up?
We sought the help from a guy from our neighboring camp, the Coalition, who was a carpenter (?) in default life and had done similar jobs before. He took over command and instructed six people to use the remaining 4-by-4s to balance the roof on while lifting it up. At the same time, more people where standing on ladders around the socket to guide the roof into its final position. This was no fun. If anything had slipped it had resulted in severe injury for sure. A flaky roof construction smashing down from 10 feet high on basically naked people would have been the worst case. But luckily it worked out and we called it a day. During the fourth day, the canopy was attached and the walls of the station were closed with fabric, and the stools and tables were set up. So finally, on the fifth day, we were open to serve some chilled Pastis to the other burners.
One remarkable quote by Jesse, standing over at the Coalition's on the third day or something: Wow, this construction looks just like ours! Except that it's shady and there's lots of girls inside...
Water truck
Every once in a while a water truck would come by the roads, spraying water onto the dust. I guess it's to cement the dust puddles again, where your bike would get stuck in. Or it's just to reduce the amount of dust in the air, who knows. It sprays the water behind it, and it moves slowly, so soon people had realized that running behind it would get them a free cold shower offering a temporary relief from all the dust. After a day or so people started yelling "water truck" when they sighted it. From all nearby camps people would stagger to the road, already naked or undressing on the run, catch up with the truck an run behind it for some 100m. You should definitely take off at least your shoes, otherwise they get crusted with a thick layer of cemented dust soon after.
Our way back
Neki and I wanted to leave right after the Temple burn on Sunday night. We figured most of the people would leave in the early morning, so we were hoping for relatively clear roads. We knew already that we'd have to jump-start the Jeep, because we had drained the battery by keeping the doors open for too long. We had tried to start it two days earlier, which worked with no problems, so we were confident the Jeep's gonna make it. So we asked Sharon for her Subaru and tried to jump-start, but it didn't work. Apparently the Subaru's power electrical system was not powerful enough to kick off six cylinders. It was around midnight by then. We tried Debbie's car next, which had worked when we'd first tried it, and indeed, the Jeep started. But as we soon found out, for some reason the engine idling was screwed up. It just wouldn't keep running when you released the gas pedal! That's bad when you can't start again because of the flat battery.
We decided to give it a try and maneuvered carefully towards the exit of the playa. All was good till we hit the traffic jam there. Stop-and-go is exactly what you not wanna do when you drive a car with automatic transmission with screwed idling and no battery at 1am after a week in the desert. You need to keep the engine at 1500rpm with the right foot, the left's for the brake. It's extremely difficult to switch from N to D under these conditions, because you'll need to give it more gas right when the clutch locks in. For quite some time I managed to do fine, but eventually the Jeep died again. We asked a random for jump-start, this time Neki was behind the wheel. We could go a couple of 100m further before the Jeep died again. We were tired and frustrated.
Neki decided to check a nearby light to get some help from a ranger maybe, but the light was just give-us-all-your-leftover-food camp. Next he wanted to check center camp, so I stayed in the car trying to get some sleep in, while he went off. There was nobody in center camp who could have helped us. When Neki was back we both took a nap in the car, waiting for inspiration. At some point we decided to give it one last shot. That is to jump-start it again and then to keep the engine running at 2000rpm for at least 20 minutes. So that's what we did.
It was 3am when we decided to get on the road again, back to the stop-and-go. Neki fought his way through, and indeed, when the engine died this time the battery was barely strong enough to restart it. It took us two more hours to get off the playa. I was sleeping and Neki was behind the wheel. When we finally go off, Neki was finished. He couldn't drive any further. Interestingly the engine idling was back to normal by then, god knows what had fucked it.
We switched driving, at some point we stopped for another nap, we passed a few bad accident scenes, one art bus hadn't made it. It was noon when we finally got back to the bay area, after 12 hours of journey.
Gifts
A big deal in Black Rock City is gifting. Nothing is being sold, so everybody carries little gifts to trade for drinks, useful stuff and other gifts. We had a bunch of portable ashtrays, which we made out of mint boxes. We painted the black, drilled holes in it for a pink cord, and drew a green Man on them. I got two nice medallions as a gift to wear around the neck, Neki's got a t-shirt from C02 camp I guess. Plus Jesse gifted me his goggles, which I were wearing all the time anyway, and his book "Bukowski". Thanks, Jesse!
