This Song Has No Title

There is not so much a barter economy as a gift economy in Black Rock City. You’re not likely to be giving away things for what you NEED (unless you’re at the Hardware Shoppe, of course.) Camp Arctica is there as a charity to the Gerlach school district. It’s all a gift in the end.

One girl walked by me in the heat of the day on Saturday and said, “I want you to have my last popsicle.” I gave her my great thanks and took my camp necklace from around my neck and gave it to her. She wasn’t asking anything in return, but that’s sometimes the best way to give something. DJ Mitch got a similar necklace from me just for playing all our requests as we were dancing at Thunderdome. He also got a sticker and some Jolly Ranchers from others in our group. It wasn’t much, but those tiny things can make a man feel rich out on the playa.

The things that amazed me the most were the random acts and the strange synchronicities… things that should happen all the time, but don’t. Like a voice in the darkness singing a song my father sang to me as a child…

I walked through an intersection on my way to a theme camp, when someone called out to me and prompted me to kneel in front of him so he could pour the ingredients of a margarita into my mouth. It was the best margarita I’ve ever had. I never did find that theme camp…

One night, we were on our way to Death Guild to dance when we came upon a golf cart glowing with black light, and “Just Like Heaven” coming from it. There were four or five girls in short, white dresses, go-go boots, and big, beautiful wings dancing around the cart, and they wanted us to come dance with them. They even played the song over again, because we seemed to like it so much. When it was through, a girl said to me in a beautiful European accent, “Now you get to pluck an angel,” and I turned around and saw that her wings were made of overlapping rows of ribbons, held on by safety pins. Each ribbon said ‘sinner’ on one side, and ‘saint’ on the other, and she said I get to choose which one I want to be.

I asked her where she was from, and she said she was Polish. I said, “Część!” and she gave me the cutest double take I’ve ever seen in my life, and said, “Hello!” I had to tell her that was all I knew, except for one more phrase, “Ją, Lubię ciebie.” And she hugged me and translated, “I like you!” Out of all the Polish I used to know, I could have remembered nothing more appropriate… And I walked away feeling the way anyone should when they’ve been dancing with angels, in the sand, on a beautiful starry night.

That’s what I find in Black Rock.

It was a hard decision… do we stop in Reno and stay the night in a hotel with a steam shower and hot tub before continuing the journey home, or do we just make a straight run for it, and end up in Seattle sometime after midnight – going home to our own showers, our own refrigerators, our own beds.

By 9:30am, waiting any longer was inconceivable, so we said our goodbyes and headed for the gates. I didn’t feel much, just a little fatigue, a desire for a cold beverage out of the first convenience store we came to. (We’d spent a couple hours talking about Slurpees the day before. Oh, for a Slurpee…)

I wasn’t sad to go; I had gone through a good deal of my time there somehow unattached. It was a strange feeling for me – I expected to be compelled, mutated, added to, taken from, tied in… yet, surprisingly, I was so ready to be back home.

I looked back upon the city and saw its crescent outline, pillars of smoke rising from the inner curve. It would be burning all day, released into the sky, free to turn up elsewhere… in a cafe, in the woods, in a bedroom, under a starry sky, on a boat, a train… any place where two people can smile and give a gift for the sake of giving it, whether it be a trinket, a song, a moment of laughter…

But someone out there knew how to reach me
in a place where I felt unreachable.

There were signs lining the way out,
mirroring the signs that lined the way in:

Our revels now are ended.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.*

And I wept.

[*]The Tempest IV.i.

SomeoneElse: Burning Man must seem like a world away by now…
Me: It seems just on the edge of my fingertips.
Me: Today, walking along Broadway, it was there.
Me: People made eye contact.
Me: We were all in the same spot.

It was Wednesday night on the playa. Luke had just given a nearby camp a couple of martinis, so they grabbed the clippers and gave him a really adorable mohawk. We found Savannah and headed to Center Camp to catch up with our campmates. There were soft, colored lights all over the pavilion, and some didgeridoo, percussion and glottal throat singing were coming from one of the stages. The center rug under the open sky was painted like a labyrinth, and there were contact dancers performing on it.

When the dancers had finished, Luke took my hand and led me to the center of the labyrinth, under the stars, and got down on one knee. He took a box out of his pocket, and I can just remember being absolutely astounded that he had a ring since we hadn’t had anything planned and all of our money had gone toward the trip down there. I said yes, he put his mother’s beautiful yellow sapphire ring on my finger, we kissed, and all of the people in the pavilion applauded and cheered.

Right then, the Extra Action Marching Brigade, in burgundy and black sequined uniforms, stormed the pavilion playing a lively march, with baton twirlers cartwheeling across the floor, and swept the crowd off their feet in celebration of something they didn’t even know was happening.

That’s the great thing about Burning Man – the most unplanned things are the most amazing things, and you just can’t replicate them in the real world.

We wandered out to the Man after that. There were Oracle-people in the alcoves on the ground level, offering absurd and wonderful advice to all passers-by. We approached one beautiful lady in her alcove, who greeted us with the sweetest smile, and I asked if she had advice for a couple who just got engaged.

She thought for a very long time, and finally she spoke:

All day long I tell people to seek out temptation in order to define their realities. But by choosing this unity, you have chosen to define a new reality and therefore you have no more need for temptation.

And we thanked her, and folded our hands and bowed to her, and left with a wonderful feeling in our hearts.

We went to the beach this weekend – close friends on our last campout of the year. And we found a message in a bottle on the beach! We dug out hammocks of sand and sat around the fire, doing our best to empty our own bottles of wine, and we read from the scroll of paper:

Beach #2 LA PUSH, WA
9/1/2003

Good wine, good friends, and all had a good time.

Advice:

1. Be careful with expensive camping lighters, because when they get sand in them, they become expensive garbage.
2. Duraflame logs are a great way to get your fire started, but they are heavy, and a pain to carry.
3. Pack light.

Wish: That all of us that came here will take away beautiful memories, and find happiness in each one of our lives, and that one day we might come celebrate life again.

UN BESO

Glad that at that moment we were sitting in the sand around a campfire, listening to the surf, celebrating life with good wine and good friends!

It’s amazing to set up a tent and live just 20 yards from the tide and the wide, wide ocean… There are lullabyes in the waves.

A long time ago, an old girlfriend gave Luke a gold ring. Not as long ago, he started bringing that ring to Burning Man, intending to place it somewhere on the Man structure, so that it could be consumed in the flames during the Burn. He brought it every year he went, but for one reason or another, it never made it to the Man.

One sunny day during this year’s festival, we took our bikes and headed out to the Man to hang out with him, and Luke brought the ring. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it for a while, looked around for a good place to put it, but in the end, he said that he wasn’t sure it deserved to be wasted, and that he felt there was another life for it somewhere.

I told him to pay attention to what he felt, and go with it.

We went back to camp, and he took out his dremel tool and started cutting. He cut the ring in half the long way, so he had two thin rings made from the one thick one. When he had buffed out the rough edges, he said that he hoped the chance would come along where he would see two people who were meant to have the rings for themselves. He asked me to help him find the right people to give them to.

On Friday night we were out on the open playa, enjoying art cars and fireworks shows, and not thinking about rings much at all. We saw the Dragon Egg fire show, shared drinks with the people at the Cheshire Cat art car. (I was in my Alice costume, so that was fun.)

We finally headed through the dark, wide-open spaces toward camp, ready for bed. As we walked along, I saw two women in a long embrace in the distance, and even in the low glow of the surrounding festivities, I saw that both were wearing white wedding dresses. I caught up with Luke and pointed them out. He wondered aloud whether they had actually gotten married, or if they were just wearing wedding dresses and on a lot of drugs. Either just as likely at Burning Man, so I told him that if he wanted to know, he’d have to ask! But I had a good feeling about it.

So our group made a beeline to them, and Luke asked if they had just been married. The women broke their embrace and smiled, and one said, “Yes, we’ve known each other for 26 years! We have been friends since we were 10, and have been through everything (including divorcing our ex-husbands) together, and we are so in love. We finally got married today!” They had rings on, but in the dark I could only see that they were giant toy-sized trinkets used as tokens for the day.

Luke told the story of the rings and offered them to the happy couple. Their eyes lit up like the stars above us, and they were touched and thrilled to accept them from him. They told us to keep each other close and take good care of each other, and that now their wedding felt complete.

We hugged them tight and made our way back to camp for a good night’s sleep.