This Song Has No Title

Making a 1400-mile (round-trip) journey by car for a couple of nights in the hot desert in mid-summer is probably a little nuts, but that never bothered us before, and I won’t lie – it was beckoning to us. So we decided to go to Black Rock Desert for the 4th of Juplaya and see what life was like in this place outside of Burning Man.

Our only real option was to leave after work on Thursday night, drive all night and arrive by midday on Friday. Marc, Luke, and I were in Gretl (the 4-Runner), and Vanessa and Brian took her little silver truck. Our gear was considerable for a weekend of camping, but still minimal considering the diverse conditions for which we were required to prepare – whether or not they actually occurred. The desert is well-known for its high daytime temperatures, but the nights at 4000 feet can get awfully cold, and of course wind, dust, and even thunderstorms are always a possible threat.

Our plans developed a small hitch when we decided to wait until Oakridge, Oregon to gas up. It’s on Willamette Highway, just before we go over the pass, and we’ve filled up there before. Unfortunately, it’s a small town in the middle of Oregon, (the state that doesn’t allow you to pump your own gas), and we found both gas stations closed when we rolled in at nearly 3am. After a brief conversation with a police officer (who obviously sees this situation on a fairly regular basis), we headed for a nearby rest stop to wait until the station opened at six. It would have let the wind out of our sails a bit, except that we were all fairly exhausted and no one was about to complain about the mandatory nap. We divvied up the blankets and pillows and settled in for a bit of a rest.

Just after 6am we were gassed up by a couple of grumpy attendants, and headed down through California and into Nevada without incident…

…except for the California Agricultural Inspection stop.

Every time you enter California, they stop you to ask if you are bringing any produce into the state. I’ve been making this trip for ten years now, and as long as we were just passing through with a few tomatoes and apples for our lunches (from the grocery store, with stickers), they wave you through. Not this time.

This time they were drunk with power, and when I rattled off the couple of items that we intended on having for lunch in Nevada that afternoon…

Me: We’ve just got storebought fruit with stickers in the cooler.
Manager: What have you got?
Me: Pluots.
Manager: *blank stare*
Me: Uh, a couple tomatoes.
Manager: *suddenly on high alert* WHERE?!
Me: Oh, well, the tomatoes are in the cooler in the silver truck… *sigh*

Manager-lady waved us over to the side to await our companions, and then ordered her reluctant minion to stop that truck as if it were crossing an international border with a load of explosives.

The minion bent down to the driver’s window and told them he’d need to see their cooler. (And actually told them that I’d ratted them out!) He also said that he wouldn’t have bothered, but he had too many bosses there that day. So they untied the ratchet straps and took apart the contents of the cooler to find the poor, soggy tomatoes and lettuce in a plastic bag. They received very little fanfare in return for all the trouble it took to present them. It seems the manager didn’t know what a pluot was, and the mystery so stymied her (yes, the rather trendy little fruit has completely escaped the notice of the fine employees of the California Department of Food and Agriculture) that she didn’t even listen to me when I said they were in my possession.

We were given the stink-eye by the manager and were allowed to leave. After this little episode, I became known as the “fruit narc” for the rest of the weekend. Someday in the future I’m sure I will be able to tell my children that the Great California Pluot Plague of ’09 was all my fault.

To that end, we got back on the road…

When we go to Burning Man in August, the landscape through which we travel is a depressing beige as far as the eye can see. It’s a lot like Eastern Washington in August, wherein I always find a certain fierce beauty. In early July, the roads leading through the desert toward Gerlach are comparatively verdant. Wildflowers bloom along the ditches, and even the tops of the scrub are a seafoam green. (It’s amazing how many water metaphors are used to describe the desert…) It seems a different place altogether. This is life in the high desert, and it is lovely to behold …if you can get past the bug splatters on the windshield.

The people in Black Rock during the July non-event are largely any combination of DPW (the people who build the Event city infrastructure), serious Burners, usually from the Bay Area, and locals from as close as Gerlach or as far away as Reno. The Event (as it’s referred to in the off-season) is just a few miles wide, with fences and the kinds of rules necessary to maintain minimal safety and organizational liability for a population of 50,000. This weekend, the population of the playa was about a thousand or so very seasoned campers. They grouped off and spread out across the long, narrow desert floor, dragging small trailers with porta-potties behind them.

We had GPS coordinates in order to find where our group was supposed to be camping, and the nearest neighboring group was about a mile away. We were perhaps a half mile from the edge, in an area where occasional dunes rose up out of the flat surface, giving us a false sense of security and wind break. The camp was full of people cut from the same cloth, but half of them had chosen small-town life – something I fancy from time to time, being an urban girl with a rural heart. I’d really like a little bit of both flavors in my life someday.

We drove into the playa at the 11-mile entrance, and drove a few more miles up the middle of the playa, watching the GPS closely. We asked the closest large group if it was Big Brother Camp, but they were not, and we moved on to find a lone truck almost directly on the coordinates. The two identified themselves as Big Brother Camp, so introduced ourselves and went about the business of setting up some temporary shade before opting to move the vehicles closer to the dune and set up the tents.

A Bureau of Land Management Ranger made a stop through our camp to touch in with us, telling us which hot springs to hit and which to miss, and where we could safely shoot our rifles. He was a nice guy, ran the rules by us without being too authoritative, but also ran his eyes over our gear and commented, conversationally, on the stranger objects. Observant, informative, and doing his job with grace and rapport. I like that in …well, it’s respectable in anyone. Specifically, he admired Luke’s rifle case (he’d been a paratrooper, and had recognized the 1950 canvas jump case). He geeked out even more when Luke showed him the M-1 Garand inside. It’s the kind of old and sturdy piece of gear that we prefer over modern plastic contraptions, and he nodded in approval.

He informed us that the fence didn’t mean we couldn’t walk into the area – it was just there to keep people from driving over it and destroying the vegetation. Year after year, he said, these mounds remained exactly where they were, and they’re the only place where anything grows out here.

Then he mentioned that we needed a county permit in order to light fireworks …just before he saw our steel-tubed mortar launcher.

BLMR: “What’s that – for firing missiles or something?”
All of us: “uhhh… heh… uh….”
BLMR: “Oh, I don’t want to know!”

And he grinned and made a hasty retreat.

Later in the afternoon we spotted a fleet of vehicles rolling toward us, a curtain of dust rising up behind them. It was the rest of our camp, complete with a couple of RVs, some trucks, and a couple early-model Toyota 4-Runners, including “Trogdor”: lift-kit, huge tires – a mountain machine in army green with a hot air balloon burner mounted to the roof. Luke had to wipe the drool off of his face as they pulled up. They circled the wagons around and suddenly we were a microcosm of the city with a camouflage canopy creating our Center Camp, and own tiny bank of two porta-potties on a trailer. Perfect!

Any time you’d glance out across the playa, you could see vehicles tearing across it, clearly enjoying the freedom of this place – home of many land speed records, and one of the only wide-open places in North America where there are really few-to-no restrictions. We saw dirt bikes, dune buggies, SUVs, ATVs, and even a police cushman cart shooting across the flat surface with a trail of dust in its wake. It was so unlike Burning Man, where driving normal vehicles is not allowed, and driving abnormal ones is limited to 5 miles per hour. Being out on the 1000-square-mile lake bed had the same feeling as being out on an actual open water, ironically, as if you were cutting across the surface in a speed boat, surrounded by shores of mountains, with dome tent archipelagos jutting up through the surface.

We grilled up some bratwurst as the sun set, and made an early night of it. Half of the camp ran off to explore and party in other camps, and the other half went to bed – or at least that’s what I heard. Our little group from Seattle crashed early, having been awake and on the road for far too long. It was a quiet night.

We were up early, chased out of our tents by the heat of a rising sun. Some things never change. (Vanessa will tell you that she was chased from sleep by the sound of Luke’s electric razor, but don’t feel sorry for her – she wasn’t wearing earplugs, and their tent had shade at sunup, courtesy of our tent.)

After a quick breakfast, we gathered up a cooler full of sandwich-makings, Rainier beer, and Red Bull and removed Gretl’s canopy, making it even more obvious that she is really just a pickup truck with a back seat in the bed. We drove her along the heavy line of tracks in the dust to find the railroad crossing to get off-playa. We followed the road around the end of a small canyon where we found a couple of old, rusted, gutted-out vehicles and other shooting targets (made of hanging frying pans) already set up against a steep mountain backdrop – the perfect place to shoot the rifles. Once again, I proved I’m really not a bad shot, and I prefer precision shooting to spray and pray…

We also tried some AP rounds into the engine block of one of the vehicles.

Three hours later, we were thinking about heading back to camp to find some shade, so Luke decided to get into the “Boom Box” and craft something loud and obnoxious as our last hurrah.

He fashioned a giant firecracker out of some of the materials he brought, and buried it at a safe distance, while we donned our earmuffs and eye protection one more time. Marc shouted “Fire in the hole!” in all four directions through the megaphone we’d wisely thought to bring with us, and Luke lit the fuse. As they scooted back to the safety of the truck, we noticed that our BLM Ranger friend was perched in his Jeep on a nearby ridge, watching us. We waited two minutes or so, but nothing happened. We weren’t sure if the fuse had gone out, so we gave it a few more minutes, and finally started to take our muffs off, and the Ranger stepped out of the Jeep and made his way toward us, finally recognizing us from our meeting the day before as he saw the Garand in the back of the truck.

Again, he was politely inquisitive and conversational, and never authoritative as he asked what we were up to, and Luke told him we’d buried a …large… firecracker, but the fuse had gone out. “They don’t make them like they used to,” he added. The Ranger smiled and asked us so very nicely to take care of it before we left, as he walks through the area often, and didn’t want any surprises. I think he got the impression that we weren’t all that bad (we even pick up our spent shells), and he said, “If there’s something you want to do, this is probably the best place to do it.” He waved goodbye and drove off.

Okay!

We quickly re-lit the fuse and got the cloud of dust and the “boom” that we’d been waiting for.

It was time to get out of the blasted sun, and the rest of our camp was up and running as we arrived, and they invited us out to go shooting at a different location. Vanessa, Brian, and I chose to stay in the shade and rest for a while (a good thing, as my sunscreen had been mightily overpowered), and Luke and Marc packed up a few more beers and headed out with them.

Vanessa went to lie down, while Brian and I took photos, chatted, and enjoyed the peaceful afternoon, punctuated by the sound of tannerite explosions coming from the direction of the springs…

It wasn’t all that long before Luke and Marc appeared again and said they were heading to yet another site for an explosion of some sort, and then maybe back to Frog Farm to see a pyrotechnics show. I was still exhausted, but, while it’s impossible to see every amazing thing during the Event if you were out and about all day and all night for a week, you still have to push yourself to get out and see what you can while you’re there. But it’s also important to conserve your energy and stay out of the sun – at least during the hottest part of the day. It’s a hard balance to maintain, and I’ve probably erred on the conservative side more often than not, but the consequences of overdoing it may result in heat stroke or some injury resulting from being too tired to be altogether safe. In this case, I’d been in the shade for a few hours, and I opted to go back out. It wouldn’t be too long before sunset, anyway.

We filled up our canteens and headed back out to the edge, crossing the railroad tracks and following a road through the desert scrub toward the Frog Farm, which was a literal oasis, and the kind of scene that I’ve only seen in movies – (have you seen the backwoods kegger scene in Dazed and Confused?) – modded 4WD vehicles, coolers full of beer, young weird people smoking and drinking under scrubby trees and soaking in a warm, muddy pool of water. I wanted so much to go jump into that water, but we had other plans.

We met up with Trogdor, the lifted 4-Runner, full of our campmates there, and then caravanned along the gravel road for quite a few miles, not really sure exactly where we were going. There was finally a sign memorializing two people and pleading for drivers to be safe on “Jungo Road.” We slowed to a crawl and then parked along the side of the road, the mountain sloping up on the left, and a jagged hillside sloping down on the right toward the open desert.

This is where Tikka’s brother Tyler died last spring. He told us the story of how they ran out of gas on this road that night, and he’d gotten out and started walking. His brother finally remembered a gallon of gas in the back of the Samurai and poured it into the tank, and he drove along and picked up Tikka along the road. Apparently, Tyler was, albeit uncharacteristically, a little angry and drunk as well. Tikka put on his seatbelt, but his brother did not. They took a corner too tight, and the car rolled off the road. The glass from the windshield was still there on the ground where it came to a stop, right side up, with Tikka inside.

Tikka glanced at the driver’s seat to see if his brother was all right, but Tyler wasn’t there at all. He’d been thrown from the car. Tikka got out and walked in the direction they’d rolled from, but couldn’t find anyone. Several yards in the opposite direction, he found his brother, dead. He said, “I found him right here, and I don’t know CPR, but I could have opened his airway or something, but I knew when I saw him, he was gone.”

He’d found the body on a triangle of earth between two deep crevices carved by running water during the spring rains. This was where we put the three jars of mixed tannerite, and Luke handed him the Garand – the only firearm on the playa that was powerful enough to set off the explosive.

We didn’t hear him fire the gun – only heard the tannerite explode, felt the shock wave, and saw the plume of dust. The mound of dirt was gone. This was his tribute – to tell the story, and to mark the spot in his own way; It with little fanfare and little emotion, but with friends old and new.

After the tannerite explosion, Luke and Tikka started talking shop about their 4Runners, simultaneously complimenting each other on their respective vehicles, and getting served by each other as only truck geeks can serve. They were actually wondering out loud where they could race them, while looking out across the flat playa that is the site of so many land speed records and luxury car commercials.

Marc and I laughed mightily at them, and we loaded into the vehicles, set to return to the playa. Luke was amped from the activities of the day so far. Now he had the opportunity to put Gretl to the test, and to go through some sort of fraternal bonding with kindred spirits. He was bound and determined to get a head start and see how Gretl handled the twisty dirt road. Of course Luke handled the road well, gleefully ignoring the fact that the dust obscured the road in our wake. But I had this bad feeling, as if we were being a little disrespectful of the scene we’d just left. I hate to say it, but I subtly tried to ask him to take it easy, but he was just so caught up in it and it seemed that he took my warnings as a challenge.

I didn’t want to play the nagging wife in front of Marc and Denise (another campmate who’d hitched a ride with us) but he started to get even more aggressive when we approached the railroad tracks that separated the hills from the edge of the lakebed, and I couldn’t rein it in anymore. I told him to either slow down or let me out of the car.

Instead, he popped over the tracks and swerved off the “road” onto chunkier playa to bounce things around a little and get his money’s worth out of the new shocks. His biggest mistake wasn’t going off the path that most vehicles follow near the edges, nor was it leading us into the white playa that was still salty on top and damp underneath – it was barreling through it at 45 miles an hour.

The ground was uneven and we couldn’t really see the narrow, water-carved crevice running across our path just ahead, and when we hit it we were going fast enough to pop the front end up, and we caught air as well as propelling ourselves more than a car length ahead before we landed and skidded to a halt with an awful wrenching groan from the vicinity of the front right tire.

We were all fine, just shaken. Seatbelts were on, and we’d just lost our 6-pack cooler out the back and the rest of our things lay in a pile of dissaray. The world became very still, and I yelled an obscenity as I opened the door and hopped out to inspect the damage. The tire was canted at a 45-degree angle, buried halfway into the soft earth. (Of course, I wish I had photos of this, but I was a bit preoccupied at the moment.)

Luke hadn’t moved, and I didn’t want to look at his face or it would have all gone downhill from there. I told him, “Get the shovel,” since we couldn’t really do anything more until we assessed the damage. I was fairly sure at this moment, however, that this one was going to require a tow truck, a hotel room, and calling in to work on Tuesday, plus a pretty hefty drain on our savings.

He got out of the truck and when he saw the tire he looked at me with the most sincerity that I’ve seen from him since the day we got married, and he said, “I’m so sorry…” He was going to say more, but I had forgiven him already, saying, “I know you are. Let’s see if we can fix this.” And we didn’t speak of it again.

I dug out around the tire while Luke grabbed the jack. We needed something to stabilize the jack in the sand, and ended up using the lid from an ammo box. Luke pulled off the tire to reveal that the ball joint had popped out of its socket completely, and the CV joint was separated as well. Other than this, there didn’t seem to be any other damage, but how do you get those joints back together with a minimum of tools and parts as the sun is about to hit the mountain?

I knew we had limited time before it would get dark and possibly cold, but, in the meantime, we had the best conditions we could ask for: low light shining onto the front of the vehicle, it was starting to cool off just a bit, and the sand was wet enough to be dug out and packed, perfect for sandcastles, and it made working on the playa ground that much easier. Marc and I mostly hung out and tried to feel useful, digging around in the back of the truck to try and improvise whatever they needed out of what we had on-hand.

It took a good 20 minutes before the other vehicles caught up to us, and Tikka’s eyes were actually twinkling as he took in the sight. And they set about to fixing it – like they do.

With the sun about to set, cars were filing toward the Frog Pond to watch a 4th of July pyrotechnic show, and every vehicle stopped to ask if we needed anything. I’d been giving Luke, and now Tikka, water at regular intervals, and we were starting to run low, so I finally asked one couple if they could spare water, hoping to fill up my canteen, and they pulled out a 2.5-gallon jug and gave me the whole thing. I passed around a full canteen every ten minutes or so, and Luke and Tikka drank from it every time without argument. This was no time to be throwing caution to the wind. We’d done quite enough of that by this point, thankyouverymuch.

Luke and Tikka started messing around with the various jacks we had between the three trucks, getting the hub up off the ground, leveraging various parts of the car against other parts, and we put the shovel between the jack and fender to spread out the force a little bit, but the fender did flare and warp quite a bit.

They were trying to position the ball joint in such a way that they could slide it back together, which meant attempting to get enough leverage to force together something that should never have come apart in the first place. Not a winning prospect. At one point, this involved rolling “Trogdor” up to Gretl and trying to push against the hub with its giant tire. That didn’t work as well as we’d like, and we ended up with a little more fender damage from it, but it still wasn’t enough. Neither was having three guys standing on the hood trying to use their weight to knock it back into place.

Another car from Big Brother Camp had gone home to drop off the extra people who were stuck at the site, and they came back with Vanessa and Brian on board, carrying the truck repair bin that is essentially our truck’s diaper bag, if you will, (oil, coolant, zip ties, wrenches, Deep Creep). We also found a jacket, Tiger’s Milk bars, sandwiches, a jug of water, a headlamp, even an extra pack of cigarettes. They really came through for us when the call went out! I was so proud. I passed around the carob bars to our wayward mechanics. We hadn’t eaten for hours, and were starting to feel it.

I think the guys were beating on the hub with the back of the axe when another truck with a DPW logo came by full of people who were obviously ready to heckle the poor losers who broke down on the playa. But then the driver called out, “Hey, BRC Hardware’s in trouble! Let’s go!” and half a dozen people piled out of the back to see what the excitement was all about. They turned out to be from Spike’s Vampire Bar, and they recognized Marc, as he’d camped with them in ’07, and we’d fixed their Pants Cannon in ’08. (Wow… I live the kind of life where that’s a true statement. I think I win.)

Kid Kaos was down getting his hands greasy, and the rest of the crew lightened the mood by passing around flasks, making dirty jokes, and generally staying out of the way of the guys working on the car. They provided bug spray when the mosquitoes from Frog Farm found us just as the sun disappeared completely. It was a morale booster, and it suddenly felt like driving back to camp was somehow feasible, even though we weren’t yet sure how.

A half hour after sunset, we had Trogdor parked with its headlights facing the workers. There were three jacks with their handles jutting out of the wheel well in different directions. Luke ended up putting all of his weight on the hi-lift jack when Gretl fell forward off of the jacks, and as it impacted the ground, the ball joint popped into place.

There was a rustle of excitement, which quickly fell silent again as Luke got behind the wheel and started her up. He put it in reverse and began to back up so as not to run over the jacks and tools. She rolled back without any issues, and the crowd let out a cheer. I let out a long, tired sigh of relief.

Now that Gretl had 4 wheels intact, our plan was to go straight back to camp, but the guys from Spike’s invited us over to their camp for some beer on tap. It came down to “we insist,” so we were obligated to go, of course. We gingerly rolled a half mile straight in to the center of the playa and enjoyed a frosty beverage with our new friends. When it was time to head back to camp we had a hard time without the GPS and ended up on the wrong trajectory a couple of times before finally finding the right cluster of tents on the horizon. We had a small strobe marking our location, but it wasn’t too visible from such a distance.

At this point, I was sunburnt (moreso than anyone else) and exhausted, and I crawled into my tent, changed into something soft and cool on my skin, and curled up with my pillow. But it was the 4th of July, and Luke insisted that it was time to celebrate independence in the traditional way – with explosives. So I tore myself away from my sweet, soft pillow and ventured outside again.

We geared up with welding gloves and safety goggles, first. (What… we do insane, possibly illegal stuff, but at least we’re safe …er about it… We’re crazy, not stupid.) Then we started in with some extra large Roman Candles. Then we moved to the box of mortars, using the steel tubes we’d constructed back at home. Compared to the giant swaths of flame erupting from camps in the distance, our little *pop* *boom* *sparkle* wasn’t very impressive, so Luke set about to making another large explosion using a variety of ingredients that I probably shouldn’t share here.

I’ll admit it, I was just too worn out to have any more fun that night. I was grumpy about his seemingly-cavalier attitude toward dangerous activities, but I think I’d just had enough and I was shutting down. I waited in Gretl’s open back seat for a while, watching Vanessa and Brian light occasional mortars while Luke worked on setting up his pyro show. But I finally said, “Wake me up when it’s time to take him to the hospital,” which earned a couple of nervous laughs, and I navigated my way back to the tent and fell down on the bed.

When the explosion went off, the sound of the blast woke me out of my doze. Through the nylon taffeta walls of our tent I could see the bright orange-yellow ball of fire roiling and stretching high into the sky before it ate itself up and disappeared. I took off my shoes, got under the covers, and waited for Luke to come to bed, satisfied that there would be no trips to the hospital tonight.

When we awoke, it was time to make a quick breakfast of eggs and toast and tear down camp. Luke took the truck out for a little test drive, got it up to speed, made a few quick turns to see if anything would come apart, and he came back victorious (but still dubious). We had decided we were going to split up the journey so we wouldn’t have to drive at night, and we’d get a hotel in Klamath Falls. So we were packed up and ready to depart at around 2pm, and we said our goodbyes to Big Brother Camp.

As we headed down-playa toward the 13-mile entrance we saw a couple of large semis accompanied by an entourage of 4WD vehicles. One of the semis had an illustration of a rocket-ship-looking, wheeled vehicle, and said something about Land Speed Records. Curses! Just when things could have gotten exciting again we were pressed to continue on. We passed them and carefully maneuvered ourselves out of the desert and onto the highway.

That’s about the end of it all. Our stay at the Motel 6 in Klamath was marred by a malfunctioning wireless service and limited pool hours. After a gigantic breakfast at the Black Bear Diner we were on our way again, and each curve in the road put us all on edge. We crept home slowly, but steadily, and made it in time for dinner on Monday night. Plenty of excitement to last us… oh, until Labor Day, at least!