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.