Burning Man Trip Story

When I first showed up to Burning Man, I was very overwhelmed.  I was in a 110 person camp where I knew no one.  If I feel like I’m an outsider, I can get pretty worked up and start worrying about being excluded.  This is a hangup from high school days and childhood that I’ve mostly gotten over.  Sometimes it just hijacks me.

My craigslist ride had dumped me off and I lugged my stuff to random spot and began setting up my tent alone.  We had our first camp meeting and somehow I convinced myself “They all know eachother and they don’t know me, I’m the outsider, and what if they don’t like me?”  It sounds silly but this is what I was experiencing.

I wrote in my journal, forced myself to breathe and keep it together, and then went out walking.  There was a skateboard halfpipe and a snowcone stand next to my camp so I jumped in line.  Still awkward feeling standing there, but I was in line so it was ok.  I got to the front of the line and they asked which flavor I wanted.  The bright colored snowcone alcohol coctail was being dispersed using IVs.  The guy behind the stand gave me my snowcone and I thanked him.  As I turned, a woman working at the booth offered me a hug.  There were few things I could have used more in that moment.   hugged her and all the tension and worry dissapated.  That was only my 2nd or 3rd hug there but it was definitely the most powerful.  We both had sunglasses on but I could tell she knew how bad I needed it.  It was a subtle knowing and loving smile.  I was tearing up and I finally relaxed.

The first couple of days of the burn treated me well but I still kept playing mind games with myself.  Fear of exclusion and/or being disliked by a group is a wild one. Burning Man is a place to work through emotional baggage.  It lends itself to a lot of interesting emotional work, if that’s what you’re open to.

It came to the point, where I wrote into my journal “You’re ok.  Anytime you get yourself worked up about something, you just need to tell yourself 'you’re ok.'  You don’t need to play those mind games anymore."

Thursday was a brilliant day.  I had made a bunch of new friends and already had all sorts of random experiences.  A campmate and I met up with a guy I had ridden up with(from the Craigslist ride) for a seminar called “How to drive a vulva”, taught by a couple lesbians.  Me and the other guy were both BM virgins and looked at each other like “What is this place?!” as a wildly decorated art car full of people dancing on it drove by playing “Pretty Young Thing” loud enough that our lesbian seminar leaders had to wait.

Later, the three of us ended up in heavy interesting conversations about the future of humanity.  We were out in deep playa, the expanse of open desert away from all the commotion and density of the city. From there, you can recognize that you are in just one smudge of humanity in a desert.  It makes the huge BM affair seem so frail, small, and totally man made.  This got us talking about the future of humanity.  Global warming was on my mind.  One of the friend’s kept probing “Do you think humanity is so special?  That we are somehow the blessed rightful occupants of this planet?”  We sat there, two of us in muumuus and one with a sombrero, and contemplated our place in the universe and history.

I split with the guys and wandered the playa alone for a while.  I surprise called my girlfriend on that 3 minute free phone booth.  I teared up to Bill Wither's “Lean on Me” being played as a rode by.  I was finally adjusted, comfortable, and happy. The mind games had stopped.

The tab of acid came to me.  I was certainly open to it but didn’t think it was going to be that night.  I ran into the crew I had formed in those 4 days at the camp.  They were rallying to go out and I was still in just a muumuu and half filled camelbak from the day.  But sure, I was up for joining them.  John, a guy from Tahoe, said “We just took some tabs, do you want one?”  It was so matter of fact, casual even.  I usually prepared for acid days to weeks in advance.  But here I was, it was Thursday at dusk and my friends were rolling out. Why not?  4 of us took it and the non taker, Andrew, laughed “Just so you know, I’m the worst DD there is.”  Excellent.  No worries.

Taking acid on a whim at night normally wouldn't be advisable. But at that moment, I had a bullet proof mind. I had spent the earlier part of the week churning and working through all sorts of emotions and odd hangups. At that point, with the tab on my tongue, I knew I was stable. My mind wasn't going to be allowed to dart down any dead ends.

We entered the middle of the playa by foot.  It's a massive expanse space filled with 20-30 ft tall art projects, art cars, and a lot of people with LED lights on.  The sky and ground are black but the horizon is absolutely buzzing with light and flames.  The 5 of us walked out into it, feeling small and excited for the trip.

The plan was to hop art cars.  Art cars are where someone took a bus or a large truck frame and completely remade/reworked it into some sort of theme.  It could be a reggae bus that looks like a dog (or lion) or it could be an old 19th century porch, ambling around the playa picking equally dressed up partiers.  I never went too far out of my way to get on them so it was fun to set aside a night to do so.

We ended up running into a woman named Jessa on one of the art cars.  I had ridden up with her via a craigslist ride.  It was now Thursday and that ride up felt much longer than 4 days prior.  She had frayed many of our nerves at the end of that cramped trip in an RV but that didn't matter now.  She had her boobs pushed way up in some kind of renaissance fair dress and was having a great time.  She seemed to happy to see me, the virgin, having such a great time.  I had clearly adjusted.  The guy she was with clued us into the pee funnel the art car had aboard (super convenient).

From what I remember, we hopped a bunch of different art cars for an hour or so.  On one of them, we came across this guy who was doing very quick sketches of people.  He would look at you for 2-3 seconds and in 10 seconds he would render you a caricature of yourself.  I was wearing pretty much nothing but a shoulder to toe African print muumuu dress.  When I looked at my sketch, somehow that stick figure looked like me (not a hallucination).

Our art car eventually stopped out by an area called Burn Wall Street.  There were a couple 4 story buildings with logos and signs meant to look like Bank of America and Goldman (I think).  Despite the fact that Burning Man probably has so many people who work on Wall St or for large companies that control the US, I was happy to see something of a political statement.  It's amazing how much banks get away with now.

We approached the Wall St. buildings.  They were so white and brightly lit compared to the dark openness of the playa.  The acid was starting to come on in the exciting way it does.  This can cause a lot of anxiety but nothing was getting to my bullet proof mind.

Inside the wall street buildings, there wasn't much.  Empty for a reason.  We ambled up the staircase to take in the view from up top.

This was when I started to see things differently.  There was a lot of political graffiti on the walls in there.  People had also torn up dollar bills and made interesting messages and art with them. Normally, you could just glance at something like that and be like "oh cool. political art. Next!".  But acid makes things so much more intense.  Things that could be glossed over are suddenly real and full of depth and interpretation.  Oh yeah…money…that force on our lives and our societies.  This green paper, this idea that controls the kind of world we have or don't have.  Oh yeah…the banks control us…the financial elite control us and can pretty much get away with anything.  And this group of elite psychopaths really fucked us over hard in the last couple of years.  But most people, including me, just forget about it and go back to our lives.  Why do they have so much power and seem to care so little about the lives of the other people living in this world around them?  These are the sorts of questions I began to entertain.

We ambled back down the ladders and went outside.  I realized that one of the guys in our group, Bryan, was starting to have a bad trip (he had mixed the acid with a couple other things).  I was just jumping into the intensity of a great adventurous trip and his mind was going into dark corners and dark possibilities that really don't need to be entertained.  His gaze was serious and he was just looking down as he walked.  Andrew, the self-proclaimed worst DD ever, was getting us moving back towards camp.  It was not a short walk.  Bryan was fine and walking but you could tell he was fighting an intense battle in his mind.  I hugged him from behind and told him "You're ok, Bryan.  You're out here right now with a bunch of awesome new friends who have your back."  He nodded.  "I hope this helps," I said.  "It does," was all he said.  He was still in there but just temporarily caught up in something heavy.

I, on the other hand, was just diving right in.  It was open and free out there in the open flat playa.

In salsa dancing classes, we did this exercise to practice your spins and turning your head at the right time when you spin.  You would stand sideways and then spin across the dance floor, but always turning your head forward as you did so.  It was enjoyable then and it was going to be enjoyable now.  I began to spin sprint across the playa.  I had just my muumuu and my camelbak on. The camelbak pulled away from my back from the centrifugal force and I just kept going.  An art car was going by me and I'm told they were cheering me on at one point.  My body felt so good and free, just running and rotating.  It's so wonderful to come back into touch with your body.  My legs live under a desk chair most of the time but they can still sprint and spin.  You wake up to this every once in a while "Hey, I have a body!"  The million lights of the playa looked like a giant band of colorful light around me.  There was the dark playa below and the dark sky above and this wonderful band of pretty light circling me on the periphery.  At that moment, there was nothing other than darkness, my legs, and that band of light.

It didn't dizzy me for some reason.  It was just pure motion bliss.  "I highly recommend more spinning!" I shouted at the 4 of them.  Andrew got a kick out of it, that guy is just a ball of happiness and laughter.  It was nice to have him taking care of Bryan.  John and Kim were also enjoying the walk back.  We headed towards center camp because that's where we could best orient ourselves.

As we passed by center camp, I could make out some very fun sounding circus music playing inside.  It began to pull and seduce me into it like a siren.  Stay with the team or go in?  They were definitely going back to center camp to take care of Bryan (or at least get him into a comfortable place).  But the music was pulling me so hard, I caved.  "It's pulling me in, guys, I got to see this", I relented.  Andrew didn't seem the least bit bothered. "See you back at camp!" he shouted, smiling.  We parted and I walked into center camp.

Center camp is this very large tent (gazebo?) in the middle of the playa.  I remember the warm red and orange colors of it and the flags rippling in the wind on it's roof feeling so welcoming to approach.

I was by myself but I had a bullet proof mind.

Inside, there was this wacky circus marching band playing.  There was about 20 of them, all dressed up the same rocking punk marching band outfits.  There were these sassy blonde tough looking cheerleaders and these flamboyant mustached men on stilts doing synchronized dancing.  I'd never seen anything like it.  A lot of the crowd was in similar costumes and they were absolutely loving it.  I walked into the seating and half rocked out and half stood in awe.  There were brass instruments of every size and shape, drums, singing, the whole crowd was going nuts and singing with them.  The band had this song that gets everyone singing "Ohhhhhhhhhh, yeahhhhhh! Feeeeeeeeeeelliiiiiiiinnn Alive!" (repeated 15 times with tuba and trumpet solos).  I rocked out and sang with them all best I could with all the scruffy guys in top hats.  A British guy told me they were "March Fourth" (not pronouncing the 'r's of course).

Eventually March Fourth winded down, after many 10 minute jams and encores.  That part of center camp cleared out quickly and there I was hanging what still felt like a circus.  Across from center camp, I could hear someone playing that "Somebody that I used to know" song quite loudly.  I was mostly tired of the song but decided to walk over and see what was up.

They weren't just playing the song loudly.  They were all meowing to it.  Around 20 people were all meow singing the song together.  It took me a bit to understand it.  This was a coordinated meow party.  Some of them were dressed up as cats too.  It wasn't long before I jumped in meowing along with them.  We did Dancing Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, and several others.  Most people would meow for quite a good stretch but then inevitably break into laughter at the absurdity of it.  More people joined and meowed with us but most would approach and then up on the ground because they were laughing so hard.  It threw you such a curve ball and made you laugh harder than you had in a long time.  I hadn't seen coordinated mass silliness like that.  After it ended, the girls who led the group were high-fiving each other congrats for a meow party success.

I meandered back toward my camp eventually.  It took so long to get anywhere because things would either pull me in or not look how I remembered.  I ran into John and Kim, they were going back out.  I knew I needed to fill my camel bak and was a block away from camp but it sounded fun to go back out with them.

So we entered the open playa again.  John and Kim were this cool outdoorsy couple from Tahoe that you couldn't help but fall in love with a bit.  John was more your no BS mountain man.  He had a goatee and was wearing this fun fur jacket that night.  Kim was this super cute and blunt Boston girl.  It was her first year but she was not going to get shown up on costumes.  I saw her white costume, her pink costume, and several other ones.  She had that I-don't-give-a-fuck I-climb-mountains-and-am-also-gorgeousness that makes guys develop little crushes on her.  We were all still tripping so it made sense to continue the adventure together.

We wandered from art piece to art piece for a while.  There was this one contraption that we can across that involved a bit of participation.  It was this spinning human driven fire contraption. Ok, so it had this 15 foot circular cage that spun because it was driven by a shaft that was then turned by people on the ground.  It seemed to exist to burn the excess scrap from the art projects.  There was this absolute babe in charge of this thing.  She would calibrate the drive shaft so it was balanced or something and then she would crank it at the end to get the thing spinning faster.  It was setup like a person could basically row and that would spin the shaft.  She was wearing Carhartt's and a bikini top and had this ripped elegant back (probably from cranking that shaft all night).  I was standing there admiring her back muscles and then she asked me to turn it.  I was tripping decently hard but was still up for it.  I grabbed that frickin rowing shaft and cranked it as hard as I could.  My back and arms felt alive with the work. A person would try to get on the other side to help crank with me but I was going so fast there was no keeping up.  It was clear that I couldn't crank it any harder so I just stepped back and watched that burning wood spin.

We kept wandering from piece to piece.  Things would suck us in and captivate us for a bit and we bopped around.  It was 2:30 in the morning then but I was still plenty warm in my muumuu.  It generally gets cold at night so this was a surprise.  A warm breeze had picked up after a totally calm night and some clouds were blowing over, partially obscuring the moon at times.  The three of us were admiring the stars, moon, and clouds but began to worry talk about rain.  Up to this point in the week, it had been either hot and dusty during the day or slight chilly at night (like clockwork).  The prospect of rain was exciting but sort of scary.  John talked about how one year it rained so hard people got stranded for a bit.  The clouds and rapidly changing sky were thrilling to watch.  The warm breeze kept coming and the moon would be obscured by dark clouds one minute and white and bright the next.  We weren't going to do much but wait as the sky decided what it wanted to do.

Finally, it began.  The pitter patters hit the dust puddles and you could hear people began to shout and scream with delight from all corners.  There were probably still a good ten thousand people awake at this point.  The three of us were near the roller disco and the DJ, of course, put on "Blame it on the rain" by Mille Vanille.

The roller disco was literally just that.  Some dedicated rollerskating loving savant had taken the time to haul what must have been a thousand square feet of smooth boards to make a roller disco.  He/She had also brought probably 80 pairs of skates out.  John, Kim, and I struggled to find our sizes before giving up and just sliding around on the slippery boards to the music.  A group of probably 8 naked guys were dancing around in the rain and occasionally dog piling on each other (laughing their asses off doing so).  I'd seen so much random stuff that night already that I looked at them and merely thought "Oh."

The rain passed.  It was just a sprinkling after all.  We had been spared of a day of muck.  It was just a little seasoning rain, just enough to be tasty.

We were slaked with thirst and so made our way back to camp.  Trying to move fast on acid is next to impossible. You keep wanting to stop and admire things.  At the portapotties, I exclaimed "I'm so damn thirsty."  A guy turned around, with a look of concern on his face.  The way he was dressed, his demeanor, and tone of voice told me he was a kindred spirit.  "Are you ok? Do you need some water?" he asked me, concerned.  "My camp is just 4 blocks away so we're almost there," I replied.  He shook his head, still concerned about me.  "That's still a long ways out here at this hour."  He dug into his backpack and found a gatorade bottle filled with water to give me.  I had some of it and handed it back.  He told me to keep it.  We thanked him profusely.

We made it back to camp.  Bryan was sitting in the same place at the couch in our camp and bobbing his head up and down.  Vanessa, one of the camp leaders, was taking care of him and telling people to leave him alone.  There were still so many people awake and out.

It felt so good to meander back to my tent, my temporary little blue home. Base. My 2.5 gallon jugs of water were sitting there under the moonlight and what a relief it was to tear into them.  I had my headlamp on the camel bak as I poured that sweet clear water into it.  Resupplied.

It was still no time for bed.  John, Kim, and I walked to center camp.  One of the things I liked about Kim is just how real she was.  She woke me up to the fact that I had been looking for validation so often.  I would go to her for validation (I can't remember how) and she would say (with her thick Boston accent) "You're doing really great, Kyle.  We're all real proud of you. Keep up the good work."  It was very sarcastic but it was what I needed to hear.  She would say it each time I kept asking for validation.

It was mostly empty at this time but all of the lights were on.  Center camp has a bit of everything. It's in the shade but it's also open and spacious with room to lounge and relax.  It was likely 4am at this point. There was really interesting art work around.  There was one piece that showed burners in away from Burning Man.  The setting they were in was normal mundane every day life but they were in their full burning man costumes.  I thought they felt sad and out of place in the default world but Kim thought they looked happy and defiant.  We looked through the art and all the random books they had strewn around center camp.

I dug into one of them and I don't remember what it was about but I do remember the author's note at the end.  She said something like "I'm quite a cynical and agnostic person normally but Burning Man, as of the early 90s, remains one of the most spiritual and powerful places there are out there."  There I was, 2012, maybe 15-20 years after she wrote that, and it was like she was speaking through the pages to me.  I was in the same desert as she was, having so much fun and growth in a spot where so many thousands of others had before me.  I'm none too spiritual either but I could feel the presence or energy of all the people who had come before me there.  My amazing trip and night was just one of many and the ingredients of burning man are what provided it.

John and Kim began to fade and went back to camp.  I stood there in center camp and just took it in.  I was present and in shock by how much random adventure I'd just had.  It was so peaceful and empty in center camp and I had pretty much come down.

It was still fairly dark and the stars were out as I walked back to camp.  I trudged slowly and thought about all the adventures I'd had.  My mind was blown.  Even as I write this, I can't do it that much justice.  What's this world all about, anyway?  Do people know what they're doing as much as they pretend to?  What are we doing here?  Everything seemed so fluid and understandable at that point.  We're all just playing roles in this big play on this green wet planet in the middle of nowhere.

It was one of those rare sonder moments when I realize that the world does not revolve around me.  I'm just a small temporary blip of a person in a big world.  Liberated from all my normal worries and mental droning.

We like to think that people have known roles, so that we can put them into place.  A plumber is a plumber.  Well no, he's just a guy who learned how to work on plumbing and he likes kayaking with his kids on weekends.  Obama, our savior, our genius half black president. Our beloved leader! Well no, he's just one of those overachieving law students who learned to play the game, well.  It's all just a bunch of people, playing roles, making shit up and figuring things out.  I mean I hope the people who build our bridges are following the real "laws" out there but hey, bridges fall down.  Even they are just doing their best.  We're all so much more fallible and alone than we give off so much of the time.

I was so freaked out going to burning man.  They're not going to like me, I'm not going to fit in, I won't get it, it'll be too intense.  But it was anything but that.  You just throw yourself in and you'll be ok.  Stop working yourself up over things like that.  It's all just bunch of people and they don't know what they're doing either.

I made it back to my tent and it was just starting to get light out.  After such an experience, things I took for granted looked different.  I was fascinated by my own hands and the curly shape of my dirty toes.  My body was a marvelous thing to be in and look at.

Right as I went to get into my tent, I heard someone whisper loudly "Hey! Do you want to see three moons?"

There were 3 neighbors, older dudes next to our camp.  They were taking turns looking through a telescope.  The latin one beckoned me.  "Hey, come see three moons," he said with an awesome thick Mexican accent.  Well it's not like I'm really going to sleep now, so ok.  I walked over and waited my turn at the telescope.  They were a group of friendly old timers.  I made friends and alluded to the wild night I had just finished.  He showed me how to find one of Jupiter's moons, another moon I can't remember, and watch our own moon as it set over the desert hillside.  The act of looking at something that is so so far away was already part of the trip I was on.  Again, the perspective of thinking beyond Earth changes how you see the normal 'mundane' life and world we live everyday.

I was pretty rattled from the whole night, in a good way.  I ended up in a conversation with one of the guys as the others took turns with the telescope.  He was mostly bald but had some nice tufts and these big kind blue eyes.  He also these amazing laugh lines and wrinkles on his smiling face.  He was simply a beautiful kind old man.  I got to talking his ear off about the night and all the thoughts I was having.  I told him about how much fun it was to sneak into someone's backyard on the way up to the burn to go to a private beach there.  We got to talking about life and the world and how silly it is that one needs to sneak into a beach on a lake we all share.  I told him about how freaked out I had been before the burn and how amazing my camp turned out and how welcomed I felt.  He just listened to me and was so soothing to talk to and I began to cry a bit because I was so overwhelmed by the experience.  He said something interesting about how the left brain is not supposed to be running the world but it is right now.  The part of the brain that chops things up and relies on often crazy logic was never meant to be in charge.  He said that the right brain or basically the more soulful loving connected part of us should have a much stronger say for how we operate in the world.  He went and grabbed a really old copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and read "Oh, Pioneers" to me.  He ripped out the page and told me that I'd find the part that meant something to me.

I parted with the kind astronomer friends and went and sat down in a loungey chair in my camp.  Bryan had made it to bed and there were a variety of people slouched over in different chairs or couches.  Dawn was coming slowly.  The wispy cirrus clouds danced and jiggled off in the orange horizon.

Then I went and cleaned myself with baby wipes and finally crawled into my sleeping bag.