Last year I spent a lot of time hanging out at Camp Vulcan, with the jugglers. They were a cool group of people (although not enough of them could pass clubs!) and for a while I considered joining their camp in 2011. Unlike Snowflake Village, where I stayed in 2009 and 2010, Camp Vulcan charged a fee, but included in the fee was a meal plan and water for the week.
It seemed like a great idea, and I was ready to jump ship up until Thursday night, when Snowflake had its yearly camp-wide potluck formal dress dinner. There was such a sense of community and family there, and there were so many cool, fascinating people, that I realized that joining the jugglers would have been a terrible mistake, and that what I really wanted was to come stay with Snowflake Village again.
This was my third year with Snowflake Village, and it really is a great community. This year it had 260 people, divided into ten or fifteen smaller sub-camps. These included the Burning Band, a full-scale marching band; Videogasm, which shows short films, experimental films, and Friday night Rocky Horror; and the Vegemite Appreciation Society, a group of Aussies who spent their time distributing Vegemite on buttered bread.
One of the new camps this year was the Blue Crew, a group of folks that drove down in a giant blue school bus and set up a lively game of 3D Twister:
I arrived in Black Rock City about an hour or two before dawn this year (we pulled up to the line at 12:30am, and made it through the gate by 3:30--not a terribly long line at all, for Burning Man). That early in the week there weren't very many landmarks. Nor where there many lights yet, so it was also quite dark. At one point I stumbled across a giant, ten-foot-high sculpture that sort of looked like a snowflake, and was right next to a huge, walled camp with icicle LED lights and assumed that Snowflake Village had grown enormously since last year! As it turned out, by the light of dawn it was actually a sculpture of a gear, and the walled camp was really First Camp, where all the big shots* live. Eventually I just dropped my gear in a little pile by Center Camp and trudged aimlessly around the esplanade hoping to find my way. That was the worst part of the trip this year--that very first hour, walking around in the dark.
But it was soon over! When I did find my camp, dawn was breaking and the Blue Craw had just pulled up in their big blue school bus. It seemed silly to go to sleep then, so I helped them set up their sleeping area. As a result, they invited me to join them, and I got a lovely spot in the corner. They had used their bus to form one wall, and a trailer to form another. Then they pulled a series of tarps over the top, creating a luxuriously shady area. It still got a bit hot during the day, but it was almost like sleeping indoors.
(There's my tent in the back right of this photo)
I spent most of my down time this year hanging out with the Mensa camp. This is partly because they are all awesome (and, by definition, smart) people, and partly because they have not one but two great hang-out spaces. The first one is Starbutt's Café, run by Flossie Starbutts III. He's a wonderfully kind fellow that greets everyone by rubbing noses, and each year he and his wife, Your Fly is Open, fill their vintage Airstream with enough ground coffee, soy milk, honey, sweetener, and Bailey's to keep everyone caffeinated for a week. He always has a big shade structure with plenty of chairs, and it's a really good spot to hang out and chat to people.
The other great space Mensa provides is their big public gift, the "Shack of Sit" (where sit happens). It's a large, shaded structure right by the Esplanade full of chairs and ice water. Everyone on the playa is encouraged to stop by, grab a seat, and watch the parade of people go by. The Esplanade is Black Rock City's Main Street--it's the innermost ring, right between the outer section (with all the camps) and the interior (which is nothing bu Art and desert). Needless to say, there is some fantastic people-watching to be had!
One day in the Shack of Sit one of my camp-mates invented a new game, or perhaps just an interesting new way to mess with people's heads. It took advantage of the fact that Burners are, and I certainly include myself in this, hyper-sensitive to two things: litter and commercialism.
Burning Man is a "leave no trace" event, which means that at the end of the week every piece of litter, every cigarette butt, and every single feather gets picked up and carried away, to be thrown out back in civilization. The only way that this is really practical is if all 50,000 burners remain vigilant about noticing and grabbing litter--"Matter Out Of Place", or MOOP, as it's known. If you see something on the ground that shouldn't be there, it's second nature to grab it before it blows away.
Burning Man is also a rabidly non-commercial event. With a few small exceptions** selling things for money is absolutely prohibited. Some things get bartered, but the vast majority of transactions are part of the "gift economy". For example, people spend the whole year saving up so that they can buy a ton of booze in order to open a bar in Black Rock City that "sells" free liquor. A young woman set up a stall near my camp where she had a bunch of jewelry, buttons, and mix tapes that she had made. It was just like something you might see at a tourist stop by the road, except that she wasn't charging money for any of it. It was a beautiful thing.
So anyway, this game that we were playing was very simple. Take a dollar bill, write "MOOP" on it in marker, and throw it out to the playa. First of all, a number of people were so out of it that they didn't even see the money, or their costume was too cumbersome for them to pick it up if they wanted to. But for the others, there was a great shock of cognitive dissonance between the impulse of "ooh, free money" followed immediately by, "but I'm at Burning Man and money is bad here!" followed by, "but it's also litter!!! Aaagh!"
(This fellow did not reach down to pick up anything)
We had our Thursday night potluck extravaganza again this year, and it was fantastic as usual. This year, instead of a costume contest, we had an Epic Pinata Event. The pinata in question was named Tony the Pony, and it started life as a fairly innocuous white pony with a hot pink mane. Before long, however, someone had stuck a cigarette in its mouth, and by the time it was full of candy someone else had strapped on an enormous rubber phallus. So when the time came, Tony was hanging in the middle of geodesic dome, half smoked cigarette and large pink cock both dangling in the wind.
The first contestant was handed a large metal pole and then blindfolded, at which point the large poll was removed and a small wooded paddle substituted. The penis and the cigarette flew off after the first couple of good whacks, but in general Tony proved to be a surprisingly tough little pony. He made it more or less intact through three blindfolded participants, and then I stepped up to bat. I won.
(Photo by BKos)
A few days later, when the time came to burn the Man, I found myself in the midst of a group of strangers who soon became friends. As I passed around my flask of absinthe I first ensured that the recipient was a fan of black licorice (otherwise it's a real waste of absinthe!). As it happened, the person in front of me was such a fan that he had brought a pack of black licorice with him! Now, one of the cool prizes that had popped out of Tony's stomach was a mini kaleidoscope. It was pocket sized, and mirrored whatever you were looking at eight times. So after we'd passed the absinthe and the licorice back and forth for a bit, I handed him the kaleidoscope and said, "Here, try some poor man's acid". He thanked me, but said he didn't do drugs, and then got the widest grin on his face when I showed him what it really was. I eventually just told him to pass it along to the person to his right--I have no idea how far it made it around the circle.
This time, however, I was much more relaxed. I didn't even open up the guide book, and I spent more time in my own camp than I did in other camps. In addition to Starbutts and the Shack of Sit, I also visited the Australians (although I didn't get to hang out with them as much as I would have liked this year) and Pleasure Garden. It turned out that one of the members of Pleasure Garden makes his living as a professional brewer, and had brought several kegs of his own work with him!
I spent more time in the hanging out with Dreamy and Tickles and Cyclopedia--great people, that I had already gotten to know from my previous years. I got to know them better this year, however. In fact, Tickles (who is a costume designer in the real world) is currently making me a skirt! I also hung out with Madtown and Rana, and hopefully I'll get to see them more often in Chicago--they both live in Wisconsin, and are Dr. Who fans.
I am, of course, already looking forward to next year. My hope is that by then, my fourth year, I'll have my act together enough to have some participatory event or another (I'm thinking of hosting a Shakespeare reading, perhaps). I'd also like to volunteer more. My first two years it felt like if I slowed down for even a second I'd miss something wonderful! This year I finally realized that it was true, but that there were plenty of wonderful things, and that one could never see all of them, anyway!
**As a fund raiser, Center Camp does sell coffee, lemonade, and ice cubes for cash. The proceeds are donated to local schools as a good-will gesture, to thank to local community for letting us party in their back yard, so to speak.
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