Tuesday Morning sunrise on the playa was gorgeous and a religious experience. Well thats what Dan told me when I got up 9ish or so. We made coffee playa style, which involves BBQing a teapot of water and pouring said boiling water into a coffee press and squeezing out the caffinated nectar of the gods for consumption. We had bagels and cream cheese (cream cheese being a desert luxury) breakfast was good. We had plenty of cream cheese for the week because we had 2 300qt ice chest of storage, one with 200lbs dry ice(our freezer) and the other with hmmm forgot "a lot" or regular ice(our refrigerator). Did I mention overkill in our outfitting for this trip?? Anyhow now with full bellies we look at the next task at hand, setting up the "public" tent. The plan here is to have an open space to welcome others into and meet new peoples. The structure is another parachute dome with a muslin wrap around the lower lever. We planned to paint the muslin in a Maxfield Parish sorta way (surreal surroundings with happy women) and lay carpet on the ground (comfy for hanging out on and reduces dust) annnnnnd a Co2 misting system to cool the denizens of this oasis. All this surrounding a professional massage table!! (we have two professionals joining our camp later).
So with this all in mind.... we decide "Let's go look around" and put off work till later. This is definitely a burning man mind set. So we set out on bikes (me on my shiny new "yahoo" mountain bike and Dan on his "flutterbyke") my favorite joke was when we would ride by and people would admire Dan's work and ingenuity on the Flutterbyke and say something like "Kewl Bike!" and I would say "thank you I just bought it" and feign confusion that they were not referring to my bike. We decided to go find "Kiki" at tic toc town and see how her fire fall was coming and get a general lay of the land.
Sorry I don't have pictures to share with you. I really wish I had some but I didn't bring a camera and I don't know if I would have used one if I had brought it. It's one of those things thats hard explain because I would really love to have pictures of friends and kewl things that were seen but people taking pictures at Blackrock seems to represent something very bad which I'll try to describe later in the week.
Black Rock City is a really amazing place. It's about as casual as you can get but at the same time there is lot's of energy going about. People are amazingly cool !! Strangers come up to you and offer you sensuous fruit! Most people have smiles and the atmosphere is ultra non threatening. I read lot of bad things about the sheriffs and black rock rangers hassling people but I saw one sheriff at the gate and the Ranger were more like helpful information peoples. Paradise found?? (odd note the one book I brought for reading was "The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri") it would seem so. I saw a girl do a volley ball body dive to catch a sandwich bag that got away in the wind! WOW "Leave NO trace" isn't just a slogan out here it's a religion. I am not capable of the prose to describe the City but it truly is wondrous...
Well after finding Kiki and running into Dark Angel as well seeing some of the sights we headed back to camp and set up the public space. We got it setup with little trouble and found we had new neighbors, playing "dance" music! Well as it turned out they were extremely cool people from Canada (eh?) Vancouver B.C. and we made friends with them and the music didn't seem so bad now. Well we shared some food and went with them to the other side of Black Rock City to the RAVE dance camps and burned some calories till hmm had no chronometer with me but guess 3am ish
(more .....later)
Wednesday, October 20th, 1999 todd@notreality.com