Be careful when you ask for a sign...

There’s this guy.  He’s really tall and stiff.  We have a yearly thing, it’s fiery, and then no contact for months.  Our Facebook relationship status would be “It’s Complicated.”  His name is Burning Man.

It’s complicated for a lot of reasons.  I am, at best, a reluctant Burner.  When I talk to the people I love who are enthusiastic, card-carrying, life-membership Burners, I will agree that it can be an amazing experience.  The art is phenomenal.  Many of the interactions that happen there are deep and meaningful and unusual.  People hug more and express their joy more than in the default world.

 

But there are also plenty of people there highly invested in their own coolness.  I don’t need another middle school experience, thanks.  While the organization is working on this, it is also mostly white and pretty elitist—those tickets are expensive and that’s just the initial hurdle since that doesn’t touch the cost of all the stuff a person needs to live there for a week or more. 

 

And then there is the place itself.  Oh my goodness, does the playa hate me.  If I have a natural habitat, I can absolutely guarantee it is not a prehistoric lakebed at altitude with alkaline dust, hideous windstorms, excessive heat, surprising cold, and occasional flash-flooding.  I am not a person with a lot of big fears, but one that I do not seem to be able to overcome is my fear of high winds.  When coupled with whiteout from dust, the wind leaves me a quivering mass of panic.

 

The friends I have there, despite them being lovely humans who bring me joy, are not enough to make me go.  Neither is the thought-provoking and beautiful art.  I go because Burning Man is Brent’s happy place.  I go because it is important to my marriage.

 

Let me digress a moment:  my first Burn happened about a month after I started dating Brent.  I had basically no idea what I was getting into.  I didn’t have enough time off work to go for more than the weekend, but off I went on Friday.  By Saturday, despite my best efforts (and no, I wasn’t even drinking alcohol), I was so dehydrated that I passed out.  I woke up in the med tent—before the current fancy Emergency Services Department and the Rampart hospital and everything—with an IV.  I got four liters of fluids pumped back into me.  While I was incapacitated, Brent had sprung into action to sort out how he was going to take me home, how to get my car home, and every other detail.  He took amazing care of me.  This is one of the reasons I married him in the first place.

 

This year, Burning Man was not doing my marriage any favors.  I don’t fully get why, and I’m not going to go into the parts I do get.  I was struggling.  Because Brent and I both volunteer for Emergency Services, he as the IT manager for ESD Communications and as an ESD dispatch supervisor and me as an admin, we tend to spend the first part of my time there doing our respective jobs.  We planned to go do the Burning Man thing on Wednesday (that’s today) before I headed home on Thursday.  But on Tuesday, I arranged to meet up with some other friends to go explore the city.

 

At first, all was well on Tuesday.  I like riding my bike across the playa.  I met up with my dear friends.  We set off to explore.  And then the wind rose and the dust came.  We were out in the middle of the playa, away from the city, and we could barely see each other.  Each time the weather would clear a bit, we’d move to another large piece of art, taking shelter at landmarks until we could see again.  I breathed deeply, as best I could.  My friends took good care of me.  But there was nothing for it; I had to suck it up and deal.  Eventually, we felt our way back to the city itself, where the structures blocked enough of the wind that it wasn’t a whiteout.  My blood pressure came down a bit.  I breathed easier.  But I still felt shaky enough that I wanted to make my way back to camp.

 

We biked along slowly, taking in the scenery.  I was given a really cool pin by a passing art car.  I stopped to show it to my friends and a large plywood sign toppled over on me, hitting me in the head, hard.  My friends stayed with me, of course, but also got more help.

 

Emergency Services to the rescue!  One of the ambulance units came and checked me out.  Other folks got on the radio and found Brent, who was doing an on-call shift for IT.  He came and got me.  I cried a lot, both because my head hurt and because the whole thing had been so stressful and scary.

 

(I am, obviously, not dead.  I don’t have any bad concussion symptoms.  I have been checked by medics and by a nurse friend in camp.  I have a big old bump on my head and I hurt all over, but I’ll live.)

 

Brent took me back to camp, cleaned me up, and tucked me in to rest.  When I woke up, again, he had figured out how he was going to take me home, how to get my car home, and all the other details.

 

I am safely home now.  I am clean.  Brent loves me.  And the playa has told me not to let the door hit me in the… head… on my way out.

Not Reading Report

Sometimes I decide not to finish reading a book.  Today was one of those days.  This book (all right:  it’s two books, containing four volumes of one work) is The Life of George Washington by Washington Irving.  It has been on my shelf for years and for as long as I can remember it was on my parents’ bookshelf before that.  I assume it was there because the bindings are pretty; some of the pages are still uncut.

I made it about forty pages into the first volume.  The actual prose is pleasant.  Irving tells a good story, which is not surprising from the man who gave us “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  (Incidentally, he also first associated the name Gotham with New York and the Knickerbocker for whom the Knicks are named was his creation.)

 

The tone is more hagiography than biography.  I was willing to deal with that for a while, but then there was a totally uncritical comment about a manager of a property living only with such negros as necessary to run the place and then I gave up somewhere in the middle of a bunch of bad faith negotiations with various Native American peoples as a way of promoting English colonization instead of French colonization.  I just can’t stomach the basic racism and genocide at the core of our national history.

 

Wikipedia informs me that Irving’s style of biography (he also wrote biographys of Mohammed and Christopher Columbus) is now called “romantic history,” a mixture of fact and fictional elements to give the story more punch.  He is the source of the mistaken idea that Europeans before Columbus believed the earth to be flat, so I’d say he was pretty darn influential.  In spite of this, the factual parts of his work seem to have held up to modern scrutiny, more or less.  To me, it reads like the kind of biography of heroes given to fourth graders but with better writing:  no warts here!

 

I expect I could learn something if I plowed through the rest of the pages, but life is short and I’d rather read something better, something that did not gloss over the difficult parts.