Seeking An Extraordinary Life - A Travel Journal

Waking up is a long slow process in the Black Rock International Burner Hostel. First up is Hagey, an early riser, who roams the house from 6am onwards with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, complaining about his aches and pains in a constant lowkey mumble. Over the next four or more hours various rumpled figures emerge from sofas, sleeping bags and beds, the coffeemaker begins to drain and fill and drain again, a low buzz of activity builds around the computers in the study and the table in the kitchen, a few people migrate to the deckchairs in the garden to slowly come to life in the morning sun.

As we are among the first up, I go out for a walk with James, to exercise his dog Chewie and Hagey's dog Limbo. James is a good-looking guy in his twenties or early thirties, with a thick blonde beard, small retangular glasses and a collection of pendants and dogtags which jingle constantly on his bare chest. A friend of his has recently purchased a huge area of land not far from the playa, and they're making plans and taking investment to build a self-contained community there, a centre for environmental education and green technologies.

James explains the plan as we do circuits of the local park and playground, the dogs pulling ahead on their leashes. He's got a slow philosophical way of speaking, often pausing to think of the right word, and his thinking is equally careful and precise. He's worked a lot of different jobs and travelled all over, and he has a very definite philosophy of what is a worthwhile way to use one's time. Like me right now, he's learning to be in the moment, to appreciate the here and now without worrying about the future or being self-conscious and afraid of others' reactions.

When we return to the house we find most of the residents up and about, so I heat up the griddle and after some searching around the unfamiliar kitchen for implements I start work on a batch of scotch pancakes, scaling up my usual recipe to allow for about 15 people. While I feel nervous at first, this being my first time cooking for a large group (and the first time I've really cooked since leaving home), it proves surprisingly easy to scale up the batch size and once I've got the heat of the griddle adjusted I'm turning out pancakes at a steady rate and they're disappearing equally fast.

The household gathers round the table, loading pancakes with "Canadian Bacon" (cheap ham of which all Canadians deny ownership), maple syrup and honey, and with a steady production line going I have time to move back and forth, chat with my fellow Burners and get a couple of plates in myself. It's a thoroughly sociable way to start the day, and appreciation of the pancakes is universal.

I spend the day at the hostel this time, just chatting or working on the blog. Kiwi, Roy and Trent head out in the afternoon to make a trip north, partly to speak to the legendary temple builder David Best. New Burners have arrived - Ina from Canada who's been minding one of the last camps on the playa, and the first group of Department of Public Works staffers, finally exhausted from tearing down the city and cleaning the desert, who've come into town for some R&R.

DPW are a very different breed, and I don't get on with them quite as well as the other Burners. Male or female (and they're fairly evenly mixed), reckless macho determination, bravado and mayhem are their watchwords as opposed to most Burners' more peaceful brand of anarchy, and many of them tend to be very into guns and other weaponry. They do an extraordinary job building and tearing down the city, working in incredible isolation and the hardest conditions, but they're well aware of it and some are inclined to treat regular Burners with derision as tourists.

In the evening the DPW group book rooms at the Peppermill casino hotel for a night of luxury and partying, and invite everyone else in the hostel to join them. I stay, conscious of my early start in the morning to catch the bus (I still haven't received a rideshare offer and I'm assuming Greyhound will end up being mode of transport), and the house gradually empties around me. A few stay till after midnight to relax in the hot tub but eventually move on.

Since the others won't be back till tomorrow this is goodbye for most of the people I've gotten to know here. Gadget is the hardest to say goodbye to - we've been together through the hardest part of this process, and brough each other through the decompression to this oasis. Pickle and Lohr I feel like the best of friends with already, we've spent so much time joking and talking food together. It's amazing how fast you bond with people in this community - even Ina, who arrived only mid-morning, already feels like a close friend, and we say goodbye with regret. Jewel and I have spent hours talking together about my journey and hers, and where she goes from here - there are real tears when we separate.

Finally the house is empty except for myself, Hagey (who is finally getting a good night's sleep) and Georgia who has to be up for work in the morning. I'm quite pleased with the arrangement - I'm ready for a quiet evening in, the DPW's agressive partying style wouldn't suit me and it gives me a chance for a serious photo-uploading session. I get all my photos added to my Photobucket account, needing only to be hooked up to the pages themselves (should have them in place shortly).

Finally I hit the sack around 1am, later than planned but with time to at least get some rest before the bus. The house is quiet around me.

Labels: black rock international burner hostel, burners, Burning Man, Nevada, reno, scotch pancakes

The plan for today is to get to the motel, get our gear cleared out before checkout time, then Gadget will return to the hostel (he's decided to stick around a few more days) and I will get a bus out to a suitable hitch-hiking point and begin heading towards Houston. Frankly Hagey has recommended I come back to the hostel too and use the net to trawl for Burners or others heading that way and willing to provide a lift, but with three days to go I'm feeling really antsy to get moving and I'm afraid of how long it may take to get a lift. I need to be in Houston by Thursday in order to meet my fellow santas Tonya, Kelly and their friends, who are taking me to the Austin City Limits Music Festival at the weekend. With this in mind Hagey drops us to the transit centre early (he's an early riser and has been up for two hours) and we get the bus back to downtown.

We get all our gear packed and out of the motel room just in time as the manager comes knocking to tell us we should be checked out, hand in our keys and move on to Quiznos for breakfast/lunch, in my case a Peppercorn Beef sandwich on a soft toasty white bun, easily one of the best subs I've ever eaten. Once we have a moment I spread out a map of the state which Gadget has given me, and begin planning a hitching strategy, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is going to be a nightmare to hitch. Repeating a mistake I can't seem to stop making, I've drastically mis-estimated the journey time - it's going to take three days to get to Houston even with the best hitching I've had. The roads all go in the wrong directions and I'm going to be really stuck trying to avoid the freeways. In short, it's a pretty near impossible hitch.

Frustrated, I look at my options. Gadget recommends Amtrak, and although initially I balk at the price as I have before, I recall that I did reckon to take Amtrak at least once on my journey and this trip might be a good time to do it. The office is closed for lunch and we wait at the station for half an hour with me getting rather twitchy at the time being lost. When the staffer returns the news is bad - Amtrak from Reno to Houston would have to go via L.A. and would cost over three hundred dollars.

Next option: My old friend Greyhound. We walk out to the station to find that Greyhound to Houston is also very roundabout, will cost $177.00 and take almost two full days. Not appealing. Finally I admit that Hagey was right and I need to try rideshare first. We stop into the cafe and I place entries on Craigslist and the Burning Man forums requesting a rideshare to Houston or somewhere on the way. All there is to do now is wait and return to Hagey's, which is actually a real relief after this stress.

However, on the way out I go to take some cash out of the ATM, and get the response "Temporarily unable to complete transaction". Panic. I walk up the road to a corner shop and try a different machine - same result. We walk back to Virginia and I try a casino ATM on a different network. Same thing. I'm really scared now - could I have miscalculated so badly that I've drained my account already? I would have to be thousands of dollars out...

I walk up to Bank of America, thankfully a lot closer to downtown than banks usually seem to be in North America, and the teller, although unable to check my status with Visa, kindly lets me use their phone to call Barclays' Lost and Stolen Card line - I'm beginning to get an inkling that the same thing has happened as in Niagara Falls. I wait for a full half hour on hold for what should be an emergency service, and begin to suspect that something larger has gone wrong at Barclays, when the teller returns to tell me they can't have me on an international call any longer but if I come back tomorrow I can try again.

Still deeply worried, I walk with Gadget back down towards the transit centre, but remember that in Niagara my card would still work at point-of-sale - this would be a test of whether the same thing has happened again. I stop into a grocery store and buy a few bits, and to my enormous relief find that the card works. We return to the station with just enough cash between us to cover our ride back to Sparks, and James comes to pick us up and bring us home to the BRIBH.

Back at the hostel a shopping trip is being arranged for dinner ingredients - James does most of the cooking and is winding up for a big pasta, salad and stirfry project. I decide that if I'm going to be here another day or two I want to be able to pitch in with a contribution, so I decide to go along to get ingredients and make scotch pancakes for everyone in the morning. It's pretty daunting since I've never cooked for more than four people before but it's an exciting challenge too, and a chance to cook real food for the first time in a long while.

I go along with Lore and Pickle, two guys who've been packing up the city for several days and have just returned. They're fanatical about food too, and they, James and I have a great multiway discussion about the virtues of meat, fast and slow cooking, baking vs cooking and other fun topics. Fully equipped we return for an immensely enjoyable group cooking effort with at least six people at all times chopping vegetables, slinging things in and out of the oven, waving red-hot pans about and generally endangering each others' safety at every turn, accompanied by passionate discussions, mostly around food.

Labels: amtrak, black rock international burner hostel, Burning Man, greyhound, Nevada, reno

Finally Gadget and I decide we're going to make a Burner party happen for ourselves. Going to Electronic Espresso first we post a proposal on the Burning Man forums for a get-together in the evening, with some activities around the casinos - we have a plan for a Burner emotional support service for gamblers, spreading out across the gaming floors, enquiring after people's luck and providing sympathy and small gifts for those not doing so well.

While I'm posting, Santi comes online through Google Chat and I tell him about our plan. He recommends I contact Hagey at the Black Rock International Burner Hostel. It's a hostel slash theme camp - Hagey takes in dozens of international Burners every year, puts them up in his place and ships them out to the playa and back again for the Burning Man week itself. I email him right away and get a response before we leave the cafe - he says to come straight over and join them, they have plenty of food, space to sleep and a whole bunch of Burners still there, and they'd really like to see us.

Gratefully we hop a bus out to the Sparks transit centre on the east side of Reno, and call Hagey for a pickup. In ten minutes a huge truck still covered in caked playa dust rolls up to the corner and we're welcomed aboard with open arms. Hagey is in his late forties or early fifties, big, chunky and with a rough-and-ready attitude mixed with enormous affection and unconditional love for everyone he comes into contact with. He's accompanied by Jewel from Phoenix who's staying with the camp, a sweet lady with a slightly snub nose, red hair and an oddly embarassed-seeming smile who welcomes us as though we're her oldest friends and have been away too long. We're back in the bosom of the Burner community.

We return to the house itself, which is a combination hostel, commune and staging area for vast quantities of heavy equipment, caravans, trailers, amazing sculptures and other paraphernalia of a theme camp. It is full of Burners in a mellow party mood - Roy from Israel, Kiwi, Hagey's right hand man from New Zealand, Trent from Australia, Perky who lives locally, James who's currently between locations but originally from Ohio, and many others. They are universally happy to see us, and we are hugged, questioned and led immediately to the fridge and tables of food and drink left over from Exodus.

Inside the house is amazing, full of sculptures and paintings, musical instruments, carvings, bizarre clothes, overstuffed leather sofas and dogs. We lounge in the garden around the hostel's beautiful sculpted fire-barrel as the sun goes down, music playing in the background, in comfortable social drift. Some of the guys drag out two red and green laser displays and hook them up to one of the several computers inside the house to play off the music, projecting a constantly shifting pattern of light over the tentacled metal tree sculpture in the corner of the garden. We disappear at intervals into the shared kitchen for plates of gorgeous potato salad from a vast bowl in the fridge.

Quite soon we decide, at Hagey's insistence, that we'll stay the night and head back to the motel in the morning to get our gear cleared out before checkout time. The sun goes down and the garden's lit by the fire barrel, the lasers and a soft glow from the windows. We talk into the night and watch the fire, unwinding, feeling a real sense of decompression in the protective company of those who know what we're going through. Inside the computers are constantly busy, playing music and videos.

I spend much of the evening talking to Jewel, who is in many ways where I was at the start of the year. After 22 years as a wife and mother she's come out to see Burning Man, and after being let down by her travelling companion and left without money or facilities she has ended up here at the hostel under Hagey's kindly eye. Now her next step would be to gather some money, return to Phoenix and her two grown children (she's separated from their father)...but she doesn't want to go back. She wants to see the world, and her experiences and the people she's met in the last couple of weeks have given her a craving to have an adventure and expand her horizons.

Despite her fears and the shock of her new and unfamiliar environment she's facing up to the challenge of her situation with excitement and passion, and it's really inspiring to see someone taking those first steps, and in a far more challenging situation than my own - she has no savings or equipment and she's getting ready to strike out and just take what comes. It amazes and inspires me, re-ignites my own enthusiasm for the road, for the life of taking what comes next, considering how much easier I have it by comparison.

The gathering continues till early morning. As the night wears on we drift away one by one to crash out on sofas and armchairs or pads on the floor until the house is quiet and every surface is covered in snoring Burners.

Labels: black rock international burner hostel, Burning Man, decompression, hagey, Nevada, reno, sparks