Seeking An Extraordinary Life

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.