Annual Post-Burn Roadside Reflection.

The truck is pointed south as we snake through Nevada en route from home to home.  The chocolate hills around me, consistently unremarkable and scarred by old two-tracks, are carpeted with my favorite combination of gray and gold - the color of sagebrush steppe as it makes the turn toward autumn.  The sun bleached billboards are all trying to sell me fireworks, high-speed Internet, or some guy named Brad Pope who wants to be sheriff and, as far as I can tell, I wouldn’t trust his smile to sell me a second-hand blender let alone enact peaceable justice.  

Fuckin’ Nevada, you know?

On my left, a storm is crawling toward me over the mountains and I’m not sure I have ever wanted to be swallowed by anything or anyone as fully as I do in this moment. 

On my right, some bright blue graffiti on a pale rock facing the highway reads “Anthony loves Shannon.”

Fuck you, Anthony.  

You’d think that this drive would get easier, that with each successful reentry we might get better at letting go.  In truth, however, the weight of exodus grows heavier each year as we deposit more of ourselves into the small pockets of Black Rock City that we continue to carve out for one another.  As much as we wax, bitch, and pontificate about the traces that we do or do not leave in our wake, each and every human animal that touches dust leaves slivers of themselves scattered across the black rock desert - a motley concoction of hopes, dreams, and imaginings... This is the covenant that we have each entered into, the pact that we all made with the playa when we flailed in the dust for the first time and rang that stupid fucking bell at the gate. 

Didn’t consent to it? 

Fuck your burn… We’re in this together now.

Yesterday, a friend likened it to the darkness of withdrawal, but I think it’s pretty fucking beautiful that the more we strategize against the sun, dust, and sleep deprivation, the more we begin to crave it all.  I love that the better we get at letting the worst of this place bring out the best in us, the harder it is to extricate ourselves from the hellscape that we call home. 

If that ain’t the best goddamn flavor of romance, I don’t know what is.

By all accounts, this year was a rough one.  The playa welcomed us home with blistering heat, endless dust storms, and the worst roads that anyone I spoke to could remember.  Roasted camp members and generators shirked their responsibilities, key pieces of infrastructure were stolen by and subsequently sacrificed to the dust gods, and thousands of bicycles quietly stranded their riders in hilariously dangerous and inconvenient moments. I don’t care how salty, seasoned, or sanctimonious you claim to be, it was enough to break even the crustiest among us.  

“Why do we do this?”  I heard a campmate whisper as she threw a pillow into the dust, allowing gravity to do the work as she collapsed downward to join it.  Exiled from her tent by yet another 105 degree afternoon, I watched her squirm as she slowly devolved into a puddle of a person before the exhaustion finally rendered her inert.  

Why do we do it?  

Why do we allocate such a tremendous amount of emotional, ecological, and economic resources to something so fleeting and abusive?  

Why do we continue to give ourselves so fully to a place that flaunts its indifference so haphazardly and without remorse?

Why do we stretch ourselves so thin and come from every corner of the earth just to throw another stupid party in the desert?

We do it because we have to, because we are afflicted with the knowledge that we can and should be the architects of this life that we share.  

We do it because we’re the lunatics who see opportunity in every moment, a tribe of rabid dust monkeys that have the fucking audacity to see infinite possibility where others only see a wasteland. We know that to see it, we must first believe it, and so we build our stupid little city and fill it with magic, madness, and mischief — we howl at the sky and bury our dreams deep in the dust, praying that they’ll take root and carry us forward through the darkness.

We do it because only when we are broken, when we are on our hands and knees, undone and unraveled, can we recognize the disassembled iterations of who we once were as a collection of components begging to be reconstituted as someone bigger… better… and bolder than who we were when we arrived. It’s cute that we think we’re smarter and stronger than the desert but year after year we are reduced to the bags of meat that we really are and, year after year, we are handed an opportunity to put ourselves back together while we decide how we want to show the fuck up to the other three-hundred-fifty-something days of the year. 

We do it because we can, because together we can do anything and our stupid little party is proof that the meat sacks we’re all driving were built to play and pray more than the default wants to admit.

Just like I resent the notion that Burning Man takes place in “the middle of nowhere”, I resent the notion that what we’ve all reentered is the “real” world.  Out there, in the middle of somewhere, stewarded by a wildly unreal community of artists, misfits, and dreamers, is the realest place that most of us have known.  Every year we’re called back to dream it into existence and then burn it to the ground. It’s hot, dusty, and miserable — a vicious playground of a place.playground of a place.

What a fucking privilege it is to call it home.