Sand Serpents, Dust Devils, and Leprechauns
a memoir of Burning Man 2007
by Scot Bastian © 2008
Hushville, Seattle, WA
Scotbastian.com
I wake up in a dusty tent—too hot to sleep. Crawl outside and stretch.
I come to the desert to play with my friends—my tribe. To give. To love.
For a time, laughter and song. Like a dream—it is a dream. I blink. I walk
up the hill—it feels like a hill.
Who would have ever thought that desert latrines would play music?
Burning Man is the freemartin of the default world. Once a lake, but now a
desert plain. A flat, dusty, chalkboard where the leprechauns come to play
games. There are no sidewalks, only playgrounds. The streets are curved,
confounding a sense of direction. Every street circles or points to the Man.
We play the games, but the desert makes the rules. You will not move too
fast—it is too hot. You will stop and drink water. You will wear sunblock
or clothing—or you will burn. The desert is the opposite of a shopping mall.
A pile of money has no utility here. You can’t eat it. You can’t spend it. It
is only debris—capitalist MOOP.
In the desert we share.
We are the leprechauns of the planet.
Our footprints erased by the wind.
Little people—yet lumbering giants.
It approaches dawn as I bicycle toward the playa. It is cool now. I feel the
vibration of my tires as they rotate in time with the never-ending thumpadathumpada-thump of rave camps where sleep is apparently banned. I pass the
esplanade to the playa and a smiling gaggle of pink puffery on bicycles
floats by, talking, laughing, and singing. They nod and veer sideways,
leaving a trail of happy-dust in their wake. I carry with me the blur of
thousands who have done the same. Playa children sharing temporary
connections. Polar bonds like water molecules—never frozen, always
moving. Like the symbiotic exchange of hummingbirds feeding on flowers
we absorb each other’s essence—drinking deeply.
In the default world these interactions feel like painful collisions bouncing
off each other. Brownian motion. Touches without bonds. But in the
desert, we touch, make love, and move on, the moment fading like falling
dust.
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I bicycle past the temple, the bleeding heart of the playa, where the
leprechauns lament the past and reach for the future. Hope rides like a surfer
on a wave. The lost friend, the departed lover, the growing cancer. There is
more nudity here than anywhere else on the playa—naked souls.
Cindy forgive me
Goodbye Father
Please let me smile again
Please make my lover’s AIDS go away—and mine too
The sun doesn’t smile—but it burns, exposing all.
There is no sunscreen that will protect burning hearts.
I bicycle on.
A bird flies over—curious. There is life here. The dust is alive.
Puddles of loose sand—sand serpents—writhe on the playa surface. A
swirling dust devil crawls across careening sideways stinging the ground
with its scorpion tail. Another follows, and a third. They chase each other
before dissipating, exhausted, at the edge of the plain. Then the dust is
animated by a sudden wind. A blizzard of alkali stirred by a weird witch,
transforming dust devil to hurricane. Squinting. I cannot inhale. The dust
bites. A dust storm is like a blizzard without the cold. Sand doesn’t melt, it
stings your eyes and coats your throat. Thirsty. Dry. I cough.
Thoreau reduced our needs to four elements:
Food, fuel, clothing and shelter.
But Thoreau was wrong, for in the desert I am reduced to the minimal:
Thirst, heat, wind and dust.
The antithesis of Thoreau—yet I live.
The wind shifts and rain, an absurd concept in the desert, threatens, but does
not harm. It seems impossible that playa dust could become playa mud—but
it is not unknown. Not today. Only a few intrepid drops pass through.
Most disappear before they touch the ground—stolen by the wind. After a
time, the wind relents and the dust settles. Dust masks disappear and
goggles are put away. We have survived yet another day. Someone looks
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up. An atmospheric prism—a miracle of color. And one miracle
encapsulates another: A double rainbow.
We leprechauns dance, for the pot of gold is in our hearts.
They say that we love our pets because, no matter our faults, they love us
unconditionally. But the desert doesn’t care. The desert has no time for
narcissism. It will simply ignore your vanity until you die.
We are the desert's pets.
I bicycle past the center camp.
A maiden's eyes borrow the blue of the sky as she dances the pain away.
A desert wraith with helium heels and electric feet powered by a butterfly
heart, she whirls in circles with a skip in the middle, barely touching the
ground. She’s a B-side girl in a flipside world. At Burning Man her walk is
a freedom-dance. If only, she dreams, I could walk at home this way. But in
the default world there are cracks in the sidewalks, and curbs on the streets.
Dance on desert dervish—you are welcome here.
I am back at camp and the beer tastes good. My shade structure has failed,
so I share with my neighbors. The heck with self-reliance, “I've always
relied on the kindness of Burners,” I muse. My eyes close and I live inside
my head a while—not a bad place to be.
I drift...
...Will we one day burn in the Gobi Desert?
Or build a snowman in Antarctica—and melt it?
Will it be called Cool Man?
Will we travel to the Moon, Mars, or even the stars?
Will the leprechauns one day dance with E.T.?...
...I awaken to a cheer: The sun has gone down!
The evening revelry begins.
I sing the playa electric!—to borrow, and twist, a phrase. Swarming with
glow-sticks and LEDs—colors borrowed from the afternoon rainbows—
nothing could be more natural. The lights are a mad impressionist painting.
A delirious Aurora Borealis on the Fourth of July. A frenzy of fireflies and
glow worms gone insane—they’ve taken too much LSD and snapped—
popcorn in the mind of God. Like a child who holds his breath and presses
on his eyes. I wonder how hallucinogens could possibly enhance this
experience?
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I fly across the plain, swerving to avoid mutant vehicles and poorly-lit
pedestrians, nearly becoming mired in a playa serpent—but I struggle
through. I travel to a quieter place in the deep playa, where the air is calm
and the noise more distant—more conducive to thought.
When I have a thought in the poignancy of the here-and-now, stripped of
antecedents, knowing no future direction, it becomes a precious thing. As
special and temporal as melting wax on a candle, the life of a mayfly, or a
first kiss. My words make love to the universe, and the universe returns the
favor.
We both get lucky.
I marvel at the ashen-gray moon, the sun's lantern—her desolate sister—a
relic of the past. Last night we were treated to a full eclipse, but tonight it
glows unobstructed. It seems to loom larger when near the horizon. An
optical illusion, I'm told, but sometimes illusions can be our best friends. I
could carve my initials on the moon, but not the sun. Unlike the man-in-themoon there is no face-in-the-sun. The sun has no bumps or pocks. It is a
featureless mass of fire. The sun is the bright, opaque, future. You cannot
stare directly at the future. It is too bright. Too formless. Too fluid. My
emotions thaw in the swelter faster than a snowflake on the sand. My
thoughts form and are immediately erased and burned. They liquefy like
butter in a frying pan, in a bubbling puddle of confused musings and deepfried conjectures.
I am astonished at the technology and sublime creativity on the playa.
Perhaps, I will one day build a dragon or a monkey swing—but I doubt it.
For I am a dabbler in words, trying to elicit memories of the past and write
the ineffable thoughts to bootstrap into the future. But exactly what is it I
search for? An epiphany? A catharsis? A journey? A plan? A pat on the
head from the sky?
I bicycle toward the fence on the border of the playa and squint at the
horizon, hoping to see what comes. The world never stops turning.
Tomorrow displaces today, fading into yesterday. Ad infinitum. The days
are not cyclic—they are a treadmill. I spin the wheel, seeming to go
nowhere, yet the world turns. Galileo was wrong. I am the center of my
universe—it’s all a matter of perspective.
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Imagine if King Solomon’s swordsman had acted on his orders too
quickly—before judgment had been rendered? Sometimes thoughts must be
taken gradually. I must savor the gradual unfolding of the universe, lest the
baby be sliced in half. Time must be consumed slowly, like fine wine, or
licked, like a popsicle. Wisdom has its own pace—not always an epiphany.
You cannot swallow an ocean, nor drink from a fire hose.
Sometimes the wind of your thoughts has to blow for a while.
Robert Frost chose the road less-traveled, which made all the difference.
But on the desert plain there are infinite roads, radiating in all directions.
And yet...I am drawn to the east. I seek the burning, bleeding, edge of
tomorrow, where the sun is always at the horizon, hugging the cusp of dawn.
And although the colors of the sunset are the same as the colors of the
dawn—they are different—for the sunset recedes behind, shrinking, but the
dawn will ever be new. Soon the man will burn, signaling the passing of
another year.
The sun seems the same, but I have changed.
The man will burn.
The man will burn.
The man will burn.
The man will burn.
And so will I.
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