Burning Man

I spent last week at Burning Man, a festival of 40,000+ people in the Nevada desert north of Reno.  I gave a presentation on our travels in sustainable communities and had the good fortune to be on a panel with several other folks who were working with communities around the world. 

Black Rock City becomes the third largest city in Nevada during Burning Man.  Its airport, mail service, and radio station only exist for the seven days of the festival.  During the rest of the year Black Rock City has nothing but desert dirt and wind.

We’ve traveled through a lot of intentional communities, and the generosity I experienced at BM was up with the best of them.  Within walking a couple hundred feet of where we were camping I was given fuzzy dog slippers, beer and song at an impromptu Irish bar, and a chunk of tasty chocolate.  BM operates on a gift economy, meaning that people brings their gifts (food, music, art, etc) and share them without money or even the expectation that they will receive a gift in kind.  The only things you can buy are ice and coffee.

There were literally miles of ‘streets’ (the entire festival packs up completely each year, leaving nothing behind – the concept of ‘street’ is a temporary one), so you can imagine the conversations and gifting that would happen if you had time to walk them all, which you would not.

In six days, I saw three pieces of trash.  There are no trash cans or trash pick-up services; everyone took care of their own.

It was fascinating to be part of a community that had the expectation of personal expression.  I felt most out-of-place when I was not dressed up in costume or outwardly exhibiting some form of creative expression (driving a flame-throwing four-wheeled pedal-powered bicycle, for example).  The norms of the Burning Man community were clearly that you should do something creative to share with those around you – the quickest way to get derided was to walk around in khakis and a baseball cap.

http://www.burningman.com/ 

Green River

For the last 14 days Joe and I have been on the Green River, canoeing, hiking, and backpacking into the Maze district of Canyonlands National Park. I went into the experience with the desire to be closer to the natural world: to wake and to sleep by the rising and setting of the sun, to witness the rhythms of life in the wild, to allow the elements to carve away what is dead and awaken what is pure and whole and real.

After 70 mph winds, 2-3 foot swells, whitecaps, snow, blazing sun, families of geese, snow egrets, the welcomed shade of cottonwoods, mountain lion tracks, panels of 3500 year old pictographs, blue herons, long stretches of silence, water-carved canyons, desert flowers, hanging gardens, and star filled skies...I feel alive. Having spent time in the desert before, this didn't surprise me. The desert has a way of removing excess baggage.

What I wasn't expecting on the river was to find a connection to humanity. I usually go into the wilderness to get away from people but on this particular trip I found myself enjoying the people we met. It was, in a way, another kind of community. A temporary community made possible by a common experience of a river. We put in at Crystal Geyser with a family from Seattle and Durango. Two days later we were sharing stories of 70 mph winds over breakfast, another day later and we shared a campfire at Horseshoe canyon.

Three days later we met a group of three guys from Minnesota on an island not marked on the river map. They invited us to their camp for dinner a campfire and we shared stories over sips of whiskey long after the stars began their nightly showing. Before we headed back to our tent, Rol, an avid paddler, canoe racer, and retired teacher, opened up a back pack full of candy bars, skittles, trail mix and M&M's and insisted we fill our pockets. (A welcome gift to the couple who brought a bare bones, no frills menu)

A couple of days later we arrived at Spanish Bottom where we planning to backpack into the Maze for a few nights. We weren't sure if we were going to go because we didn't know if know if there was any access to water. Not a half hour later a group of folks that had just been backpacking in the Maze came by and assured us there was plenty. The group happened to be a professor of prehistoric rock art and three students who had just spent a few days with the harvest scene. I learned more about rock art in a half hour with Ike than all my previous knowledge combined.

And then at the end of our trip on the jet boat back up the Colorado River and bus back to Moab, we met a couple from Australia, Tom and Claire, a pair of modern nomads who travel most often by foot, sleep most often in a tent, and find hiking the Himalayas on the India/China border without maps not all that big of a deal.

When I remember the Green River I will remember the long stretches of solitude, where the only thing you hear are the wings of the geese flying overhead and all that you see in front of you and behind you is the river winding through layer upon layer of the earth. When I remember the Green I will also remember the people we encountered for only a brief time but whose presence was as remarkable and lasting as any vista or view.