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~ photo of via and john the pilot by ravin

Dusty Skies ~ Day three at Burning Man, via's blog, Sept 14th, 2007

day 3 at BRC....

got up early (as we'd been advised that both the weather and the pilots are smoother in the morning!) and hopped on our bikes across town to the airport, with a pot of coffee, the rest of my homemade zucchini cake, and robyn, our resident airport groupie (who has been taking flying lessons at home, hence the obsession).....

....and within minutes she'd procured me a ride aboard a friend's 4-seater, sharing the space with our pilot john (a great regular guy, in a green fur skirt), paul, and ravin, who'd already been offered a ride after running into john on their own.

the BRC airport is a funny place, with a faux-customs office, a boozy lounge, and professional air traffic control keeping watch on the airborne activity (which we saw much more of as the week progressed.) there were several dozen planes out on the playa, and official green wrists bands that indicated authorization to go out to them. john's was an unpretentious brown and white Cessna, and he did his checks and we climbed in, leaving the door open until takeoff for much-needed ventilation.

captain rainbow in full dust-storm gear ~ photo by via

i took my time, biking out to the pavilion that fanned out under the absent man, and visited the many displays of green technology and sustainable practices that the pavilion sheltered. there was the low-cost, instant hex-house, the algae tubes consuming CO2 from BRC generators and growing oxygen from it, the efficient "long bike" designed for hauling, and scads and scads of visual aids that illustrated just how wasteful and devastating the average western lifestyle is on the life of this planet. it should be mentioned that there was a giant solar array out beyond the man that was powering most of the infrastructure this year, and whose panels would afterwards be gifted to the nearby towns of gerlach and lovelock, nevada for their community centers and schools. it's not much to offset the cost of all these people getting out to the desert and setting huge fires (!), but it's a start.

and there under one wing of the pavilion was the man, lying prone like a giant game of "operation", being fussed over for his reappearance later that afternoon.

i biked home before it got too hot, had a lovely lunch and a catnap or 2 under the shade, until finally getting down to the business of affixing my tent to the playa with actual rebar instead of my puny tent stakes. all the while, the wind had been getting slowly more insistent (after 2 beautiful, mild, breezy days) and it was clear we were about to be engulfed in the first genuine "white out" of the week. those of us who were in camp donned our masks and goggles and set about holding down the fort, which meant minor things like running after loose moop (Matter Out Of Place, in burner parlance), re-clamping flapping shade cloth, and closing up tents and domes against the horrendous dust...

...until finally, our neighbors' EZ-Up shade structure gave way altogether and came barreling against my own guy lines! by this time, the wind was fierce, and - with the canopy acting as a full sail of force - it was all i could do to keep its weight off my own structure. a couple guys managed to fold the thing down, despite its bent arms and torn canopy, and we got it tucked away under someone's truck. meanwhile, my tent - with its all-screen ceiling and a rainfly most definitely designed for vertically falling weather - was having its own mini dust-storm inside. there was nothing to do but keep my mask on and make myself useful.

this is the kind of thing people bond on, keeping body and soul and shelter together as needed, and when self-sufficiency merges happily with group-effort. the dust-storms ebb and flow, and just when i thought i could risk biking over to the meet-and-greet, we'd have another wave. so i stayed put and enjoyed the company of my fellow campers, who were hilarious and generous in their absurd desert heroics as the world went white.

toward early evening, the sky cleared and, except for the thick coating of dust on everything in my tent, the playa came back to life. i swept out, changed clothes again (keeping your clothes in plastic ziplocks helps!), and headed out for my 6 o'clock temple shift.

the temple had been hit hard by the storm, with one of its filigree "chandeliers" having lost some of its layers, so the crew was busy adding support ropes to those pieces. i found my old guardian friend, sparky, among the workers, who had ridden in on a long bike bearing bandannas and bells, so the meet-and-greet went off spontaneously for our shift. we intro'd ourselves to the staff as we accessorized, and sparky led me over to meet the architect, the diminutive but remarkable david best. it was a calm moment before the dust kicked up again.

an open-air temple is no shelter from a massive wave of dust, but there's not much to do when you're out in it but hunker down and carry on, and that's what everyone did, as the distant city disappeared in a haze of white. my bare shoulders were well-exfoliated that evening, i can tell you! people immersed in grieving, journaling, or praying, carried on.

~ photo credit

when 9 o'clock rolled around, the next temple shift arrived and i met some more great folks, staying a bit longer just to socialize. finally i headed home for another rinse off and clothes-change, shaking out my tent again before heading out to explore the city at night. i visited the disco-roller derby, the phenomenal Cubatron (the world's largest 3D display of programmable LED strands, constantly changing, where i could have stayed all night!), the solar array observation deck, and many other visual treats too numerous to mention.