I left camp so I wouldn't have to look at the empty parking space. The car that had been in it was headed south and west, over mountains and across state lines, taking Sunya back to work. I took the trike across town to see my friends at Dragon Ass Camp. They cheered me up, and I said hey to Claude the Dragon and his creator Gabe, and stenciled a dragon on the trike's passenger platform.
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| The trike in happier times (the night before) |
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| Claude Idrilla the Dragon |
While I was hanging about chatting and whatnot, this girl came up.
"Is that yours? Can I ride it?"
She was young and pretty and Indian and spoke with an Aussie accent. She was super friendly and wore a fur hood against the dropping night. She was brand new to Burning Man and I took her for one of those happy souls who are still filled with excitement and trust. I said, "Of course! Where do you want to go?"
"I don't care! Wherever you're going!"
Right? That doesn't happen every day. I decided we'd go see the Man, because I hadn't yet. Sunya had spent a lot of time working on Sacramento's part of the Souk that surrounded the Man, and I hadn't seen that yet either. So she got on back, careful about the wet paint, and I took us bumping down the pockmarked and clod-strewn streets to the Esplanade and across and out into open playa, swinging around sandworms as the western sky slowly darkened into deeper shades of blue. Sandworms are soft spots in the lakebed, sand dunes about an inch high, that bog down bicycles and wreak havoc on the battery capacity of electric tricycles. I sometimes took wild turns and was gratified by squeals of fun right behind me.
She had a suitable playa name, an English word suggesting a persona, but I've completely forgotten it.
We spent a pleasant hour wandering through the Souk on its opening night. Taut canvases on poles and ropes encircled the Man and housed varieties of performance art, people "selling" playa office space or making drums or inviting people to get on stage and tell short stories. My companion was fearless and looked at everything and talked to everyone. Sacramento's portion was a sort of travel agency, where we were challenged to puzzle out where we were REALLY going. A world map gave a place to smudge your fingerprint where you're from, and the girl was the first to put a smudge on Sydney. Further down, in a beautiful library full of Russian books, a beautiful Russian woman took my name and returned it to me as ВАСХОТ (vaskhot), which she said was Russian for sunrise. Well. Google says it should be ВОСХОД (voskhod)), which is close, but, I dunno. Maybe there are dialects. I was confused by the Don / Dawn thing anyway.
I was getting bored and cold but I had a nice young thing to entertain and that suggests part of what went wrong with my Burn. One rather good reason to be excited about an open relationship such as mine with Sunya is that we can have our adventures and know we are fully supported by the one we love. We don't do it much, and it's not always easy, but over time we've managed to learn and improve and be amazed and pleased that it keeps on going. When I first went to Burning Man I was married but long frustrated by my relatively unsocial pre-marital history and the insecurity and suspicion I regularly faced from my wife. I wanted to go to this unique and wonderful playground and have romantic adventures and kind of put all that old stuff to bed (as it were). But I'm not really made for a lot of adventuring, in terms of personality, and this desire was not much met in Burns subsequent to the marriage's end, when I instead was happy to spend most of my time and energy on Gekko and Sunya (one, then both, then the other -- I've been blessed with interesting times). I hadn't given up, though, and I knew it was okay, that I had "permission". I really only needed to learn more fully to give permission to myself. This of course leads to expectations of myself.
And as I drove her towards my part of town where I meant to change clothes for the night's chill, I wondered what sort of adventure she was open to. I missed Sunya and wanted her there but that wasn't in the cards so I pushed myself to refocus and see about getting this year's Burn off to a nice warm start. I harbored no expectations and knew the odds were pretty slim, but I wanted to at least be aware of the signals. In the past I've missed a lot of signals.
We pulled into my camp on Frankincense near 7:30 and got off the trike. She said, "Thank you so much!" and gave me a hug and disappeared into the illuminated foot and bicycle traffic of nighttime.
Well, that was a pretty clear signal but it's not like I minded. In truth I had just spent an hour or two having an exploration adventure with a very nice person whom I otherwise would never have known existed. I was open to the interaction (not always the case, even recently), and we had a good one. That's what it's all about, after all: Interaction. But you've read between the lines and you understand I had more in mind, whether or not I was ready to admit it.
From there I grabbed an art car and let fate take me around the city; had a nice conversation with a blonde who was very outgoing and didn't mention her boyfriend for at least five minutes; decided against going to bars (too bad, because the Duckpond was hopping); disembarked whatever art car I was on as it headed out in to deep playa where the bars are few and the winds cold; walked to the Temple and the Man and around to various installations taking pictures; got to bed about four.
It was a good evening. I was pleased with how things were shaping up; and the next day it got better. But rising tides have their counterparts.
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