All across the country, all our supporters want to know: How was Burning Man? The short answer is, IT WAS GREAT! The long answer is very long, so I’ll break it up into several pieces. The first one follows.
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My first day at Burning Man was a blur. Literally.

The whiteout started at the worst possible time. We had partially unrolled the unwieldy 30-foot sail over the top of the Squid Wagon, and we had to abandon it and dive inside.

For a long time, we sat watching fine playa dust sift through tiny cracks in the doors and windows. Then we started trying to unearth the dust masks and goggles we’d brought to protect our lungs and eyes. Meanwhile, the sail flapped and chafed against the van, and we couldn’t see five feet. Finally, wearing our protective gear, we groped our way to the Lamplighters’ lounge, almost missing it in the total whiteout.

Was this what we’d driven across the country for?

The storm hadn’t abated by 5 pm, when we coughed and hacked our way to the Lamplighter Chapel. We milled around with the other newbies, until someone directed us to Digital Dan at the signup board. Dan is a tall, handsome man, and he looked like a sexy, elegant monk in his flame-decorated Lamplighter robe. He was also mysteriously silent. At the time, I thought that was to keep the process solemn and avoid back-talk. It seemed so appropriate that it was days later I finally realized he has a health issue that prevents him from talking.

Barry and I had seen pictures of the Lamplighting processions, but we were new to the complex, labor-intensive process. Each night, this volunteer public utility lights over a thousand kerosene lanterns and carries them, in robed processions, to 20-foot lampposts along the city’s major streets.

Each route requires dozens of people who sign up for one of four roles: A luminary, who leads each group; carriers, who carry 12 lanterns on long sturdy poles across their shoulders; lifters, who use long, slender poles to hang the lanterns on the lampposts; and support, the people who keep lanterns lit and take care of carriers’ and lifters’ needs.

That first night, Barry signed up as a lifter on the lengthy 2 o’clock route. I was nervous — was I strong enough to carry 30 pounds of lanterns and pole? Was I agile enough to hang lanterns 20 feet in the air? I decided to sign up as support, since that sounded easier.

There were about a hundred people milling about in the dust, cleaning lamps, trimming wicks, and using turkey basters to fill the reservoirs with kerosene. The tricky part was lighting the lamps in the storm, and I fretted about my ability to keep the lamps lit.

Finally, the robetenders helped us put on our robes and tied the cowls behind our heads. Then we gathered into groups, according to our routes. Our luminary, an old hand by the name of Jeff-Who, introduced to the lead carrier, a wild and crazy young woman named Ducky. She immediately began group bonding activities, including calling us the “Deuces” and inventing our own gang sign. Looking at Ducky and another carrier, a slender, silver-haired woman, I thought maybe carrying lanterns wouldn’t be so tough — they looked pretty normal, not like body builders.

So when Jeff-Who reviewed our roles and mentioned that support people would be expected to take over if a carrier or lifter was unable to finish the route, I wasn’t too worried.

Maybe I should have been.

We began lifting the loaded poles onto the carriers’ shoulders. I saw the silver-haired woman falter, then begin to walk slowly toward the front of the chapel. She seemed to be having trouble.

She didn’t quite make it to the fire cauldron, where all the routes gather for a convocation before spreading out. I found myself stepping in, putting a rolled towel around my neck and taking the heavy load on my shoulders. It wasn’t a question of whether or not I could do it. She could not, so I had to.

The load was so heavy and the wind so strong that all I could do was slowly place one foot in front of the other, following the person in front of me. I couldn’t turn my head, so I couldn’t see except straight in front of me. I was too focused on the pain in my neck and shoulders and arms to see anything, anyway. To make matters worse, the lanterns developed a maddening swing that got worse with every step.

Damn. This was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and I hadn’t even signed up for it.

Worse yet, I was near the end of the line, and the lifters weren’t taking my lamps and lightening my load. I was right at the edge of my physical limit, and I festered as I carried my load, angry at being ignored. But I was too exhausted by the task at hand to even complain.

I later realized we’d been sent out with extra lanterns. Since mine were swinging so much, they’d mostly blown out. In the fierce wind and whiteout, the lifters had all they could do to hang lanterns that were actually lit.

When it was all over, I stood in the middle of the road with my head down, like a horse that’s about to collapse in exhaustion. Someone took my lanterns and my pole, but I could barely get my arms down. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to use them for the rest of the week. I practically had to be lifted onto the truck for the ride back, where I heard Jeff-Who telling us this was the worst weather he’d ever seen for Lamplighting.

But our ordeal was not over.

The truck made a detour on the way home, out to the Man. That route had run out of lanterns, and they needed us to light and hang some of our extras.

It had only been about ten minutes, but somehow I found use of my arms again. I picked up a lifting pole and managed to hang a lantern. And another one. I drifted away from Barry, towards an empty lamppost, and then onto another one. Finally, I ran out of lanterns. As I turned back towards the truck, I panicked. It had totally vanished in the whiteout.

First came fear, then adrenaline, and then, when I found the truck, relief. And more relief when Barry appeared out of the whiteout.

We arrived back at Lamplighter Village exhausted. The kitchen crew had held dinner for us, but we could barely lift our forks.

This was Day One of a typical Burning Man experience. We’ve often heard it said that the event will push your boundaries, whatever they are. Even — especially — if you don’t know what they are. Evidently, I had some boundaries regarding strength and stamina that needed pushing. Day One of Burning Man 2008 was great!

Whoops, I squeaked too soon.

Remember that post about starting each day with “a giant roar and that diesel rumble that sounds like a UPS truck?”

I’m sitting in a library in Casper, Wyoming. It’s a lovely place to hang out, with wi-fi, desks, and big comfy chairs where you can curl up and read the local paper or the New York Times. It’s also walking distance from Thomas Crawford Auto Repair, where Squidley is getting a new fuel heater installed.

Things went awry at Burning Man, when Squidley decided not to start after 10 days of sitting in the desert. We had to crank and crank and crank the engine to get it primed, and finally, we made it out of there.

For the next week, we crossed our fingers every morning and drove our neighbors (and sisters) crazy with all the noisy cranking. I began to say prayers to the Gods of Starting Motors. Finally, in Burns, Oregon, we made our home at the Burns RV Park for three nights and Barry made friends at the parts desk of the Ford dealer. The morning we left, with a new valve on the fuel filter cap, the van started perfectly.

Things went great from Burns to Crystal Crane Hot Springs and then the World Center for Birds of Prey, outside Boise. We popped into Pocatello and Lava Hot Springs and Soda Springs, and it was there I pointed out the new problem.

The little puddle of diesel under the engine.

We made it to Kemmerer, where all we could find were RV parks with no bathrooms. Finally, I asked a couple on a motorcycle if there was a campground nearby.

“No, well, wait a minute, there is that place out by the dog pound…it’s kind of ugly, right on the highway, but it has a couple of porta-potties.” He painted such an awful picture of it, we were about to give up and go to a motel. Then our motorcycling friend insisted that he lead us over to the campground, and sure enough, it was a picturesque spot, far enough that the barking dogs were quite faint, and the “highway” was a rural Wyoming road with one car per hour. We had the place to ourselves, which is a good thing when you are doing car repairs to a big ugly old van. Motels and nice RV parks frown on that sort of thing in their parking lots.

But it was our anniversary, and though Barry tried to find the source of the fuel leak, he didn’t want to take the engine completely apart. So we kept going, to a campground in Casper.

That night, we sat in a Wells-Fargo parking lot, having a heated “discussion” (argument) about the new problem. “I don’t think we can trust just anybody with a ‘mechanic’ sign — we need a good referral,” said Barry. “Well, I don’t want to drive to North Carolina dribbling diesel the whole way!” said Meps.

That night, we asked the man who ran the campground, and he told us to check with Keith, the maintenance guy, the next day. “By the way,” I asked, “what are all those animals along the highway? We saw hundreds or thousands of them — they look sort of like deer?”

“Pronghorn antelope,” he told us, “the fastest animals in North America. But they’re not good eatin’. They taste like goat.” He made a face.

We looked at each other. “Oh, we like goat,” we said. He shook his head, “Antelope’s not even good for jerky. It tastes like the sagebrush they eat. I shot one once. Never again.”

We were a little skeptical, because the critters we’d seen seemed too big for antelope, and we hadn’t noticed the horns. But he was sure of his local knowledge.

The next morning, I found Keith and a couple of young folks standing around the bed of a pickup truck, staring solemnly into it. When I walked up, there was a dead antelope in the truck. OK, so they were antelope, after all.

“I heard they weren’t really good eating,” I asked the guy with the blood on his hands. This started a discussion of the relative merits of antelope-eating, with 33% in favor (the hunter) and 66% opposed (the hunter’s wife and Keith). The hunter said, “It makes good jerky.” I guess he’ll be eating a whole antelope worth of jerky by himself.

I wandered back to our campsite and gave Barry three pieces of valuable information: One, that I could personally confirm that we’d seen antelope. (How do you know? I just saw a dead one. You did? Where?) Two, the name of the auto repair place in town to avoid at all costs. Three, his recommendation for Thomas Crawford.

We were set. The only downside was when they told us the part wouldn’t arrive until the next day. “Oh, no,” I said in dismay, “We’re going to need a motel, I guess…”

Barry, who’s more straightforward than I at times, finished my statement. “…unless you don’t mind us sleeping in your parking lot.” The folks behind the counter chuckled. “You won’t be the first!”

So we took advantage of their “free” camping spot, a half block from a grassy park with porta-potties and picnic tables. Best of all was dinner — no antelope jerky for us. We went to Johnny J’s diner and ate a huge, gooey two-person banana split for our anniversary.

When the van is fixed, we’ll pay the bill and continue on, with a new soft spot for Casper, Wyoming. At 180,000 miles and 18 years, we’re just happy that the Squid Wagon is not B.E.R., or Beyond Economic Repair.

Most of the time, I wonder why people say I have an interesting life. Then something happens that leaves even me shaking my head.

Such was the case with the topless woman at our Crater Lake campsite.

I have to start at the beginning for this one. We had decided to stay a few extra days at Burning Man and help tear down and pack away the Lamplighters’ Village. We’d been completely out of communications during the week of Burning Man, so our first thought was to get a quick email out to family, letting them know we were still alive and planned to rejoin the default world on Thursday, instead of Monday.

Our friend Mike left on Sunday with the emails on paper. He sent them when he found wi-fi, down the road. Wheels began to turn, and a few days later, we were able to check messages. Much to our delight, Meps’ sister Daisy and her family were heading to Lassen National Park, a half-day drive from Black Rock City, on Thursday. And sister Julie could meet us at Crater Lake, a half-day further, on Saturday.

Burning Man is a leave-no-trace event, so tear-down involves taking down all the structures, packing them into containers, and then removing everything. Whether it’s trash, like a sequin or wood splinter, or abandoned items, like clothing or bottles of booze, we had to make sure they left the premises. As a result, we had a lot of liquor in the back of the van.

The transition from Burning Man to the default world is very disconcerting, a peculiar kind of culture shock. You find yourself in a rest area on the interstate, wondering why everyone doesn’t want to hug you, and what people would think if you started offering them jelly beans and telling them they look fabulous.

This transition takes time, and we were not quite over it when we reached the campsite at Lassen, where we rendezvoused with Daisy, Dario, Claire, and five other friends.

They were very patient with us, humoring our need to share crazy stories, costumes, shoes, and alcoholic beverages. At night, around the campfire, we also demonstrated the “apparitions,” two life-sized ghostly creatures that we fly on long poles.

It wasn’t all Burning Man redux; we also hiked, swam in alpine lakes, kayaked, and played a hilarious game of Chuck-it, orchestrated by none other than Chuck. But our large, noisy group and big noisy van drew the ire of a testy campground hostess, and I had to call on my I-just-came-from-Burning-Man-where-I-love-everybody mindset to deal with her complaints.

On Saturday morning, after ten minutes of anxious cranking, we left for Crater Lake and our rendezvous with Julie. When we arrived, she had put a note on the bulletin board for us with the site number, F12. At the bottom of the note, she’d written “on-on2,” a reference to the fact that some other Hashers had left a note on the bulletin board. Hashers are members of a running club, or, rather, a drinking club with a running problem. Their activities seem to consist of running from beer to beer and celebrating the end of each run with more beer.

A few hours later, we were hanging out around our campfire, when a couple of people burst into our campsite from the woods. They came up to us as though they knew us, so I figured they knew Julie. Meanwhile, she was probably thinking the same thing!

They turned out to be Hashers, drawn to our site by Julie’s note. We introduced ourselves, and Barry and I said we were not Hashers, just a couple of folks returning from Burning Man. That’s when one of them started laughing, and she said, “Oh, I know — we really enjoyed all your stories last night! We were in the camper van next to you at Lassen.”

Talk about no privacy. Lisa and her husband had spent two nights listening to all our stories, had watched the crazy game of Chuck-it, seen our ghostly apparitions, and even bought a jar of Nutella when they left Lassen because we’d been eating it with such relish.

We visited with them as though they were old friends, and they introduced the woman with them, a world-traveling Hasher they’d met at Crater Lake as a result of the other bulletin board note. Finally, they got ready to leave, and the other woman said she wanted to do a naked midnight run. “Come by for a drink, if you do,” I said. I was thinking to myself, “What are the chances?”

After the group left, Julie turned to me and gave me a joking big-sister warning. “Don’t offer liquor to Hashers, or you’ll never be rid of them!”

We chuckled about it over dinner, which consisted of grilled salmon-and-gruyere sandwiches and Cheetos. Julie and I have a long history of camping together, going back to our first grown-up vacation in the 80′s in my little orange pup tent. After all these years, we usually don’t plan ahead, we just compile our resources. We were washing dinner down wth Goombay Smash, the fruity and potent beverage partially responsible for our loud behavior at Lassen.

We were having so much fun with conversation and fire-poking, we didn’t notice how late it had gotten. Just after midnight, there was a crashing through the bushes. Out popped our new Hasher friend, topless.

She was clutching a bag of flour, leaving a trail for her friends to follow. She looked behind herself, nervously clutching the bag to her chest and complaining that none of the losers had actually followed.

So what did we do? We’d just come from Burning Man, where topless and bottomless are commonplace, and we made her feel right at home. First, we stoked the fire, because she was freezing. Second, we made sure she had plenty of antifreeze in here system — the Goombay Smash was gone, but there was the bottled Mojito, and beer.

About an hour later, the three of us were laughing and talking and staying warm (Julie and Barry and I had our shirts on), when a crashing through the underbrush told us someone was finally following the flour trail. It was her husband, fully-clothed, but just as entertaining and hilarious as his partner.

In the morning, there was little evidence of our nighttime visitors. Just a cold campfire, some empty bottles, and a mysterious trail of white powder leading into the woods.

If you’ve never been to Crater Lake, let me assure you that this type of visitor is not common. Chipmunks, magpies, even bears are more prevalent than topless women with bags of flour. So I guess this counts as another interesting life experience. This time, we had Julie as our witness. She’ll tell you, we don’t make this stuff up.