Grander (more grand?)

Oct 25, 007
Black Rockalypse

I met Barton at the Gate during Burning Man when I was working and he was … pretending? … to be a hippie trying to get in for free. He doesn’t quite look like a hippie, aside from the Tevas and the dirty calloused feet: vintage short-sleeved cowboy shirt, worn black Carhartts, shoulder-length layered brown hair, pronounced brow and nose. I guess he’s handsome, in an ascetic sort of way. But I can’t think of him like that.

The Gate staff first sent him packing, told him to stop trying to mooch and to get his dirty hippie ass back to Reno … but then Naked Bob pulled him aside and sussed him out and decided he was cool, and made a super giant exception to Gate’s super-giant no-tolerance policy: Bob made Barton work like a field hand all day around the Gate, doing cleanup and whatnot. Which he did, happily.

By the time I got on shift, Barton had been toiling there in the hot sun for 14 hours, and the shift lead assigned him to help me MOOP the illegal plant matter from D-lot and bring three truckloads of bamboo and palm fronds to the burn barrels inside town. Then, despite wanting to continue conversing with the fella, as he radiated this sense of otherworldy calm … I shook Barton’s hand, thanked him for 20 hours of honest labor, and let him go free into Black Rock City, never to see him again. Or so I thought.

“So why us?,” I asked Barton, when he visited me inside The Wall that day, more than a month after the event had ended. “Why here, in America, in the Black Rock, with a bunch of drunk, idiot-savant freaks?”

I checked to see if he still had Tevas on. He saw me see them and shudder internally. I have no poker face. He smiled.

“Multiple reasons,” he said. “Mainly, though, once the broken circle forms, we come see what’s going on.”

“What broken circle?,” I said.

“Here’s a bit of trivia for you,” he said. “Technically, you called us. The universal signal for distress is a broken circle.”

“So who are you?,” I said.

“Not you,” he said, and winked. “But close.”

—–

We’ve got far more real estate than we originally thought: Perimeter staff went all the way around the Not-Dome’s squishy border and figured out it takes up a goodly amount of the Black Rock Desert itself. Miles and miles and miles. The whole Desert is the size of Delaware, roughly, so we’ve got a lot of wiggle room to play with.

Also! There’s a Not-Dome wormhole tunnel that leads to the Burning-Owned work ranch about 20 minutes down the 447, and then a smaller Not-Dome surrounding the ranch. I guess the Not-Us know we can’t function without our tools and our giant piles of stuff. Ranch managers now have the difficult job of allocating and appropriating materials.

And then there’s the team who’s trying to figure out how to build a well. We need running water if we’re going to live out here. We need water to survive, and we don’t really want to catch rainwater, what with all the chem trails overhead and who-knows-what in the air.

——

How are we going to support ourselves? This is one of the main questions weighing heavily on us. Senior Staff is kind of freaking out, but handling stress with a fair amount of grace, as they usually do. They know they’re not in charge out here, that it’s leaderless, except for the Not-Us … but senior staff also knows where everything is.

Their top issue right now is whether or not to take the profits from this year’s Burning Man and apply that money directly to this … project. I mean, what else are they going to do with the cash? It’s not like they can put on the event any more. They’re in here with us, willingly.

(I hadn’t even thought of next year’s Burning Man yet … I guess Radical Self-Reliance will be put to the test for all 50,000 people who’ll have to do this thing without any help at all. I’m sure the authorities will send them away … maybe they’ll even bust out the National Guard to keep them off the desert. Imagine: rows and rows of government henchpeople in riot gear, forming their own armed-and-dangerous MOOP line along the 447. Anarchy? You betcha.)

no more Drink Puke Work parade … not that we got to do anything fun anymore anyway, with the cops breathing down our necks

Right now everyone’s being given the freedom of planning a whole city that will eventually house 200,000 people. A sustainable permaculture type thing, I guess, and a town center (or centers) with the basics. Trading posts, food and clothes … Like the old West, but with art fags and punks and scientists instead of gold-diggers and cowboys and Indians.

This is all far into the future. (Except the digging-the-well part, we hope.) The strategizing and building, most of us are guessing it’ll take a year to do it right and for plants to be grown and everything. Right now it’s super early in the planning stage, obviously. Everyone’s amassing into teams based on their interests and specialties. Getting in where they fit in, and discussing the best ways to proceed. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings. You know how it is. Walk by any of the trailers at any given point besides the dead middle of the night — there’s planning-yelling going on in every third one.

Flooding? Yes, the playa floods in winter. But the wet will stay away from us, say the Not-Us. That’s what the Not-Dome is for. Sometimes we’ll have dust storms and occasional rain, just like regular summertime out here. Temperatures will remain more … uh, temperate … than the usual winter freeze, so we don’t feel like it’s too much of a chore to be doing this thing. We’ll have to build structures made for inclement weather — probably build them in inclement weather sometimes, too — because on this rapidly-devolving planet, inclement weather is an inevitability. But this is supposed to be fun. Even though it’s serious. The Not-Us seem to be good leaders. They know how to maintain group morale by mostly leaving us alone and letting us do our thing.

—–

It’s been quieter the past couple nights than it was on Monday. I think it’s starting to sink in. We’re all going to be here together, alone, isolated from everything but this magic amazingness we’re locked inside of.

Claustrophobia has begun, a little. Just like I felt at the event, but on a much grander and more stifling scale. Grander. More stifling. Grander.

More stifling.

GRANDER I SAID.