Blackwater goons = dust storms

Oct. 29, 007
Black Rockalypse

I discovered another property of the Not-Dome on Friday morning. The hard way.

I’ve been trying to conserve gas, but I was freaking out about what to say in the blog. So I woke up at dawn and took the Donkey (my dog Bruno) and drove the car to the perimeter — which has been half-assedly delineated now, at least near our living area of the Black Rock Desert, with dashes of fluorescent spray-paint on the alkali, so nobody speeds into the Not-Dome and accidentally rubber-bands themselves back into our … “area” to mow someone down. I needed to write and think and stare out into nothing, and usually for that I go to Bernal Hill in San Francisco, but we’re not there, we’re here.

I was sitting on the roof of my car, tapping on my laptop, when I looked over the playa towards the town of Gerlach and noticed a squadron of behemoth black military helicopters in the distance. By “squadron,” I mean twenty or so.

Kicking up clouds of white alkali, this cadre of helicopters buzzed along the desert floor, probably 10 feet above it, in straight-line formation. As they got closer and closer, I noticed something amiss, and realized I couldn’t hear them. Twenty humongous choppers should make a sound like bass-heavy death, right? … and they got closer … and closer … and situated right in the middle of their line, I began to realize they didn’t seem to be lifting themselves up any higher to clear me and my Delta-88, or our trailer park in the distance behind me …

I stood on top of my car. I screamed as they approached. Waved my arms and jumped around like a fool, heart pounding in my throat, sure I was about to die. Why weren’t they lifting up? Wouldn’t it ruin their choppers to crash into a 120-pound woman on top of a 5,000-pound American steel automobile? … Why couldn’t I hear them? Were they stealth choppers, somehow? …

Nearer and nearer they came, and I pretty much said my final prayers — and then, about a body’s length away from my face … the helicopters vanished, right at the border, and a hurricane-force gust of wind knocked me off the car. Ouch, with the spinal injury already and whatnot. I pulled my face up off the alkali dirt to look behind me and see a dust-wall forming — about 20 helicopters wide.

And there were dust storms all weekend. Me, I sat in my car at the perimeter the rest of the morning on Friday, looking to see if the helicopters would reappear, or if they’d been somehow eaten up by the Not-Dome. They did. (Reappear, that is.) And a couple military vehicles. And three B-52 bombers that must’ve come from the Winnemucca side of the dome, which approached me from the trailer park as three magnificently huge dust devils, shook my car violently, and resurfaced beyond the barrier, a yardstick’s length from my car.

I’ve heard reports from other residents who saw similar things throughout the weekend. Nobody knows how the Not-Us are doing it. Nobody knows why the military’s private guard are looking for us so hard, and why they can’t find us.

The best guess so far is that we’re in another dimension.

—-

We woke up in the Black Rock Desert a week ago this morning.

(…and on the outside, my peeps in the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo went to Bumbershoot in Seattle while I was at Burning Man. Now they will have just gotten done performing at the Maker Faire in Austin, and if the bus hasn’t broken down, they’re in New Orleans, preparing for the Halloween shows and trying not to get arrested. Sigh)

—-

It’s only been a week. It feels like two kinds of eternity, with four days of orientation and scrambling and planning-yelling, and then three days of waiting out the dust-pocalypse. Luckily I spent my storm-weekend inside my trailer, alone, organizing my thoughts and my notes, and trying to explain this situation to all y’all in a more reasonable and linear fashion.

Speaking of the blog … well, I keep trying to make big pronouncements and stuff, and then Barton tells me not to. I should merely provide an overview from my perspective, he says. Keep blogging, the way I was before the … Black Rockalypse.

What this means, I tell him, is that I will just keep talking out of my ass. In between trying to keep my own head together, help other people here under the Not-Dome avoid freakouts, and do my share of physical labor, I must also talk out of my ass.

Barton visits me some mornings in my trailer to go over my postings with me. He won’t answer many questions at a time, never tells me what I should say or not say, and only stays for 5 minutes. So I’m winging it. We’re all winging it. I’m pretty sure everyone on the outside just thinks I’m nuts now so it’s cool. I could write anything I wanted to and it would sound just as ridiculous.

Not to worry, he says. I’m merely setting a tone here. And then — here’s some news — Barton told me communication will open up eventually so the whole world can see inside the Not-Dome. (Via human cameras, I would guess. They’re not letting us in on any new technology or anything, I don’t think. If they even know any, besides magic. Whatever they are.)

But to make a time schedule for that — the everyone-seeing-inside thing — would be folly, he said. I agree. After waking up with helicopters in my face, I most certainly agree.

—-

First we have to figure out how to get the supplies we need. Gate and Purchasing and a whole bunch of people are working with the Not-Us on that. I won’t say any more about it since the fucking helicopters might come back and lock us inside a giant three-day cloud of dust again. Uncle Sam, if you’re reading this, please don’t. What are you even trying to do? You can’t flush us out. We’re in here and you’re out there, and we’re not hurting anyone so leave us alone.

(I know, right? This sounds WAY crazier than my chem trails rants or the weird bubbling action in the hot springs during the event or the shadow on the mountain with no clouds above it. But I’m just calling it like I see it. And I’m thankful for the Not-Dome’s properties. I’m pretty sure at this point if Uncle Sam’s Blackwater goons could get inside here, they would not be friendly to us.)

——

Why did the Not-Us place our double-wides out here, instead of just letting us all live on the ranch? Why didn’t they move us onto the ranch, and “beam” all the supplies and stuff out to the harsh, 100%-alkali, hard-packed, hard-on-the-human-body desert floor? I took it up with Barton.

“Can you re-transport everything to magically make us switch places with the stuff?,” I asked. “Residences on land with topsoil; work stuff on playa?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Are we allowed move to the ranch if we’d rather be around sagebrush and gypsum and old chicken coops?,” I asked.

“That’s up to the group,” he said.

“So why are we out here?,” I asked. “Out here where invisible helicopters can kick up enough dust to cramp our style all weekend?”

“This is federal land,” he said. “Not private land. It’s owned by the American people.”

“Why not some other federal land,” I asked, “if you’re concerned with interfering with other people’s property-owning experience? Why not the Mendocino Woodlands, or somewhere where plants grow and the ground cover doesn’t eat your skin and hair?”

“Because,” he said. And he smiled.

it used to just be us, and the open sky, and the option to come and go as we pleased

I’m pretty sure a lot of us have started to make plans to trick out our double-wides with a sort of “entrance chamber” where one can receive visitors during a dust storm and avoid tracking alkali all through the house. In case this becomes a frequent occurence.

——

It occurs to me now, because of the relentless angry dust storms all weekend, that very soon, life on Earth will have to be lived inside. Here in the Black Rock Desert, we can’t have gardens outside, or swimming pools, or patios that stay clean, or any sort of ground cover at all. Maybe this will be true of many more places soon — maybe the atmosphere will almost always be as angry and agitated as a fleet of invisible helicopters.

Thanks for reading, but I’d recommend that you take some time every day to get off the Internet and go outside.

We might be the last generation who can.