25: Last Ride

the road is black and the ground is brown. The sky is blue above and we drive over the pavement, exhausted. We're both beyond tired, but I'm driving. I've been behind this wheel for two and a half hours, and only the last half has been while the car was actually moving. Two hours of traffic on the way out. When we finally make it out the front gates I'm rigid with anger. But the anger at the line of cars is only a small part of the larger, complex emotion I'm experiencing. Euphorout, grimejoy, playadaze soulburn, grumpleaving showerhope. Endings, leavings, always make me sad because I know every time that there can never be a this again. We leave Black Rock City for the first time ever, and it is a moment that exists only once for me. I revelrage in the exquisite uniqueness of this particular traffic jam.

Since we lost each other on Saturday night, we had decided to stay an extra day. Sunday we rolled around with Curvas friends, and then watched the Temple burn on Sunday evening. We made sure to stay together. Hands were held tight. And the fire was different Sunday night, more personal. The crowd was smaller. The eve was nippy and the chill-time afterwards was looser and much more relaxed. The ending pieces of everything were falling down all around us, the soft invisible ash of the Burned Man, of the Torched Temple, of all the fires in every camp sizzling away out of form, into light and heat as the sharp playa wind crumpled and flared the flames in our firepit. We burned what we could of the trash, including the two by fours used to build the shower. We lounged in our camp chairs and random people stopped by to see where they were. "420 Gestalt," I told them, and I grinned every time. Such a great address and totally happenstance. They couldn't even get the spot we'd planned on before we left. I loved it there. I felt the sandy grit of playa between my skin and the inside of my Crocs. The shifty, silty ground slithered beneath my feet. The ground is hard, but it gives...

no! It's the pedal and I almost fell asleep at the wheel. We're leaving. We're leaving Burning Man. We're leaving Burning Man for the only first time and there is trash on the side of the road as we drive. The trash of life lived. The trash of disrespect. The trash of dreams spilt open from the dark nylon of the deep glowburn playa night. I haven't been able to sleep true in days. My mind is loose and ragged, shocked by the structure of life outside Black Rock City. The roads out here curve slow and wide as other machines rush past, fast. Before me are the people we rolled with all week and the wheels of the bike are right and steady in my mind as I drive. The road thrums with solitude. Lu is asleep beside me and I look at her, the curve of her cheeks, the tip of her nose. Then quickly back to the road I'm driving down and I wobble in the seat sighing heavily, shaking myself. Not going to pile up out here, I think. We managed to avoid a hundred-bike mashup out there tripping on the playa so we can do it here on the road, too. Steady, alert, alive. But I'm caught by the visions of our erratic path across the playa every night. I still cannot believe all of us managed to ride around and not destroy each other as art transfixed and we rode by, mouthes agape, over and over again. I loved how it felt, the action of legs creating motion over the ground. Here in the car it was like riding a fast couch. A fast, deep, wide couch hazy with the light of noon and the soft breeze of fanned air.

And then I jerk alert again. I can go on no more.

"Wagup," I said loudly, shaking her softly.

"Wha?" she asks from the shotgun side, sleepy.

"Wakeup baby! I need you to drive."

"Wha? Me?"

"I can't. I'm friggin exhaussed," I say to her from behind the wheel, my lids dangerously heavy.

"Kay. Kay. I can drive for a bit," she says, rubbing the nap from her bleary eyes.

We switch at a rest stopped filled with other Burners. I'm thankful Lu's behind the wheel as I tuck into the crux between headrest and window and pull the bandana over my eyes.

My dreams are vivid and rapid.

We pedal through the day playa flatness brimming with everything we didn't see the fifty foot ladder stretched all the way up to no-where domes pulse and I didn't find them the night it Burned was wild and bright and hot sun poured into the bonfire of flailing mortals prone on the earth circled by the fading city that beat only with the sounds of human hearts synchronous within skin I looked out through my shades at the shifting day fell down to night to glow to roll to dance and search and hope and dream I'm dreaming in a car somewhere I can't stay awake. I nod off and then jerk awake, twice, first into the dream of driving and then again when I nearly made us crash, but no I'm safe, I'm shotgun. Lu's driving and I'm sweaty with hot sunlight sleep. She fighting slumber with every ounce of her will. I slip away to a desperate doze and it feels like only seconds before she's shaking me awake again. The car rumbles beneath us. The green hills and leafy trees flash by beside us. In front, the road unravels, long and hard. Cars and trucks blast by in the opposite direction. We are entombed in metal and the world is hard, immediate.

"Gotta switch," she says thickly. "I can't."

"Cool, I'm good. I can do it," I tell her and so we pull over and make it happen. She sighs into shotgun and I grip the steering wheel tight, utterly determined. "I just needed a nap and now I should be fine," I tell her. But she's already asleep. But I'm not okay. Ten minutes back on the road and I'm cold with fear at how tired I am, how far we have to go and how the hell we're going to get there. Twenty after that and it's over. She has to drive. We pull over again, we switch, Lu takes the wheel and I sleep hard, knowing my nap is limited. Lu rocks through forty minutes of the one-laned concrete vein of the Black Rock we flow out of. When she wakes me to switch again, I know this time it has to be mine, all the way to the Bay. This is what I do.

I get behind the wheel and start using every tactic I know. Self-pinches. Open window. Tunes to sing to. Exhausation pulls me still. I sigh and shift, shaking myself and battling those two thin folds of skin that pull me out of the waking world and into my internal one. Dreams come quick behind the lids but I use details to drag awareness from my jumbled head.

The steering wheel is rubber coated. The glass of the windshield is thick. The speedometer's wand is bright orange, pegged at seventy. Lu is snoring.

The wheels are tight against the ground and we flash past trash more often than I'd lke to see. I wonder how they're doing back at Curvas where the truck still had to contain a whole shitload of trash bags before it could pull away. Black Rock City is gone, I realize again. With every single mile Lu and I put down we are pulling out, tearing apart the fabric of the city we'd just hours ago helped to manifest. Black Rock City is being pulled apart by the cars in front of and behind me as we drive out of the desert, back into the world. Nobody knows what we saw. I cannot help but wonder at all the things we must have missed. I marvel at the madness we played in.

It was a good choice staying Sunday night. We got to go back and get a lapdance lesson on Sunday afternoon. We learned about the Tush Push, the Naughty Girl, and best of all, the Wandering Knee. Eye contact was a key point of the lesson, but they had lots of tips. Though the two people teaching the 'class' weren't exactly what you would picture when thinking of it. He wore a tshirt and a ball-thong. She was a larger woman, dressed in a pink leotard with a nettled layer on top of that. They were great, though. Really nice and funny and it was cool to just do something a little different. The distinct lack of nakedness was a definite plus. I paid them in cans of beer. They were delighted. Idling over the memory of our lesson I turn to talk to Lu, but she's still out, deeply asleep.

I push through another twenty minutes and finally we make it to the biggest little city in America. Reno. The sign for the city means food is close. We'd left Curvas Peligrosas around 10 a.m. without eating and got out of Black Rock just past twelve thirty in the afternoon. I'm starved and I cannot believe it has only been a bit less than two hours before achieving Reno. It feels much longer. The roadtrip is a battle we fight through in shifts. We order shitty pizza and a couple of sodas and wait for our food to arrive in a strip mall pizza joint we settled on mostly out of sheer indifference. The food is cheese with sauce and bread. It barely rates pizza status. Out the restaurant window our car stands out quite distinctly. It is the one filthy with playa and dusty, barely glittery bikes strapped to the truck. The back seat is a pile of camping equipment and clothes. We have lived from within this car, clearly.

Food coma doubles the trouble when we get back on the move. In a half an hour I have to stop again, and I know exactly what I have to do: Smartfood, Red Bull, coffee. Before I'm halfway through the large cup of their strongest brew, I know I've got the driving situation completely under control. The haze of drowsiness has lifted as the morning turned into afternoon and the calories of the food finally kicks in. The coffee simply ensures I'm going to make it deep into dusk. I don't even touch the Red Bull, but the Smartfood I eat kernel by kernel, each one tantalizing me for the next. Wide awake and thoroughly in the driving groove, the zen of motion and memory and instinct kicks in.

I think on the road. As my eyes rove between the cars before me, the ones in the rearview, the side mirror and then again out the windshield, a part of my mind cycles through a cascade of thoughts. It has always been that way for me. It is one of the reasons I absolutely love to drive, as long as we're moving and not just fuming in traffic. And there the cycle starts, flowing backwards and to the sides.

The moving truck was nearly full when we finally cut out at 10 am this morning. 20+ bikes, some broken beyond repair, tarps and tables, rugs, leftover water and food, the futon, the bar, all of it was stuffed back in and all of our personal stuff was packed up in our cars and tied to our roofs. Tent rolled. Bikes strapped to trunk, water and peanuts and wet naps ready and waiting in the front seat, and then finally we just did it. They still had some work to do, and lots of trash to stuff in the truck, but we were done, just kaput, so we bolted. Directly into traffic.

Waking up that last morning was confusing but calm. I knew by then to be bewildered by dawn. The heat. The dryness. The soft, squishy give of the airmattress. How relived I was to wake up and find Lu there still with me.

I thought back to last night, when I finally found her in the tent, at 3am. The sensation of relief that washed through my body when I saw her bike leaned up against our dusty car was nearly overwhelming. The deep darkness of the lonely Burn night had been suddenly filled with light, for me. She was sitting up when I burst into the tent, and I fell into her arms, hard. We held each other for a long time as we mumbled apologies and murmered of loss and despair.

I thought about the moment I decided I'd had enough fake fun grooving to the dj beats of Lotus and decided to ride back home, hoping I would finally find her there. How on that ride I realized that my true home is wherever she is. That these were the risks we took by coming to a place like this. That thousands were still raging against the dark of the night. That I loved my bike, too.

I rolled back through the week, back to the boobie hunt, to the never-tried roller desert disco, to the human-sized games of Operation and Mousetrap. To the maze, to the blue head we chilled in on our first night and I first puffed the playa winds. Back all the way to when I stood next to the parked car, holding my bike as we started our search for our friends, realizing that it had all begun. I'd finally got to Burning Man, but now, somehow, we were leaving it subsumed into memory as the light drained from the Monday holiday sky and we burned west and south, towards our other city, the place we stayed when Black Rock wasn't around. The Bay Bridge crested in the distance, foretold by the traffic I snuck around using Oakland backstreets.

The toll told me I was valid as I drove through the booth, night and headlights close around. Then I drove across the bridge, over more water than I'd seen in days and the city rose up before us as Lu slept thoroughly beside me I shifted into fifth gear speeding between the lines I could feel us one of many moving on the span, spiralling into this large, permanent city of steel and structure and inhuman dimensions so that I see what happens when we all stay awhile, and what it looks like when the slow, fading entroy of impermanent life is tamed and hardened. When the tents become wood become stone become concrete become steel and the wires are threaded through, and the pipes are laid true, and the hills are covered in concrete to ease traversement and I don't even know if it's good but I'm oh so very happy to have a shower and a bed and a secure, happy home waiting for us at our address.

In my soul, though, 420 Gestalt, Black Rock City, will always glowburn with the hot playa night, and in my mind, those dustcovered wheels of my bike will continue to churn.

The City by the Bay that burns with fog envelopes us as night falls, and together we are returned. She awakes surprised we're home already. I sit behind the wheel marveling that we made it at all. And as we unpack the car in the San Franciscan night, I realize 2 things: the first hits me as we're unstrapping the bikes. I realize how excited I am to ride this machine through the streets of this city, too. The second thing I realize as we pull them off, is that next year these feet and those bike wheels will touch the playa again. When we decided to go, the foundation of the decision was that if not now, then maybe never. But now having been, all we can do is go back again, and we will. The playanight burns in me. I will never be the same again.