Take 5: A trip to Burning Man

    There are few things in life as dear to me as the community of wonderful crazies I have found through Burning Man It's almost not enough, what I've just said, but it will suffice, for the magical special thing about Burning Man is, I believe, incommunicable.

    Here I am (below) all ready to leave the farm in North Carolina. I had about 10 days to buy, register and wire-up a truck, and prepare everything I was bringing. There was a lot of running around, fixing up the trailer, bamboo harvesting, shopping etc. The only piece of available flat land for the trailer was was down at the bottom of the farm. The farm house is at the top of the hill, up a quarter-mile gravel drive. Packing day was a lot of up and down.

    You may notice the blue tape on my travel trailer, a tribute to my friend Andy, with whom I traveled post-burn in 2014.

     It may also catch your attention that the bed of my pickup is not piled over the top and strapped down with gobs of supplies. It is a tradition drive to the Burn with a vehicle that is maxed-out on payload by volume and moderately to severely overloaded by weight. It felt strange to be heading out with the bed of my truck virtually empty.

    Part of the reason I was so lightly loaded was that I was driving alone. I wasn't able to convince anyone from our Virginia-based art project (The Mega-Cake) to drive with me. Jamie and Chris were driving out from Norfolk a day later and we hoped to meet up in Wyoming to caravan together the last thousand miles.

    I'm pretty new to towing a trailer, so a solo transcontinental trip felt like a challenge. However given my cross-country experience I was confident in my ability to do 500 mi days. I planned for two rest days in my schedule to break up the monotony and to leave room for any unforeseen incidents.

    Day one was a great success, despite the lack of Air Conditioning driving was manageable without the use of the cooling suit I had brought with me. It is a t-shirt with tubes sewn into it. You connect it to a cooler with a special pump that pumps ice water through the shirt. Some cloudy weather helped on many days of the trip so I didn't end up using it while driving.

    Another big aide was the use of some old-school cruise control. That is, my steering wheel lock ("The Club") jammed between the accelerator pedal and the driver's seat cushion. Highly effective.

   Carbondale Illinois was reached before sunset on the first day. Visiting my friend Raine and her daughter Sequoia. Rest Day: Working out, breakfast, emails, sanitizing the trailer's water tank, cooking dinner, moon viewing, fixing generator.

    Day 3 took me up to St Louis, and then across Missouri to KC. (This map might be helpful now) Stopped at a Home Depot for a part to fix the kitchen sink in the trailer. Discover that even with my two generators my AC in the trailer still isn't working right due to high starting amperage. I made it to a lovely campground in Nebraska City. Camper life is really enjoyable if you find a peaceful campground. Of course I had to get to work draining the bleach water out of the camper's tank, fixing the kitchen sink, and researching the AC problem. I learned that all AC units might benefit from a hard start kit. In short, the part I needed was in Omaha.

     Day 4, detour to Omaha to pick up the AC part. And a stop at Home Depot to try a few more parts until the sink finally got fixed. Driving across Nebraska takes all day. I passed my first fellow burner, he too was towing a trailer. I waved, but I wasn't sure he got the message, my taped on decoration was facing the wrong way. He had a little burning man logo taped on the back of his trailer, this was something I would have to emulate.
      I pulled into Cheyenne Wyoming after dark and realized that my dim headlights would need fixing. Called a handyman to arrange the next day to have the help of a ladder to fix the AC on the trailer's roof. I plotted a pre-dawn run, brushed my teeth and checked the Facebook Mega-Cake group chat where I discovered that Jamie and Chris had broken down in Denver. With them the camp trailer with all the tools, tents, clothes and kitchen supplies wasn't going anywhere : (  I knew what this meant.

    Day 5, after an early morning run, breakfast, meeting an interesting retiree handyman who had a ladder. [He keeps busy writing google reviews, even for places he's never been to, and exploring old mines and hunting for gold.] At 8:30 am I called Jamie:
           "I heard you'all broke down"
     "Yeah"
           "Should I come down to help?"
     "Yeah"

      So off I set. (Fun Fact: Cheyenne is only 90mi from Denver) Along the way Jamie and I worked out various details of how I could tow his trailer.  Jamie wanted to know how high my trailer ball was off of the ground, because "this trailer is really low, and we gotta have it level."  At 8,000 lbs I knew there was no messing around with anything other then level.  Jamie told me he was running with the top of his ball 15 inches above the ground.
    I pulled over to measure mine, I called Jamie up:
         "I'm at 21 inches off the ground"
    "That's alright I'll give you my adjustable level ball mount, We'll just swap it out of the hitch"
         "Uuh, my truck doesn't have a hitch."
    "It doesn't have a hitch? Then what are you towing with?"
         "Its got this thing bolted to the bumper, its got a ball but its not a hitch."

    I had to look it up. Ladies and Gentelmen, this is what a you call a Pintel Hook.

       I told Jamie to figure something while I got back on the road. He cruised the internet and found a hitch that has a plate on the back with four bolt holes. You can bolt it to a tractor, you can bolt it on a wall, you can bolt it to a truck. I told him Amazon wasn't gonna cut it for our timeframe, I said:
         "Find it in Denver"
     He did.
          At Trailer Source, and I drove straight there.
     The friendly associate had pulled the part aside and I was all smiles as I got the part I needed. I walked outside held the hitch up to the bumper to see, and . . . F*¢K. 

     The bolt holes didn't line up. Immediately I realized that this was gonna have to be welded. I went back in the shop, spoke to the friendly associate. Spoke to the mechanics in the shop. Spoke to Jamie on the phone. No one had any answers. 
      There was only one problem with the idea of welding the hitch onto the bumper. it was a Saturday! By divine guidance the first welder I looked up on google answered the phone, listened to my problem, and said he could weld it in the alley behind the shop. I didn't like the sound of it. Some random dude, welding it in the alley, and I'm gonna trust my truck, all of the camps equipment, and potentially my life that this hitch doesn't shear off at 65 MPH.     But I had no other options. 

      I drove down to the welding shop. Mica the welder had a shop full of race cars, which is why he had to do it in the alley. But in the end I trusted him and he did a beautiful job.
     Now all I had to do was get a new ball mount, hook back up my trailer and park it somewhere. Luckily Jamie had located a fellow burner in the Denver area who happened to have a free yard to park my travel trailer, his name was also Evan. Then back down to finally see Jamie! By this time I had driven through the teeth of Denver traffic three times! I was pretty beat. 

      But we weren't done yet, I had to get Jamie over to the tool store so he could get a transmission jack to change his transmission in a Lowe's parking lot. Then to the named parking lot to tow Jamie's stranded truck away from the trailer and push it into a parking space. Then to finally hitch me up to the camp trailer. Whew! What a Saturday! we crashed hard.





    Jamie was going to have to wait a whole 'nother 24 hours for Monday morning to start calling shops to find out about an expedited transmission so he generously gave me his co-pilot Chris to help me get the camp trailer out to Burning Man.


Day 6: Chris Revels takes this triumphant picture of me getting ready to leave Denver. 

     With the 32 foot 8,000 lb trailer securely hitched I gingerly drove north out of Denver. I had Chris back out of the gas station. Maneuvering a rig this big was a whole new ballgame. 
      I got back behind the wheel, My truck had plenty of power to tow it, but we were being conservative, no overdrive on the transmission, 60-65 MPH max. At that speed, all of the Semi-trucks were passing us. When they did, their wake first pushed us aside, then sucked us in close then pushed us away again. I was learning quickly how to corrective steer against these forces. 
     We made it back to Cheyenne, where I had been a day before and set out west across I-80. We stopped at the summit rest stop at 8,640 ft of elevation. I drove west to Laramie and picked up new headlights. As I drove into the late morning the electronic signs on the highway warned "CAUTION: WIND GUSTS UP TO 45MPH", Chris drifted off to sleep. When he woke up the electronic warning had become all too real. I told him I had been white knuckle driving for the past 40 minutes. Just then a truck blew by and the gust pushed me to within inches of the edge of the pavement. As we came to our senses, a blue sign offered an oasis, Rest Stop 2 mi!  

    We pulled over at about 11am and waited, and waited, and waited. Plenty of time to have lunch, take a silly photo, change out the headlights, meet fellow travelers, and put retro-reflective tape and a little burning man logo on the trailer. 

     It came to me, the trailer was 'The Black Beast' and my truck 'The White Knight' to save the day. The rest stop seemed to know of the omnipresent condition.

    By the time the winds died down it was near sunset and we had been stopped for 8 hours. We drove on into the night, wary of the transmission. With no temperature gauge for it, we stopped from time to time to crawl under the truck tap a hand to the hot transmission and see how hot it was getting. It was hot, but the cool night air was helping. Chris' eyesight was no good after dark, so I drove on until my eyes gave out. We stopped in Evanston Wyoming, at the very west side of the state. We had made it a solid 440 miles. We did 2am laundry and slept. 

     Day 7: As we breakfasted and packed up Chris gleaned from the locals that the climb up into Utah was a reckoning. I wanted to plan a stop to cool off the transmission before the climb, but we couldn't figure out where the grade was, despite its mythologizing by the locals, so on we went. After cresting the summit, and a transmission temperature check on we went into more bad news. The gentile I-84 route down into Ogden was closed, so we'd be forced down the steep I-80 grades into Salt Lake City. We made it into town and did a little shopping to buy food for the weeks ahead. I drove out of town to an overlook on the Great Salt Lake to let Chris take a stint behind the wheel. But before we could set off, another misfortune. The transmission was untouchable, it was scorching hot. We sat in the narrow noon shade of the trailer and waited for the transmission to cool. I bathed in self-recriminations. 
      Eventually I looked to see about a mechanic in the last town on the edge of the SLC metro area. I called up Pete's automotive in Tooele. Pete answered the phone and dropped everything he was doing to come rescue us. He towed The Black Beast to his shop and we followed along. His inspection turned up nothing wrong other than being a quart shy on tranny fluid. After a few test drives up steep hills he pronounced our transmission good to go. By now it was the hottest part of the day and we again chose to wait untill conditions were better for driving. I set off into the cold star-filled night. When we stopped, only 400 hard miles had been accomplished. We were a couple hours behind schedule. and we felt like for sure we could make it. 

     Day 8: We woke and hit the road early, meeting more burners along the way.

Stopped at the last town in Nevada for food and ice and gasoline, and then headed up the beautiful and narrow country road that leads to the Black Rock desert. We checked the transmission temperature many times, and things were staying cool enough. At 2pm a stroke of intuition told me to check the tire pressure on the trailer. The tires registered 95 PSI!!! The Black Beast had thrown up one last challenge. We let air out of the tires and drove on. Reaching Burning Man for two weeks in a bubble city apart from the world. 

Mega-Cake was the art project we built. One week of work, four tiers, 6 flaming candles, 2000 Watts of power. It was open for 48 hours, and then we burned it down in a fireworks spectacular. 

Here is a timelapse of the week of building it. 

And Some shots of the Cake

And of course there were a few weddings at the cake. 

I Love this perspective picture showing the Cake and the city beyond.

Yours truly and Jacob (one of our Mega-cake Crew, 11 years old) just after finishing the Flaming Candles, Jacob is holding the box with the 6 buttons that fire off the candle poofers. 

And The Burn

There's so much more I could write about the Burn, The trip afterwords to Portland, selling the truck and trailer, visiting old friends and the three part train ride PDX-OAK-LA-KC back to North Carolina, but I'm out of words, and I'm sure the pictures are what you really wanted anyway.

-Evan