To Kelle Re: Don't Go

Well I did ask, didn't? But you knew I probably had already made up my mind. I guess I just wanted to say thanks again for this year's Omaha Peak Experience.

So what should I have expected except those bikini-clad women in the sandstorm screaming at me? Sometimes I like to go with the flow. Sometimes I like to defy the scary skulls planted along the roadside, telling me turn back, traveler, herein your doom. Doom, schmoom. It will get to all of us in the end.

Thought of you vividly at one moment, of great reward, on the last night I was there. After the fabulous Aspenites had trickled mostly away, leaving a rump camp, and the raves had died down, and the both the man and the temple had been burned, I took the opportunity to politely ditch my friends and headed out onto the "deep playa" on the other side of the temple.

The pure dark of the night was cut by the full moon over the barren mountains. I had no problem navigating on my bike across the flat playa, out into the darkness, towards the distant lights of the art exhibits that been erected out there, and the floating headlamps of the other riders in group or solitary.

It was like going from planet to planet, a galactic explorer, into the deep of both space and the mind at once.

I picked my way more deeply onto the playa. At the third exhibit, I think, I came upon a startling piece, my favorite of the show.

It was the Sephirot, standing about twelve feet high, held by wires anchored in the desert floor. It must have been painted in colors, perhaps, but in the starkness of the full moon, it was bleached black, white and gray in the stark shadows that the moon cast. It was otherwordly, as if I could not have distinguished between the reality and a DiChirico painting right in front of my me. All around was the dark flatness of the empty playa.

I lingered for a while, soaking it all up. Two or three other people came and went while I was there, then biked away into the darkness. Otherwise it was just me and the sculpture.

There were more fun things, out deeper in the playa. If I go back, I plan to spend a lot more time out there, right from the first day.

You should go, by the way.