The Real Start of Burning Man 2104

Of course it was not really the start of Burning Man, at least the official event. As it happens, three full days of stressful hate awaited us in Reno for our last stage of preparations. Much of the stress was simply the uncertainty of being able to pull off the plan---picking up the rental truck, and then doing so much last-minute acquisitions at the big box retails of greater Reno, the things we couldn't yet acquire without the truck in hand.

Driving it around Reno was no piece of cake. It was my first time at the wheel of such a large vehicle. Changing lanes in busy traffic was often a matter of pure faith. But we managed to make it through out list, culminating in a last-minute visit to the Costco just next to our motel (quite near the place I stayed in near the airport while recovering from last year's event).

Finally after dropping off Red's car the last evening, we checked out and climbed up onto the freeway in the truck and started heading eastward on I-80. In a forty minutes we were parked in the small dirt lot along the road, next to the giant Wal-Mart supercenter in the little town of Fernley, along the Interstate. It's the last output of civilization to some respect. It even has a Starbucks where I had previously worked, two years ago.

After making one last visit into the Wal-Mart, I had the back door of the truck open, and had sat in a folding chair. It was a good place to get away from the sun. A couple other RVs were parked nearby, obviously heading to the same place as us.

While we waited there, I took the opportunity to use a couple bungee balls to affix the large nylon Iceland flag up just inside the back of the truck. I also put up the old mangled string of little plastic Swedish flags that I had used for several events running now.

It was barely ten minutes after I had finished hanging them, and while sitting in the chair inside the truck and looking out at traffic, that a pair of familiar figures rounded the back of the truck and came into view.

"Good day good day," said a familiar voice, in a convoluted Swedish-Finnish accent.

It was Okki, wearing dark shades, and next to him---Ash. They had just arrived from their own long trek westward on the Interstate across Nevada. They had stayed the night before at a Motel 6 in Evanston, Wyoming after leaving Boulder in the afternoon.

We had arranged our meeting place in Fernley via text. In fact my text message box was swamped with multiple group messages from numbers in the Aspen 970 area code, belonging to people I may or may not know, updated various other group members as to their whereabouts on the way to the event.

One was even coming by ultralight aircraft. We had spotted another group member in Winnemucca before flying onward to land in a ranch field near the little desert town of Empire, about seventy miles north of where we were in Fernley.

"What the hey," said Okki. "This is going to be the best burn ever,"

Now Burning Man really had begun.