I wasted no time making a bee line across the Playa back to Center Camp, then circling around behind it to the 6:00 road, and following it through the city down to G, where I turned right and easily found the bus shelters where I'd left my bags.
There were two shelters, one for San Francisco and one for Reno. Both were crowded with dozens of people in a snaking rope line, either sleeping on the ground or standing up. The shelters were flanked by large mountains of bags.
I realized the place I'd put my bag next to the Reno shelter was now in the midst of many other bags. At first I couldn't find my bags, and circled somewhat frantically around the line, having a moment of weirdness thinking they'd been stolen. Then I looked and saw another third shelter that wasn't being used at all. I realized I'd probably left them there, and I was right. They were exactly where I left them.
After that I got in the rope line in the Reno bus shelter. Fortunately it was not long before the bus began boarding. They took us in groups of four, having us bring our bags to back of a big Ryder van, and then getting on a rented school bus nearby
While I waited my turn in the shelter, one of the guys in line right behind me---a New Yorker who was in his Thirties and wearing a big fur coat---was talking loudly to the guy next to him, whom he'd just met, and at first I was peeved because by then I'd been up for so long, and just wanted to veg out. But he was actually quite funny and interesting to listen to, so I didn't mind that he was entertaining the rest of us tired folk.
He'd been camping at Fractal Planet---the dome club at 2:00 towards which I'd sent Kevin off. He'd paid to camp there and be a participant, as many people do when coming to Burning Man. A lot of camps have this kind of open buy-in for participants.
He related a funny story of how he'd messed things up while setting up his tent by driving the rebar right down to the electric wires that had been buried earlier by advance people from the Fractal Planet camp. While pulling the rebar out at the end of the week, he'd gotten an electrical shock.
After about ten minutes it was my turn to board the bus. I toted my bags over to the truck, and then waited for them to check my name on the roster. They had no trouble finding my name on the list. All went smoothly.
The bus filled up until no seats were available. Some of the stand-by people got on as well. Then right on time at six a.m., we left and headed out of the city and onto the Playa where the cars and RVS were still in an endless line to get back to the main road. But the driver did not get into the great line of cars. She forced a gap in them and cut through, and then we were in the pitch darkness by ourselves.
"And this is what we get to do now!" she said with a whoop of joy, and we accelerated down a secret road away from the cars. Everyone cheered. After a mile we went through a BLM checkpoint, and then were soon on the main road by ourselves. We followed the asphalt up a small rise, and from there you could see the line of thousands upon thousands of headlights in the dark that stretched for miles and miles off to the east on the Playa.
The secret road we'd used was not the secret way out of the city that DPW had told me about. The DPW route was simply to get to the Merge Point faster---maybe it would shave an hour off the six hour wait. Most of the Exodus was after that. We'd avoided all that, but somewhere in those headlights were Okki and Ash, and tens of thousands of other people, patiently crawling towards the road upon which we were now zipping along.
We got into Gerlach about twenty minutes later. By then it was almost light. The school pulled into the same gravel parking lot where we'd done Will Call on the way into Burning Man. The driver said we had an hour until we were to board the regular coach bus that would take us back to Reno.
She said the little cafe in town was open and only a block away. That's all I needed to hear to scramble off the school bus as quickly as possible and hoof it over to the restaurant. Groggy, I took ayseat at the nearly empty counter. When the waitress came by I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, with coffee. It's a fun experience, the first time you order food in a restaurant after Burning Man. You just have to remember to pay for it.
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