Burning Man 2014: We Follow the Man in the Kilt

Of course by the time Okki and I embraced in the dirt lot beside the Wal-Mart in Fernley, Burning Man had indeed officially started, but not for us.

The gates had opened officially at 10 AM---an unprecedented early start for recent years at least. Okki had wanted to shoot for being at the gates then, of course, but their stopover in Evanston had put them behind schedule. I think it's insane to drive straight through anyway, so I was glad they had stopped. It had made our morning in Reno more relaxed, among other things.

We would get there when we got there. There was no rush. After one last raid on Wal-Mart, including a stop in the little liquor store in the front (Nevada is nice for this kind of stocking up), we made our way to a local Black Bear Diner where we gorged one last time on the bounty of civilization. The portions will so ample, none of us could finish the whole plates. The service was very nice.

Kathy had come with them. I had met her in Boulder last New Year's Eve at Ash's place. She was driving her own Prius (Okki and Ash were trading off the driving of Ash's hallowed minivan). Kathy's little car was packed with her own things.

After our last meal, we formed a mini caravan with yours truly in the lead, cutting under the interstate on the two-lane blacktop into the little town of Wadsworth, where the cops sit and wait for anyone to break the speed limits. There is even a 15 mph school zone. I had told them we would drive one mph under the limit at all times, and we made it through without issue. Likewise in the little Indian town of Nixon, just north of there on the Pyramid Lake reservation, we eased passed the patrol car that is always parked right by the bridge over the Truckee, and also on the south edge of town, near the civic center building that would, after the Burn, become temporary car wash service, one quite lucrative for the locals this time of year.

North of there is open country. One gets an awesome view of the lake itself for a few miles, climbing up out of the marshy delta of the Truckee onto the hillside. Then the road cuts over to the other side of mountains in to the parched valley of the dry bed of ancient Lake Winnemucca, like its extant sister Pyramid, a remnant of the giant Lake Lahontan that covered much of northern Nevada at the end of the last Ice Age.

The road there is straight as it goes up and down low hills, past Indian taco stands every few miles. We were making good time towards sunset, but then the traffic came to a sudden stop in the middle of nowhere. According to Okki, they were pulsing the traffic into Gerlach this year. We waited quite a while there, moving ahead slowly in staggering pulses. In the van in front of us, a man in a kilt would sortie at each stop. We would consider it to be an official "stoppage" whenever he finally got out to explore the countryside around the line of cars in the desert.