Galaxian’s Diary: How the Burning Man Temple was built and burned down

Instead of Preface

The most popular question I (and probably every builder) was asked during Burning Man was: “So, do you feel sad that the Temple you’ve The most popular question I (and probably every builder) was asked during Burning Man, was: “So, do you feel sad the Temple you’ve built will be burned down?
No?
Why?”

…Compare it to Christmas trees.

Millions of people buy them but for only one night, decorate them with beautiful toys, some of them costly, some handmade, some kept in families for generations. Under these trees, we put special things for people we care about. For that brief moment in time, there is joyful magic of both presents and the celebration of a new 12-month period of life.

Several days after, the tree loses its magical meaning. And nobody feels sad about throwing it away.

Technically, the Temple has a similar temporary function. It gathers inside all the artifacts brought by thousands of people during the event in memory of their beloved ones who had passed away, or events that matter. A giant archive of memories and thoughts in all shapes and forms.

And then, fire takes everything away.

This final step of the burn is crucial; it is the most intense and vivid part of every Burning Man Temple’s life.

In this fire, everything becomes equal. Sorrow and joy, memories, messages become coals and ash. Leaving a thing or a note inside the Temple may not feel as something mystical, but watching it burning does something quite special to all the participants. I met dozens of people telling me how it pushed something inside them, inspired them to reconsider things, and soothed the pain of loss.

Burned down, the Temple falls back into invisibility to reappear again at next Burning Man, every year with a completely different facade.

So, for me, there was no question had we burn it or not. We were proud of our work, and the night we saw the Temple disappear in ashes was unforgettably beautiful and meaningful.

Before all the stories and pictures, I would like to thank everybody who helped me with this miracle in my life. Thanks to Arthur Mamou-Mani for his outstanding architectural project. Thanks to everybody we talked about volunteering for the Temple in winter 2018. Thanks to Jerry James for approving me to the crew. Thanks to Anastasia Davidova, Boris Chibisov, Eugenia Gorzhevskaya, Oleg Rocklin, Marina Eybelman, Alex Furman, Anna Furman, Michael Leyzerovich, Maria Tsukernik, Marina Kalmanovich, and Boris Berkovich for helping me with my equipment. Thanks to everybody who helped me with logistics: to Peggy Su and Mariam Halstead, our volunteer coordinators who kept in touch with every and each of 100+ of us; to my campmates Yoel Bilsky, Paul Mcdonald, Lee Klinger, Brian Hiller, Laura Bacon who helped me to bring my luggage to Reno, then to Playa, then back to San Francisco. Thanks to everybody from the Temple Crew with whom we worked together every day at the build. Thanks to everybody who made my life in the desert easier by bringing me extra water, food, or things I needed during the month – Boris Levit, Alexander Kiskachi, Nickolas Morgan, Aleksey Krasavin, and all my campmates.

A single minute of this life experience wouldn’t have happened without you. Thank you.

100+ gallons of logistics

I stayed in the desert from August 10th to September 6th. One month out of civilization. It was my fourth Burning Man, but although I had checklists from previous years, this time it took me almost three weeks to get together everything I needed. And to figure out all the logistics.

Being a Temple builder doesn’t mean you get privileges. You have to buy the ticket for the festival, you work for free and have to bring with you everything you need using transportation of your choice. During the event, having your Temple Crew badge doesn’t give you shortcuts. You have to pay a camp fee for your stay during the construction, and there is another fee if you want to stay with the camp during the event week. Because the Temple is technically just another art project for Burning Man, the event covers some part of expenses but doesn’t provide financial support for volunteers. On the one hand, it may sound even a bit unfair. On the other hand, most people who join the crew feel genuinely happy about sweating under the sun and working as hard as they can to offer the installation to the Burning Man community. So were we.

I volunteered as a carpenter, and before the start, I had received a list of equipment items I had to bring with me. A pair of steel-toe shoes, a hard hat, an impact driver, fall protection, build gloves (three types for different tasks, seven pairs), protecting glasses (three pairs in case), and so on. Apart from specific equipment, there were basic things in amounts you would never need for an ordinary one week of Burning Man. Clothes for heat and cold for many days (no laundry service in the desert), shoes for every occasion (flip-flops, ninja shoes, winter boots for the coldest nights), scarves, lots of underwear and socks. Wet wipes in case I didn’t have time to shower. I rechecked everything a dozen times: in the worst-case scenario, I wouldn’t be able to bring anything throughout the entire month.

Then came my logistic challenge. I live in New York, I didn’t drive by then, one part of my belongings was flying with me from the East Coast, another part was in San Francisco, and the rest was on Amazon waiting to get shipped to Reno. I asked everybody I knew in New York, then in San Francisco, then wrote to dozens of people from our Temple contact base checking wherever we coincided in dates and asked for help – to take a pillow and a sleeping bag from one place, to bring a container to another, to give me a ride to Playa if possible.

Writing letters to dozens of unknown people felt a bit awkward and super exciting at the same time. I knew that I would meet them soon and we would spend a lot of time together. It felt like making the first step towards somebody invisible yet very important, who would shortly materialize in my life; an expectation of a distant yet already well-known future. Suddenly one of my recipients, Brian, answered me that he could give me a ride from Reno to Playa, and the puzzle got together.

My gratitude here goes to Yoel and Lee who kindly agreed to take my tent, sleeping bag, mattress, two pillows, a 27-gallon (almost 100 liters!) container and a cooler from San Francisco. Our excellent volunteering coordinator Mariam kindly agreed to keep everything until my arrival. Another part of things went with me on Greyhound in a huge trash bag which I converted into another couple of containers in Reno, then another container arose from all the Amazon purchases, and then Brian and I headed to the desert.

Playa felt empty and crowded at the same time. There was no city and no installations yet, but there were trucks, vans, piles of wood everywhere, and everything was in motion. People walked, trucks moved, VRs beeped.

I heard the nights were warm, the days were hot. We arrived by 5 PM, for an hour and a half I struggled with my tent – the wind was so strong my tent turned into a parachute each time I tried to set it down. While I was struggling to not to fly away, a sweet smiling girl approached and helped me out – so I met Peggy, our volunteer coordinator. During summer, the Crew used Slack chat to talk about every detail of the project, and I had talked to Peggy many times too and of course we would meet, but still it was weird and amazing, meeting in person people whose names I read dozens of times on my phone screen. Nicknames and lines of words transformed into dozens of people around, with different accents, backgrounds, stories behind. I have never had such a massive devirtualization.

August 10 was about unpacking the boxes and forming the triangles for Module 12: we laid down pieces of wood according to some numbers and letters the logic of which everybody but me seemed understanding already. By the end of the day, the entire module was on the ground.

Our build site planned to be four times bigger than a usual Temple build site.

Day 2. Petals and wedges

An unexpected beauty: the sunrises, the sunsets, and the desert sky above us. For two weeks before the festival, we camped at the Temple area, and as there was nobody else around, from the first day it felt like landing on a new uninhabited planet where we had to complete a specific short-term mission.

Every piece of wood and every metal brace for the Temple had its own name and number. Together, they made 2,400 triangles of different dimensions forming a 20-petal 65-tall vortex that looked as the Milky Way galaxy from the sky.

My tasks for my Day 2 were unpacking the boxes with wood from 7.30 AM to 1 PM, and then, when I felt tired of the task and asked to switch to something else, I went on to sort out the metal braces for different sections of Module 12. There I met Jerry, my beloved companion for next couple of days, together we put every stack of braces (very heavy!) according to its number, and made a stack of triangles closer to dinner. Jerry was my highlight, so much fun of working together.

Progress since Day 1 (what I noticed): the laid out Module 12 field started transforming into 3-d triangular figures for the middle part of the Temple; two out of three scaffolding structures were in progress. The area where pieces of wood were put together got a name Triangle Farm, and would exist until the very end of the build.

Day 3. M1-F2-T1

Our kitchen truck also served as a white board for our daily agenda, which changed every morning depending on our tasks. It was written in the kitchen area above the barrels with water and electrolytes, so everybody checked with it at least 10 times a day. We also had speeches during every mealtime – Arthur, our architect and leader, reported the progress, the team leads talked about the main goals and safety (we were also taught several basic words from sign language in case we needed help but couldn’t hear each other).

Most of Days 3, 4, and 5 happened for me at the Triangle Farm, where we were assembling triangles from different modules. These were hot days, we worked under the sun, but if you damped your bandana with water every 20 minutes, it was tolerable.

The M1-F2-T1 was a tricky double-braced module where we had to drill the holes to match two braces at once. Thanks to Jerry and Juss for this day, so far we did only 7 triangles while figuring out a system, and moved to the one-braced triangles after.

During lunch and dinner, we talked about our work and awkwardly asked again and again each other’s names – when there are 100+ people from 19 countries, you keep having a deja vu feeling, already having the person again and again and still not able to recall the name. By day 3, I took a piece of duck tape in the morning, wrote my name and put it on my chest to ease a bit the interaction. My fitbit showed that I had walked 32,420 steps per day, and I cannot tell I had a lot of walking compared to others.

Progress: the scaffoldings grew more, and the first part of the Middle Crown was attached to the main scaffolding.

Day 4. The Middle Crown

One of the greatest highlight of this month, for everybody: our Kitchen Crew. We had a massive kitchen truck with food enough not only to feed 100+ people every day but also to invite all our guests and closer to the event all the volunteers who came to help us finish everything faster. For every day, the 3-times-a-day menu was different, always with options, always with some extra food, with coffee and something sweet in the morning, like croissants, and always with some kind of dessert for our birthday people. You can imagine how many birthdays we celebrated if there were more than one hundred people. These are the warmest memories, how we sang to each other a happy birthday song in the evenings and how everybody said something warm and kind.

Because of how much work there was and because of how crucial was to keep the pace, we were told to switch from one task to another as fast as we felt tired of it. So, you never knew who you would meet next day as your build partner; by day 4, I met Reagan, a smiling DJ from San Francisco. We had a pretty good result of two stacks of triangles by the end of the day, and when we walked back to the camp for dinner, all the three scaffoldings were finished and the Middle section was gathered together.

There was a massive dust storm at night, everything seemed to fly away. Since the very first day on Playa, I started dreaming about the build, and that night I dreamed about a night shift in a dust storm, a dream that would repeat even after I left the desert and came back home.

Day 5. The Man

Tuesday was the record day for my triangle tasks – together with Jesus, we made 39 triangles! I wish we met earlier. With some people, it is fun to work together because you chat and make jokes, with some people, you may exchange few words and still you’ll be very tuned. Good day, good result.

One of the artists in the crew brought white and black Galaxia medallions, so we had our little symbols to recognize each other in the crowd during the festival.

At night, the Temple Crew went to The Man Crew party. Neighbors to neighbors, village to village! Every day at the build had been so intense that by that time I had completely forgotten there was anybody else outside the Temple. Burning Man? Installations? Outer world?

The Man statue for 2019 wasn’t big, but every single piece of wood of the figure was milled and sanded to perfection. We talked to the Man Crew and helped to prepare the Man for the upcoming burn – broke the wax, boiled it, rolled the sacks tied them up with wire, damped them with wax, and then adjusted to the statue. There was a beautiful moment when Andrew Johnstone, the Man creator, met with Jerry James, the very carpenter who had created all the first Man statues long time ago and joined the Tempe Crew in 2018. The past and the present, smiling to each other.

When we came back to the Temple, we sat for some time at the campfire with Max and had a wonderful conversation about hinduism. What amazed me most about our Crew was how different we all were, and how many different things we could share with each other.

Day 6. The Upper Crown & Staple guns

One of the day-to-day things I do after my Temple experience much calmer: washing the dishes. Because when you wash the dishes after 100+ people, and the water is scarce due to the circumstances, afterwards, no amount of plates seems impossible. We all volunteered for washing plates three times a day, normally it took an hour or more, and these were the funniest conversations. By the end of the build we knew who we liked to wash the dishes with most and gathered in teams.

Day 6 was the day of beautiful sky pictures between the whiteouts.

The most frequent thought of these days: walking all day in steel-toe shoes is hard! Yet they saved my feet so many times on the Triangle Farm. On one of the first days, I forgot to put them on and dropped a huge piece of wood on one of my toes so it partly lost sensitivity for months, but overall I can’t complain, I mostly got bruises when others had broken fingers and cuts than couldn’t heal for weeks due to the desert conditions.

After another couple of dozens of triangles, Jesus and I joined the profilactics team. Our task was to secure the petals ready to be put on the scaffolding for the Upper Crown with straps and pieces of plywood (“coupons”). To do this, we used staple guns that function with compressed air. Stapling the wood wasn’t as heavy as lifting timber for triangles, but it required accuracy and preciseness, otherwise it could be very harmful.

There were only two Russians in the crew – me and Philipp, the guy from a small filming crew. Apart from these stories and pics we’ll have a documentary movie about the build somewhere in 2020.

Progress: The Middle Crown was put together; all the petals for the Upper Crown got ready and part of them was already on the scaffolding. The Triangle Farm kept growing new triangles.

Day 7. Guns and Crowns

On the previous day, I joined the profilactics team after the dinner and for the first time I saw how many people kept working at night shifts. The process didn’t stop, and I don’t know how much work was done the previous days when the rest of us stayed at the common area to get some rest before going to sleep. Enormous amount of work. My deep respect to our owl gangsters.

After lunch, the Crew signed the petals our profilactics team was working on. It’s a longtime tradition, the builders leave messages on the highest part of the Temple before it’s raised.

When everybody left their message on the wood and I came back to stapling, suddenly when I turned around, I saw… children. After being in the desert and at the furthest corner of Burning Man for a week, it felt completely surreal. Every living creature looked like some kind of illusion – random birds, praying mantises, bugs. A flock of children, curious and, compared to us, unusually clean, walking out of a yellow school bus that came from some school in Reno, coming to us to see the thing we were building felt like an episode from a movie where the aliens walk out of a spaceship to greet the earthlings. They touched the petals for the Upper Crown, walked around a bit, then went back to the school bus and disappeared as if they never had come.

When the petals were prepared for the lifting, I switched to the Middle Crown. It had to be finished by that very evening – the scaffolding removed, the profilactics done on every level – so the crane could lift it at 7.30 AM on Day 8.

Day 7 also coincided with my birthday, and our amazing Kitchen Crew provided every and each person with ice cream. Since my first time at Burning Man, I’d always dreamed about celebrating my birthday in the desert and until 2018 sighed that it was too far from the event. And there I was, in the middle of a crowd of more than 100 new friends, in that desert, under that sky, with a Temple in front of us.

After my birthday dinner, I went back to the Middle Crown and helped more with stapling, strapping and buckling until my vision started blurring. The rest of the crew brought a car with loud speakers, turned on electronic music and threw a “build DJ party”, in other words, worked until 1 AM. I doubt I’ll ever meet the same amount of people with the same amount of wild enthusiasm working that hard in the dead of night after a day that had started around 7 AM.

When we woke up the next day, the crane had already come.

Day 8. Wild is the Wind

The lifting of the Middle Crown was scheduled for 7.30 AM but did not happen – nor in the morning, nor by the noon or the evening because the wind was too strong. As Galaxia had a spiral construction, with the wind, the Middle Crown would transform into a 14,000-pound propeller. So we waited and tried again, but each time lifted above the earth, the Crown started spinning, slowly but noticeably enough to pause everything and wait.

The petals for the Upper Crown were already put together by our night team. I felt something a bit disturbing in my knee and went to the electronic tent to help with small things that didn’t require walking in heavy steel toe shoes. For the first part of the day, I punched out the metallic boxes, each of one in the future would contain all the electronic filling for every light bulb, and after I finished this task, I started acetoning the electronic boards.

I really love the design for the Temple electronic boards: my favorite purple + Galaxia sign in the middle. Acetoning meant putting a drop of acetone with a syringe into each of 12 tiny holes of every board. The Temple had 400 light bulbs; I didn’t do all 400, but definitely did around a half during two days. Very slow and meditating. For the first day, I acetoned around ~840 holes.

Progress: The scaffolding inside the Middle Crown removed, the Upper Crown is put together, the Triangle Farm is building triangles. The first light bulbs, electronic boards and cables are connected to test several preprogrammed light modes.

Then in the evening we had another birthday with cakes and songs. Walking around the Middle Crown, I noticed that the empty space around the Temple had changed: the alley from the Man to the Temple got set up. Like a bridge of lights, connecting our village with the outer world.

Day 9. Successful lifting, Acetone rivers, and Happy Early Burn

On Saturday, the Middle Crown was successfully lifted and put on the main scaffolding. Each of us did something to create this enormous sum of triangular forms.

My day was quiet and monotonous, by 4 PM I finished acetoning what I had started after breakfast and then I turned off for an hour, a bit intoxicated by all the spirits I breathed in during my shift.

By the evening, we all headed to the Man for the Early Burn, a party for all the early arrived where every department and camp brings a small wooden statue. For the Temple part, our guys built in one night a huge wooden croissant laying on french fries, because Arthur, our architect, was French, and there were many French people in the crew. The croissant looked more like a big mustache or a weird-shaped banana, so we also were the most symbolical petite installation.

The Man statue already had the lights on, there was a couple of bars, and it looked a lot like a Burning Man gathering, with people in costumes, music, and alcohol. We burned the installations, and then there were fireworks, with almost no safety distance between the people and the fire, “like in good old times when there were fewer people and not so many rules”, as old burners use to say. It indeed felt like a small time travel, back to the time where there were no more than maybe 10,000 crazy people hanging out in this middle of nowhere.

Progress: the Middle Crown put on the main scaffolding, the Triangle Farm kept growing 3d figures, the Man got its lights.

Our work schedule changed and starting from Sunday was following:

• 7 AM: wake up,

• 7.15 AM: breakfast

• 8 AM - 1 PM: build

• 1 PM - 3 PM: lunch & break

• 3 PM - 7 PM: build

• 7 PM - 8 PM: dinner

• 8 PM - 10 PM: build

10 PM was optional, there were always people who kept working until 1-2 AM every night, and it was incredible how much effort everybody put to make everything happen. We were getting more and more tired, but every day we made big steps. The results paid out our exhaustion and gave the impulse to move forward.

Sunday was full of dust storms, we worked most of the day with goggles and masks. I kept working on securing the modules of the Upper Crown with plywood, straps, and buckles.

The most memorable task I had was stapling the upper level of the Upper Crown – yet on earth, I walked on the highest level of the highest part of the installation! At the same time, this task was the hardest I had, as most of the plywood couldn’t be stapled from the right side, so I shot most of the things holding the gun in my left hand and sometimes turning it upside down, sitting on timber that rounded the scaffolding. Lots of concentration and no mistakes allowed.

I hardly remember Monday because of my first dehydration experience. I felt weak, dizzy and sick during most of the day, and the next day I’d been recollecting all the things I had forgotten here and there moving through the fog inside my head.

By the evening I was told that the first petal for the Lower Level had been put together. The Lower Level had twenty petals, each of which would serve as an entrance to the Temple. With the time we had left the perfect timing would be four petals per day, but we also had to move our village to the City before the event, which would take out two days of going back and forth and packing the gear. We didn’t have this time, and it felt very sad to leave the Temple area. We were a village without neighbors, away from everything from the outer world. You woke up, stepped out of the tent and saw the sky, the mountains on the horizon, the white emptiness of the desert, and met the same people as if you were the only ones left on a blank background by some divine movie maker. It was a bit sad and bitter to tear down and move out our little world. But rules were rules.

For the Monday evening, we had guests from the Man Crew. Andrew, the architect of the Man, brought a bagpipe and not only played some music for us but even performed a happy-birthday tune for Jeff, our birthday guy for Monday. Again, we had a delicious cake from our Crew.

During the night, the scaffolding for Upper Crown was torn down and on Tuesday morning, the Upper Crown got ready for lifting.

Day 12. Wooden whales and Apollo 13.

The very first petals for the Lower Crown started floating around and it reminded a taming of some huge creature: a VR holding an enormous and super heavy piece of the structure, and just one or two people holding it and directing the movement of the whole module. Like peculiar geometrical wooden whales flying around. Hypnotizing.

The highlight of the day: The Upper Crown and the Middle Crown were put together! 

We all had been waiting for it. After almost two weeks on Playa, we made progress every day, but the results still didn’t look like a building. Everybody needed so much an impulse and an inspiration to work further. To see what we were sweating for.

There were attempts of lifting in the morning, but it was windy and therefore risky to lift the vortex structure.

By the lunchtime, the crane lifted the Upper Crown again, some of us sat to watch this beauty and the closer the parts were getting together… the clearer we could see that they did not fit.

I remember somebody saying timidly in silence: “Is it me or the upper part seems bigger than the middle part?…”

We all saw the same. Maybe it was because the wood had dried up in the desert. Maybe it was because we screwed up somewhere. Maybe the angles weren’t right. Somehow we build the lower part of the Upper Crown bigger than the upper part of the Middle Crown. And apparently a bit oval. It felt sickening. During previous days, we had rechecked every triangle and every module. There were several books with dozens of pages of plans and schemes.

The crane with the Upper Crown froze above the Middle Crown and we went back to our tasks on the ground. There were several hours of uncertainty when everything we could do was keep working on what we had to. Our most experienced builders and engineers went up on the cranes and started fixing what seemed completely unfixable. Enormous sizes, big difference in shapes, metal and thick wood.

Amazingly, by the evening the Upper Crown got adjusted! Part by part, petal by petal. The adjustment team worked all day long on the cranes, slowly moving from one part to another. The adjustment was done so well that it was almost impossible to notice the transition sector. All our pieces of wood, triangles, and modules finally were becoming Galaxia.

Few times in my life I witnessed such a good example of how a steady routine work can fix a problem that at the first sight seems unsolvable.

From that evening, we had to put together 20 petals of the Lower Crown, 48 triangle in each, and adjust them to the Middle Crown. Then, remove the scaffolding. And gift the Temple to the event.

Between the days: One night chat

…At the night after my birthday, on August 16th, when we were sitting at the camp fireplace, chatting about different things, Johnny suddenly asked me, what were the things in my life that I wanted to burn in the Temple.

I thought and said: all my inner fears that I will not succeed.

Jonny may not remember this conversation after so many others that had taken place at the build, but I am very grateful for this question asked at that time and in that place. I kept thinking about it during the next three weeks of the build and watching the Temple burning down at the end.

I cannot say that back in New York after Playa I became completely fearless, but somehow I got more peace facing the challenges, both in the present moment and in my never-so-predictable future. I still may live my life very emotionally, but now I find the ways to stabilize way faster.

Days 13-14. Going bananas and moving out

Very soon we started calling the petals for the Lower Level “bananas” and there were countless inner jokes. “I went bananas for the Temple”. “There is a banana party out there, haven’t you heard?” “Ba-na-na!” (with Minion voices). There was an idea to rename Triangle Farm into Banana Plantation, but due to the US historical context it was declined.

By Day 14, we moved to the City. Moving a village of 140 people is not easy, but by Thursday evening all the living area was empty. My huge respect to everybody who took charge of the moving, first of all, Howard and Sandy for organizing everything. And giving a ride to people like me who didn’t have their bikes yet.

While moving, I checked all my luggage and thought again that I had never seen before so many things with my names on them! I signed even my bottles with water, because in the chaos of moving they could end up anywhere. It felt maniac but in the end I knew perfectly what was mine and where it landed. There was another unexpected bonus of signing things: if you forget something somewhere, you are more likely to get it back. By the end of these days sometimes I felt so exhausted that I couldn’t remember where the hell I had left my protecting glasses. Or gloves (Ryan, our tool track keeper, once gave me three of them!). Or a thermos and a mug. So many thanks to everybody who took care of them and brought them to me.

Despite the moving, we still had to keep the pace. I left all my things unpacked at our City camp until the night and ran straight back to the build to keep putting plywood protection on metal braces on every triangle so they didn’t cut the straps that secured the joints inside the modules.

On day 14, the first petal of the Lower Crown was adjusted to the scaffolding. And then, the second, and the third. The Temple started revealing itself to us, and it felt like with every new piece put on its place it got more and more separate from us, living its own first hours of life.

As more wooden modules started rising around the Lower Level waiting to be put together, the space became more and more looking like a blank parallel universe consisting of wooden angles of different sizes and shapes.

Between the days: tasks and implementation

At one of our dinners, our carpentry coordinator Kai said: “nobody has ever built this Temple before. Nobody knew the best way to do it. Despite all our experience, there will be things and tasks we all will face for the first time. In this environment, with this architectural and engineering specifics. So we have to be: patient to each other; open to new solutions; patient if they don’t work out; be ready to react and suggest something new.”

This is the part I will miss very much about this month – being inside a big team united by one goal and constantly looking for ways to improve the process, being patient and caring for each other as much as it is possible at all times. Everybody knowing that we are in hardcore conditions, tight in time, limited in tools and sometimes in people, and the only thing that matters is the installation before us that has to be finished despite all the dust storms, heat, tiredness we feel, and whatever else.

Day 14. Playa Dust City Diner

It’s around 6.40 AM, a bit chilly morning, Youen and I meet at the kitchen longing for morning coffee. We sit together side by side, waiting for the kitchen thermos to brew us some caffeine. We are gloomy, dirty, sleepy, and shivering from cold, it’s the last day of our Temple village as it was for two last weeks, our camp would blend with other City camps, there would be no more sunsets and sunrises with mountains greeting us in silence every morning and every evening, the road to the build would be longer, and so on, so on, so on. We all had got used so much to this place and the build routine.

Michael walks by, looks at us and says “You look like I feel”.

And then, by the time the coffee is ready, there are new sounds behind our kitchen truck. And turns out there is a diner on wheels with pancakes, orange juice, maple syrup, fried cheese, and so many other things!

A diner. In the middle of the desert. Came to cheer us up with music and breakfast. All the attendees have funny wigs and pretty pin-up style aprons, and all the morning mood changes – yes, we are leaving, our build will be different with our camp in the City, but there are always more wonders to happen. For Burning Man is coming.

There was an episode in the Chronicles of Narnia with the Beaver’s Dam, when the children are hungry and tired, there is no help around, and then there comes food and care. This morning was exactly like this – support out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, together with us, bringing calm and certainty that everything will be good. Different, but good.

Day 15. Bananas must go on

The closer was the festival, the fewer people we had at the build – in the morning, there were only around 30 people on the perimeter, compared to 100+ before the camp had moved to the city. And we still had a hell of work to do. Modules and petals, light bulbs, cables, plywood protection, ratchet straps.

People who built Temples before told that this happens every year closer to the festival; some part of the Crew moves to their event camps, it takes longer to get to the build from the City, and people are simply tired and don’t show up.

Every year there are bets wherever the Temple opens on time or not, and most of the times it opens at the second or third day of the festival.

With 100 people, I thought we could do it on time, but having only one-third of us at the build site, our terms tripled as well. We called for volunteers, and are very grateful to everybody who came to help us during the last days. Not all the tasks were interesting, or sexy, but every new pair of hands mattered very, very much.

Day 16. The Blessing

Day 16 was the only day I wasn’t at the build in the morning. Because I planned to stay during the festival with my friends in another camp, we agreed that my contribution during the event would be to help unload the truck and mount the structures for several hours at the beginning of the event.

So I could have missed the Indians’ visit if it wasn’t for the camp leader Alexander Gershenson who let me go earlier than we had agreed, telling “go and build the Temple”. Thank you, Sasha.

This extra time did work for several more tasks at the build site, and also by the time I was back, there were Indians. A shaman and a tribe representative.

There is a Native American tribe, Paiute, that lives in this area and takes care of the lands including the Burning Man site. That day they came just for the Temple, to give their blessing to the installation. They told us, “we know what you are building here, and we know that people will bring here their memories, their emotions, their grief, and sadness. The fire will take care of everything, we came just to make sure that nothing lingers on earth after”.

Even the invisible part of the place had to leave no trace after everybody was gone.

It was my second time of meeting a shaman – and like the first one I met in Ecuador jungles at an Indian wedding, the Paiute shaman wore simple travel pants. And a black t-shirt. They don’t dress up if it’s a work routine. The only thing that stood out was a huge golden ring and a very fine-crafted wooden cane the tribe representative was carrying with him.

Then they walked into the Temple, and we followed them.

At the moment the Indians walked into the installation, a whiteout rose around the Temple; it wasn’t a storm, so we didn’t have to put on masks and goggles to protect eyes from dust, but it formed a light wall of dust between the Temple and everything else, dense enough so nobody around the Temple could see what was happening inside, and we couldn’t see anything beyond the Temple.

The ceremony was short, and the whiteout cleared out very quickly afterwards, but for me, these several minutes were one of the most powerful episodes of the build.

Then before leaving, the Indians gave their blessing of health and luck to each and every Crew member. This was a big honor and an unexpected gift that we all have now with us. I’ve never dreamed of meeting Native people without bothering them with my presence, and having them as guests who expressed respect and attention to what we were making was the most beautiful thing that could have happened.

Then, we got back to work. This visit gave us a lot of energy and inspiration, and we got very synchronized at working on every detail of the lower petals.

Days 15-19. Finish Line

One of these nights I had a dream that my tent turned into our tool truck, with all the tools, but still being the size of my small tent. The most claustrophobic nightmare I’ve seen in many years. Through all month and long after we left, I dreamed about the built and dust storms and sometimes about the night shifts of the built during dust storms. My subconscious couldn’t tune more to the environment.

We didn’t open by Monday, day 18. Partly because of the shortage of people during the last days, partly because there was a massive dust storm on Sunday and everything got paralyzed for seven or eight hours. For four years I’ve been to Playa, I haven’t seen a storm of that strength.

I heard people around saying things like “I think the tool truck has to be this way” – and it certainly was, somewhere very close, but you couldn’t be sure where you were and how far or close was everything. The world turned blank, windy and dusty. Galaxia seemed to play with us a constant hide-and-seek game: now you see me, now you don’t, funny how even six-floor buildings can do that.

It was a draining day, very slow, with lots of different tasks that required double or triple effort because of the constant and monotonous blinding wind.

Many people say Playa reminds them Tatooine; if we could add some episodes of ordinary life on this planet, I would definitely suggest adding dust storms like this one.

These last days were the hardest ones. We were advancing, but we were fewer, and it was already the end of our third week. Because of the distance between our camp in the city and the build site, our meal times got delayed. By the middle of the build, 20% of the Crew already had dehydration cases at some point, by the end, every third (if not second) person at least once had felt sick, or emotionally/physically worn out.

Put together tiredness, hunger, desert heat, dryness, and a pressing feeling that no matter how hard we worked, we were already out of time, and you will get closer to our condition. Add to this lack of good sleep (Burning Man is a noisy hell even in the quietest parts of the event) lots of caffeine, sugar, and energy drinks to stay awake and keep working.

There were many tasks to be finished – during last days, I worked with cables, light bulbs, plywood protection, climbed a bit (sadly, my boots were too slippery), helped on the ground, strapped the joints, etc., etc., etc. At the same time, people climbed to the highest level to check the protection and put more wood between the joints, there were VRs working from sunrise to the dead of night, huge bolts for the ground fixation, and so many other things happening simultaneously.

We greeted with “Fuck yeah!” every next step that was finished and cheered each other up, reminding that the more we worked, the closer we we to the end.

By Tuesday night, Day 19, Galaxia twinkled with 400 light bulbs and was ready for the scaffolding removal, but we wanted to open it together with everybody, and the opening got scheduled for Day 20.

Apart from scaffolding removal and opening, we also had to prepare the Temple for the burn. You cannot burn down without a 65-feet high and 195-feet wide building without leaving a trace; for big installations like the Temple and the Man, there is an obligatory burn shield – several tons of decomposed granite that are spread through the whole area of the installation.

DG protects the ground from heat and coals – those of you who have been to Burning Man may have noticed that the sand inside the Temple is a bit thicker than the dust on Playa. It’s DG, and it’s the main cause why the ground stays clean of patches after the event.

We spread some part of DG at night and more in the morning before the opening.

It was a very touching moment when the Temple we built stood empty and already completely separate from us, as if these three weeks had never happened. It was spacious and calm, rising above us, little human creatures, as a geometrical spaceship.

One of my friends, Yylia, meeting me the night after the opening, asked me “But you are so small, how could you have built such a big thing?” – and I thought then again, that each of us separately was small and not strong enough to mount even a tenth part of what we made. But together we were a superpower, a force of nature, bigger than the units it consists of. We had many arms, many faces, we were like an alien organism or a mythical creature that could disintegrate and be at many places at once, doing dozens of tasks.

Day 21. The Wedding

At the opening, we formed two greeting lines for the first guests of the Temple, 50-60 people on one side, 50-60 people on another side. It felt like welcoming somebody to your house. There were words of gratitude, and cheering, it was a fantastic moment of sharing something that mattered to us more than anything else all this time.

Everybody who I met at the festival told me that our Temple had a very airy and light atmosphere.

It was very spacious, but at the same time, there were corners if you were looking for some privacy. Because there were twenty entrances (all these petals we’ve been working the last week), there were no human traffic jams. The lightbulbs were programmed in several different modes and twinkled, glowed, and glimmered. The structure reminded at the same time a galaxy (view from above), a volcano, and at sunrises, it dropped a shade that looks like an Eiffel Tower, an hommage to its architect’s country of origin.

For me and for other Crew members, this Temple project was also very special because Arthur, its creator, built it for his wedding. After all the time we spent together during the build with Arthur’s family and Sandy, his fiancée, it was almost like a home event. We came to Galaxia by 4 PM, already dressed for a party and a festival, there were speeches, music, dances, party at the Temple Camp, and the Kitchen Crew brought fresh flowers from Reno and baked an amazingly beautiful cake with petals and macaroons.

How much can you love your woman to build a temple to marry her.

Day 23. The Flight

The Temple was open on Day 20; on Day 24 we closed it and prepared everything for the burn. We had three days to join Burning Man.

It was my quietest Burn: I barely met people, fell dead asleep by 10; not having to wake up at 7 AM was already a bliss. We managed to hang out with friends several times, but I felt insanely slow and out of the rhythm of the festival around me.

Still, there was one thing I kept in mind after we opened Galaxia: I had to see it from above. It is not an easy wish to come true. Burning Man airport exists, but you have to wake up very early to get into the line for flight rides, there are not so many pilots, and so on. And then, suddenly I met Alex who kindly gave me a ticket for a flight!

It was as great as it sounds. Black Rock City from above, our Galaxia (this year it was the biggest installation on entire Playa), the mountains around. It felt like the place laid out before me answers to any questions I’d ever had about Burning Man. How does it feel to live here one month. Who else lives here and what do Indians look like when nobody is watching them. How does it feel to be a builder. How does everything look like from the sky. Who created the festival - it was an honor for me to meet Jerry James, to be approved by him to the Crew, and I remember with smile all the moments that we spent together, working with wood, talking at the Early Burn, washing the plates after dinners.

There will be other Burning Mans, but this one will be very different in the number of things that stayed deep inside me.

Day 24. The Burn

In the morning, the Temple perimeter was closed, the Temple Guardians stood and didn’t leave anybody but us to walk in. It was a strange feeling, to see the Temple empty from people again but filled with hundreds of artifacts after just four days. There were toys, photographs, pieces of clothing, letters. Hundreds and thousands of lives sending a message to the past, the present, and the future.

We brought more wood to make sure that everything would burn properly, and by the evening, gathered again to say goodbye to Galaxia.

In one of my favorite movies, there is a line: “There is no sense in keeping count of how many women you’ve dated. She is always the same, the Eternal Woman, just each time she has a different body and a different face”.

I had a similar feeling during the build. Maybe the Temple exists somewhere as an eternal invisible image that materializes every year. The facade is always different, but the core essence is always the same. We just help it to regain shape and form. And from this point of view, it’s not sad to watch it going away. It’s a great honor to participate in this another manifestation. The fire lighted up all the contours of the installation, each and every piece of which every one of us knew by heart, and then a big plume of fire went up, as if it was a volcano eruption. Then everything fell apart, and kept smoldering for several hours.

Day 25. Ashes and Propane Party

I stayed as a member of Leave No Trace Program until September 6th, the very last day visitors and builders were allowed to stay on Playa.

Although we had a huge help from volunteers during the night, on Monday morning, when we came to the burn site, I took a deep breath and told myself: if the previous years people managed to clean everything up in three days, we would handle it too. By then it felt more like a self-affirmation in the middle of a post-explosion area.

The best and simplest recipe of all times – to start and keep going without questioning wherever you succeed or not – worked again, as always. Even by 8PM of the same evening, the area looked way better. And we looked like a crew of coal miners after a long shift.

There were many things that the fire didn’t destroy entirely, and it felt as if we were looters of memories. We found keys (many keys), rings, pendants, small boxes. Somebody found animal bones. Each time I was wondering, what type of story could be behind these charred things? Who left them there? What did these people feel?

On Monday after every Burn, there is also a Propane Party, where all the vehicles and fire installations left on Playa burn out the rest of propane they brought for the event. There were art cars, installations spitting fire with remote control, and the craziest thing was a concert on an organ on fire, connected somehow to a synthesizer. A hypnotizing ear-bleeding show, of course there was no music, but yet there were some noise modulations following the fire flashes.

Days 26-28. Thank you

By the last couple of days, there were only 15-10 people left. We checked out the Temple site by Wednesday, day 27. We picked up all the copper from cables, all the light bulbs, all the screws and other tiny metal things left after the burn, and DPW took care of the rest. The decomposed granite was scraped out of the surface and gone.

We still had to clean the area of our City camp, and it seemed a never ending process. How do you clean up an area where you had around 100 people living during a week and you are just 8? Apart from splinters around our fireplace, there were hairs, pieces of paper, even glitter. In the end, we took broomsticks and swiped the most critical parts that would take us ages. So now you know as a minimum one person who literally swiped the desert. Actually, very successfully! We were given “green” area color by those who checked the space for trash after.

So, the whole adventure ended where it started for me – cleaning up, as in Reno before going to the desert – I cleaned our build place in Reno at the Generator after everybody was gone to Playa and I was still in the town.

..The desert was empty and calm again, and these days I thought that some kind of uneasiness I had during Burning Man might have been caused by the dissonance I felt between the festival vibes and the atmosphere this place has for the rest of the year. The festival needs it as colors need a canvas to make a picture. But there is a hypnotizing beauty in the emptiness and blankness of Playa without any sound and any figure on the horizon.

Then we moved out. My huge thanks to the kindest Laura who not only took me to Bay Area but also spent an hour more in the car and went for me to San Francisco instead of going straight home to Santa Rosa. This was the biggest help I could imagine with all my 300-kilogram stuff and no car, and I will be very glad to return someday this favor back.

After one month in the desert, everything feels weird.

It was amazing how green is the grass. How tall are the trees and the ceilings in all the buildings. How much water we have in civilization. How much food you can see in supermarkets. How soft are the beds we sleep on every night. How clean is the urban life. How many tools we have in the kitchens. How may technologies we have that we are used to and we don’t appreciate enough. How I missed normal toilets and showers (of course).

And how good it was to see my friends and come back to my beloved cities on both coasts again.

Afterword

It is March 16th, 2019, New York, around 1 AM.

I have just revised my Galaxian diary (again). This month in the desert, even after so much time, stays so deep inside me that I can still recall a lot about each day. What else was so special about this time?

It was a fantastic lesson about leadership – how much can do politeness, an absence of hierarchic distance, a talent of a good listener, and well-picked words. You cannot push people who came to do something on their own will. There was no pressure at the build. Despite how hard were some days, our leaders kept an amazing atmosphere inside the team, keeping us all together with nothing but jokes, pieces of advice about everything, stories, and sums of our progress. I wish I meet more leaders like our the leaders of our Crew in the future.

It was a great lesson about teamwork. We haven’t had a single argument during the entire month. Being from 19 countries, with different roots and views, we all stayed together and were ready to adjust to each other.

It was a very important example for me about reflections and doubts. In 20 days, we built a 65-feet installation, without thinking too much about how exactly would we get from boxes with separate pieces of wood to Galaxia. There are many situations that require way fewer efforts and need zero extra thoughts. We didn’t try, we did what we had to do. And I think that for each of us many things will get easier because now we all know that we are capable of building a six-floor building with our own hands.

Same thing about dust storms: since my arrival to New York in September, there were happy days and days when I woke up almost in tears. And then I told myself: maybe these feelings inside are just like a dust storm – it has nothing to do with what I have for today on my agenda, it’s just blurring the picture. And I went to build my day, as I got up to build another part of the Temple in summer, despite anything.

It was a fantastic gift of meeting so many beautiful souls around all the planet, at some things as crazy as I am, at some things freer, crazier, braver, and stronger. I learned a lot from you and do hope to learn more.

Maybe at the next build.