Heat - Katie Burke

The heat and the dust – not just any dust, but that microscopic, alkaline, Burning Man dust, that darts into every pore and nests there for posterity – were stifling. I was sweating, caked with metallic crud posing as dirt, and tired of trying to dodge the sand dunes and divots, which rose and sank to meet me no matter which trail I attempted.

My biking partner was a nice, nerdy guy, and this made me angry. I’d finally formed a camp of my good friends, so this was supposed to be the Burning Man experience I’d always dreamed of celebrating.

In 2004, four years before, I’d been to Burning Man for the first time. It was a cherished memory: temperate weather, as desert climates go; smooth bike paths on which I gained speed enough to make my bike commutes across the playa worthwhile; and I was in heat, all right, but only the good kind. My playa buddy back then was a fun, sexy, creative guy I’d barely known from the city, but with whom I became intimately – or at least carnally – familiar on the playa that year.

The bumpy roads of 2008 were explained by rains that had come just before we’d all descended. The combination of water and alkaline produced an unworkable effect: muddy clumps that worked like quicksand on a bike tire, which weren’t readily available to the rider’s eye. Bike rides across the playa that year wasted time: no one could gain traction for longer than 20 seconds or so, before hitting a divot (by day or night) or a dune (by night only).

Those friends I’d gathered this year, after waiting four years for the right opportunity to go again, had scattered like frightened ants, the moment our caravan had arrived at our campsite. This left me with a literal stick in the mud, a nice guy who bored me, the co-worker of one of the scattered ants.

When I scratched my cornea and had to avail myself of the medical tent, reminiscent of TV’s M.A.S.H. – except with casualties of bad acid trips, rather than battle, for my fellow patients – I knew I’d never return to Burning Man. I cursed the fact that my magical memories of a sexy guy, a powerful “letting go” ritual at the Burning of the Man fire, and all-night-long dancing at the playa’s hottest makeshift nightclubs, had been tainted by this.

Never mind that my “Burning Man Soul Mate,” whom I’d summoned by applying for him at Costco, the matchmaking camp that promised love in bulk, came to find me in the medical tent. A romantic gesture and a charming, Australian accent made him seem gorgeous, though my saline-drip-occupied, cornea-scratched eyes could not be sure. “Katie?” Asked a male version of Olivia Newton John in Grease. “Yeah?” “I’m your soul mate!”

My campmate Kim and I would laugh later, about how your soul mate comes when you’re not looking; how love is blind; etc. She confirmed his sexiness, and, always a champion for love, she’d been the one to send him to the medical tent when he’d come to the camp to find me: “Look for the cute blonde who can’t see,” she’d told him.
Alas, even the blind run-in with my Burning Man Soul Mate could not entirely console my overheated, rust/dirt-covered body or weary mind. It was time to go home – just in time to miss a violent, miserable dust storm that forced everyone, Burning-Man-wide, to take refuge in her/his respective camps – and leave my wild playa days to two opposing memories.

This I concluded in my Burning Man diary, a spiral notebook I bought in Reno, where the nerd and I stayed in different hotel rooms of the same hotel, and I celebrated air conditioning and a clean, temperate bath. The heat safely contained outside my hotel room door, I’d never engulf myself in it, with only the shade of a paper-thin tent, again.