In today’s #PlayaTales, our hero discusses what happens afterwards – decompression…
Decompression is a hard thing to explain to non-Burners. Usually, the only context that people have is when divers come up too quickly and they have to decompress in order to not die. While Burning Man decompression isn’t that severe, there are similarities.
Like any foreign environment, there are certain quirks to being there. Travel to any other town or country and you’ll see them. But Burning Man isn’t another city in Nevada – it’s like going to a whole other world. Even the most simple things are radically different.
I’ll give you an example – going to the bathroom. Think about the process you go through – you get up, walk to the nearest bathroom, do your business, then go back to what you were doing. Simple.
At Burning Man – you get up, make sure you have your shoes on, orient yourself to determine where the nearest port-o is; walk maybe a block or more to the nearest one; wait for a port-o to open up, check to make sure it is clean enough to do whatever your business may be; did you bring toilet paper, because there may not be any?; walk out of the port-o and take a squirt of hand sanitizer; walk back to your camp and hope not to get distracted by any of the hundreds of things that are literally all around you. A trip to the bathroom may take hours.
Which is another quirk – time is irrelevant. Maybe that’s a bit misleading. Some things happen at “actual” times – but everyone usually works on “Playa Time”. Something is supposed to start at 4pm, so it may start anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour in either direction (usually later). There a few people with watches, so you come up with creative ways to describe things.
“What time is it?”
“It’s Drink-30… it’s Nap-15… it’s 10 til ‘I’m gonna f*ck your face off’ o’clock.”
You greet people with hugs instead of handshakes. People offer you food and water and booze with no expectation of a return, and you share what you have with random strangers. Money can only buy you coffee and ice and so you rarely even think about it. People will share parts of themselves with you that they never would in real life. You will make some of the closest friendships ever with someone whose real name you may never know.
And then – after two weeks – you get to come back to the default world. And all those quirks are gone… and you are back in the world you left behind. But you have changed… the default world doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t feel the same. Why does all these things that I did before hand now take so much more effort? You have to go back to those ‘jobs’ and remember all the tedious shit that seemed to melt away the second you turned off blacktop and onto playa. Your body became accustom to the thin layer of dust and reaching for a bottle of water at random times.
The default world is infinitely harder after you return. And that causes a lot of people to get sad. We (Burners in general) refer to that thing in the desert as ‘home’, despite it not having hardly any of the conveniences of our actual “homes”. But we have adapted and we crave that! Sure, I like being able to flush a toilet and take a shower whenever I want. But our minds got so acclimated to that other place so quickly. And not just our minds – our bodies, our hearts, and even our souls.
After a few days or weeks (sometimes longer) we start getting back into the swing of the default world. But something has definitely changed. We start to crave remembering that other worldly place. The smell of that alkaline dust takes us back. We see pictures and we remember when we saw that thing – be it an art piece or vehicle or a person. Our brains are always craving going back to that.
Which is why we do – year after year. We keep going back because there is no place like that desolate patch of land in the Nevada desert. Even after 10 years of being away, I slipped back into that familiar place so easily.
To paraphrase someone – “You can get yourself off the Playa, but you can never get the Playa out of your shit.” This definitely includes your soul.