The Meaning of Radical Self Reliance

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Today is my day to prepare for Burning Man. I had planned for it to be my only day. How wrong I was.

Veteran participants warned about the need to build things in advance.

Black Rock City is an incredibly stressful place, where missing tools and spare parts can’t be replaced.

Structures and other things should be assembled in advance, and then broken into pieces for transport to the event.

This ensures that everything needed is available, and they can be put together with minimal effort on the playa.

Shade Structure Build

My main goal today is to build a shade structure.

Black Rock City gets incredibly hot during the day.

By 9 AM, tents get so hot the heat wakes people up.

For anyone who wants to sleep past then, a shade structure is essential.

Burning Man has so much to do after dark I know I need one.





Burners debate the best shade structures as much as anything else about the event.

Internet sites are filled with design ideas.

Some people go for Quonset huts, while others use repurposed car ports.

Some groups set up elaborate tarps over curved pipe structures.

So many shade structures exist that someone made a chapter of them in a book called the Architecture of Burning Man.





I want something that is quick to set up and requires little space when packed.

I finally found a website called “how to create an ice cold tent”.

The design is straightforward: cut space blankets to fit the sides of a tent, cut black sheets to match, tape the sheets to the non-reflective sides of the space blankets, and attach.

The space blankets reflect enough sunlight that the tent stays cool.

The black sheets block out light inside the tent and add enough weight that the space blankets don’t flap in the wind.





On the website, the process looks very straightforward.

Reality is another story.

The only place I have to work was a driveway, so that is what I used.

I put the sheets on the tent, draw the outline in pen, and then cut away.

This became a major problem.

The only cutting tool I have is a camp knife.

Many things can be done with this wonderful device.

Cutting sheets is one of the harder ones.

The knife has trouble cutting the tight cloth weave, which I had to do in little chunks.

Even worse, the knife cuts best in a straight line, which is a problem following a curved outline.

I finally got it all done, but it took far longer than anticipated.





Cutting the space blankets proved to be easier.

These cut like plastic with smooth lines.

I placed the final sheet sections on the blankets when doing the cuts to ensure the results lined up properly.

Unfortunately, I forgot to mark which blanket went with which sheet, a real problem later on.





Cutting the pieces is exciting compared with the tedium of taping them together.

The cloth and blanket must be taped around the whole edge, as well as multiple spots in the middle.

The edge tape keeps things from flying off in the wind, while the middle tape keeps things from flapping.

Taping must be done with Gorilla Tape, because anything else will come apart in the dust.

This is excruciatingly dull, lining up a row of little tape globs on the blanket, rolling the cloth over them, stomp to ensure it sticks, and then repeat, over and over.



The build overall was really hard work.

I spent most of it either bent over or on hands and knees (I alternated the two poses to hold off cramps).

I was also in the California sun all day, with the heat and dehydration that implies.

Finally, I ran out of tape halfway through the build!

Good thing I still have an extra day.

Radical Self Reliance

All this effort brings up an important question: Why go through it all?

During a few water and juice breaks I did fantasize about finding shade structures at the local camping store.

The answer relates to a central feature of the Burning Man experience.

Burning Man (and events it has inspired) is unique in the festival world because it is created entirely by its attendees.

The Burning Man organization gets the land and builds infrastructure (plus the ‘man’ statue); EVERYTHING else is created by the people who go.

Every art piece, every mutant art car, every theme camp, every structure of any kind, is built by participants.

At Burning Man, everyone is a creator; nobody can just watch.

Our efforts, combined together, create the incredible world of Black Rock City.

From this, we learn radical self reliance, that we can create our own world regardless of skill and circumstance.

This is an important, and thrilling, lesson.

If assembling shade cloth in the hot California sun is my particular price to learn that self reliance, it’s well worth paying.





I gave myself a reward for all that work by having dinner at the Charlotte Hotel.

Built during the gold rush, it has the best food in Groveland.

The building is from the Victorian era, although not as elaborate as the Erma in Cody (see The Highway in the Sky).

The menu is heavy on meat.

I had pretty good pork chops with a side of applesauce, washed down with yet more lemonade.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Self Reliance
I can't imagine what this would be like. Amazing. Yes, you would grow to trust yourself. Well done.

[Roosta]

Self-reliance
Thanks for the comments. That build was a great deal of work, but worth it. I consider the self-reliance a integral part of the Burning Man experience, and deliberately camped by myself to test whether I could handle it.