Burning The Man #2

The Man looms in the middle of the Playa and nobody seems to talk about him much. He seems a little ominous but in the background the whole time. Maybe it’s something to do with the knowledge that his days are numbered.
Beyond him another quarter mile is the Temple. All I’ve heard is that when someone (apparently with money) lost someone they loved, they decided to build a temple dedicated not only to the lost loved one, but to all that are lost. The tradition is for anyone to write on the wood inside of the building a message or poem to someone in your own life that you’ve lost. The inside is covered by the end of the week with messages of all sorts. And the day after the Man burns, the Temple is burned and the messages are sent to the sky. Then another is built again the next year. I’m sure the plans are already underway.
It’s a beautiful building of original architecture: gaudy and nutty and exquisite. Hundreds or thousands of hours obviously went into it with full knowledge of it’s pending demise. I love this spirit that is reminiscent of some Buddhists and some Navahos that work for days building unbelievably beautiful sand paintings on the ground only to destroy them after a set time. In a way it’s pure art in that it is made not for money or fame but just for the joy of giving it away. And it speaks of the temporal nature of the world in that nothing lasts.
On the Black Rock City map the farthest item out by the “trash fence” is “The End”. One morning I decided to peddle all the way out there to see what was there. I was not disappointed. There was a simple 20 foot, plywood sculpture that spelled out “The End”. Of course. What else?
I was told that the playa usually gets some rain before the event so that the playa surface is fairly hard. When it’s firm you can ride like you were a kid again peddling fast and then holding your legs out with your head back. But this year it had many sift spots and when you got going good you would invariably hit two or three inches of soft sand and come plowing to a halt. More than one person has been through as if from a high-spirited pony. After a few days you could imagine those thigh muscles getting hard as rocks. I’m sure that by the end of the week I could crack walnuts between my knees.