Prelude to falling out of a plane, 2010 (or how I learned to love black rock city from the sky).
How many times can you watch someone pack a parachute before it gets old? I dont really know, I’ll let you know when this shit gets old. There’s just that thing about being around people overdosing on adrenaline that I dont think EVER gets old.
Be it bands coming off a stage, athletes leaving a field or near misses with real danger, manufactured or otherwsie, when you’ve got enough speed beaming out of you, if someone stands close enough, a spectator can catch some of that infectious goodness.
Its these times in life when it pays to be a scavenger, I’ll gladly scoop up them scraps, thank you. We can’t all be raptors, all the time.
I had sprinted over to the Waldorf Mystoria looking for John in hopes of scoring a poker chip to fly only to find him walking down three o’clock trailing a parachute, fighting the occasional gust inflating the rig hanging off of both his shoulders.
Both hands flew off the handlebars into the air and my heart sank down to the pant cuff bunched up behind my knees. Fuck.
You just jumped?
His eyes were crazed with that look you can only have after getting into a skydiving plane twenty five minutes ago.
Yeah, but Im going right back up again, here’s your chip.
Yes!!! Some of my friends are impossibly righteous. John is one of them. It’s a short list but damn, is it a good one.
The morning was calm and balmy in the high eighties, we both knew there was a short window before the playa heated up bringing the venting wind and white that can make flying there terrifying/impossible. No time was wasted getting a parachute flattened, rolled, cinched and stowed so we could both run back to burning sky and get our names on the next flight roster.
The layout of this year’s Mystical Mysfits camp was particularly amazing, but more on that later. It did lend itself especially well for packing a parachute. I suppose there is not a lot of irony to be discovered in the fact that the guy packing a parachute in there also designed the camp. hmm.
The one interesting thing about someone packing a parachute, its not the most common thing for the average person to see. Sometimes it can draw a small crowd but perhaps with the seasoned galactic freaks at burning man, it takes a little bit more to phase people…
So there’s that thing about burning man: radical self reliance. Before the first time you go, someone tells you about radical self reliance and you wind up packing at least twice as much shit mostly filled with items not you nor anyone else will ever need. By the third time you go, you usually get it down to packing twice as much stuff as you actually do need. The fourth time you go you take exactly what you need and only go home with half a box of power bars, four gallons of water, a handful of batteries and the spare bicycle tube you didnt use or gift.
By the fifth time you go, you start getting creative with the radical part and develop that skill to truly impress some people with having some esoteric tool that someone desperately needs. None of this explains why my neighbor this year had all his tig welding gear but it does lead to the fact that after you pack and unpack for ten years, there are still some things that you’d never ever think to bring in duplicate.
Often, with adrenaline overdose hands and the recent memory of free fall to the earth combined with the anticipation of doing it all over again in the immediate future you can go ahead and just rip the pull up cord in half trying to get your rig secured. Or at least John can, at least once. Well, good thing ten years of radical self reliance taught you to bring an extra pull up tool for all your rigging needs…
Which brings us to law number one of skydiving: its harder to keep your rig closed than it is to get it to open.
FUCK!
Ok, someone at burning sky is gonna have an extra, lets go.
So half packed, we walked to burning sky where in fact someone did have a pull up tool, John did get his chute packed, we did get on the roster, the plane did take off, there are the best pictures ever and you gotta wait for the second half of this story to see them. psssh.
There is a man. He burns in one hundred and sixty two days.