…Part Three in a three-part series…

In the normal state of affairs, I would have blogged in great detail about this whole thing, because I’m incredibly wonky about process and I would have loved to share every excruciating detail about How I Did It, but in this case there were hippie-feelings involved.  Just posting the first draft of the graph paper map on the Theme Camp Organizer [TCO] Facebook group (to show them that the process was under way) was enough to set off a frenzy of squinting and worrying about where they were.  I learned to blur the map as I teased them with my progress.

So now you’re just getting the Cliff’s Notes version of How I Did It.  Sorry, future Placement Leads—I’ll try to write it all down elsewhere.  It’ll be under the third rock on the right after you enter the HeadSpace…

Wednesday, early entry day for those camps who need a bit of setting up before the burn starts on Thursday.  Most theme camps are arriving, especially the big ones.

I am given a walkie-talkie and a golf cart.  Do you know how many years I have avoided being given a walkie-talkie and a golf cart (or their equivalents)?  All of them, Katie.  Oy.

But it was a miracle: only a handful of camps had real issues with their spot—and I had predicted which ones might, in my head—and by the time I tootled up on my cart, each had a solution to their problem that was viable and acceptable.  All I had to do was give my imprimatur and hop back on my cart in a cloud of red dust and gratitude.

In short, it worked.

It worked, it worked, it worked!

The photo above is an aerial shot taken Friday afternoon (by Christopher Curzio) when almost all the theme camps (and open camping) were in place.  You can see the boulevards, the art garden circle, the paths—none of which were actually there 48 hours before.

You can also see the 3 Old Men labyrinth in all its splendor.  Doesn’t it look swell from the air?  Most impressive.

When I finally got out of camp on Thursday night, I walked the entire burn, and it was working exactly as I thought it should.  All the hippies were happy,¹ and the place was alive and humming as if it had always been there.  It worked.

And 3 Old Men?  Have I mentioned we made an improvement this burn?

IT LIGHTS UP, KENNETH!  More than that, the strands glow and fade and dance in patterns you can control from your phone, because it has its own little mini-wifi point!  It was amazing.  (Kudos to Old Man Scruffy for the design, construction, and programming of the whole project.) As usual, I will not go into details, since what happens at a burn stays at a burn, but there were spirituality and abandon in equal measure, generosity, astounding creativity, good friends, beautiful weather.  What’s not to like?

All in all, a good burn.  I learned a lot about placing all the hippies and of course will do it again, although if we move to a new property again I may have to issue a stern statement of concern.

updated 10/23/16 to add: Holy crap, Bubba, I just realized—I have designed the “largest burn in the U.S.,” other than Burning Man itself.

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¹ As far as I could tell, obviously.  I’ll do a post-mortem survey of the TCOs next week to find out for sure.  I know there was one camp who was extremely surprised at how small their allotment was, but when I got home and checked, they had requested exactly what they got.  But they were right: it was not enough room.

Part Two in a three-part series

Having organized my thoughts by writing a manifesto on the design of a burn, I began to see how much I could apply to the property.  Since it was less than an hour away, I was able to drive up to the farm repeatedly to walk every inch of it, measuring with my handy-dandy laser rangefinder and making disastrously incomplete notes.  Pro tip: besides a rangefinder, you also need a kick-ass GPS coordinates thingie, one that will give you accurate, precise, and above all repeatable coordinates for any spot you’re standing on.  Unlike your phone, for example.

I started a Google map, and on that I began to lay out the main thoroughfares—the boulevards—for the burn.  Pretty simple, actually: other than the existing road, you just draw lines down the middle of the main masses.  Then it was a matter of figuring out where the infrastructure went: Center Camp, the Effigy/Temple, other burnable art, etc.

Then, using my handy-dandy FileMaker Pro database, I printed out little “chips” for each camp:

Notice how it has almost everything I need to know about that camp: dimensions, area, acreage (Google maps deals in acreage, not sq. ft.), whether it’s outward-facing, inner-, or bedroom (read the manifesto), any village they’re part of, and a color code for kid-friendliness.  (“The Middle Ground” is the neighborhood, which in my case I already knew because I’m the Placement Lead and I already know where my camp is going LOOK ON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY…)

There were 109 of these.  (There were 79 additional chips for art projects, but most of those were contained within their camps.)

I commandeered the dining room table and drafted a large version of the Google Map on an 18×24 piece of engineering graph paper.¹  I then cut out little rectangles for each camp.

Then I placed them.  See?  Piece of cake.

No, it was actually quite difficult.  Sound camps had to be restricted. Not all sound camps could be where they wanted to be. Everyone, literally, wanted “flat, near the trees, on the road, centrally located, away from the sound camps.”  Some had contradictory or illusory requirements (e.g., “near the Effigy and Center Camp,” or my favorite, “out in the field near a power source”).

Corrections (“Did you really mean to request 52,000 sq ft??”), revisions, and unending Successive Approximation, for two weeks.  Done, released into the wild, and done.

Except then it was time to make it real, leading a team of fantastic volunteers through the vision, whacking wooden stakes into dry, brick-hard ground and stringing surveyor’s tape between them, and not panicking when the measurements simply didn’t work.  Whole camps vanished and had to be relocated.  Space opened up where there had been none.  Open camping areas got smaller and smaller as the theme camps had to be shifted around.

Oy.

That was Sunday.  I retreated from build weekend knowing that I had done the thing, but stressed beyond belief as to whether the thing would work.  I packed 3 Old Men on Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday went back up for early entry.

…to be continued…

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¹ As one does.

You may have noticed, in my gargantuan list of activities from yesterday, that a great many of them had to do with Alchemy, our fall regional Burning Man-style gathering.  Here’s what happened.

Last spring, we were on new property over in the Great Eastern Wastelands of Georgia and were thinking we had found a new, permanent home.  (We hadn’t.)  It was my second time helping the Placement Team lay out the burn, i.e., measuring out the campsites for the theme camps and marking them with stakes and construction tape, and even as we did it I figured that the layout was going to be problematic: it was little more than two straight streets, one each on two great legs of land in a V shape, with camps to either side.  (It didn’t help that Euphoria, the spring burn, has fewer participants and many camps set up away from the road, leaving huge tracts of land seemingly unoccupied.)

Sure enough, after the burn the complaints were consistent: it didn’t feel like a burn.  The hippies said it wasn’t explorable; it felt as if you were walking down a midway at a carnival.

Not a problem, I thought.  The Placement Lead and I had discussed the planning a couple of times, and he had readily admitted that this burn was an Abortive Attempt—just get it down and see what happens, and then we’ll make changes for the next burn.  Exactly as it should be, I thought.

And so that’s why I volunteered to be Placement Co-Lead.  I wanted to provide some insight on the “urban design” of the burn.  Toss in a few ideas, jigger with the map, and show up build weekend to drive stakes and stretch tape.  What could go wrong?

Here’s how that went wrong.

First, we moved again.  Rather than the Eastern Wasteland property, we were now on completely new territory.  Not a problem.  I mean, it’s just unfamiliar terrain, right?  (Actually, I was pleased.  I had issues with the previous property; I intended my input to ameliorate its deficiencies.)

Second, Real Life™ overtook my new Placement Lead, and so one morning in August I awoke to find an email from our superior assuring her that Dale could step up and handle it.  Oy.  Of course I could handle it, but that’s not the point, hippies.  I have made it a part of my guiding philosophy not to be in charge any more.

But I did it.  I redesigned and streamlined the registration form.  I whipped up a FileMaker Pro database to suck up all those registrations and slice and dice the info in ways that made sense.  I drove up to the farm about eight times to tromp all over that property, taking measurements and making notes as to which areas were unsuitable for camping.

(I may or may not have also picked an absolutely perfect spot for 3 Old Men, my own theme camp.  Sue me.)

But before all that, I wrote a manifesto.  I pulled A Pattern Language ¹ from my shelf, picked the patterns I felt would contribute to the overall well-being of the hippies, and wrote a 14-page treatise entitled Patterns: the language of burn layout & placement.  You should read it.  (The dry response from one of my trusted mentors in the burn community: “This is brilliant.  No one else needs to see this.”)

Thus secured against surprise, I sat down before the fire to take my gruel.  Wait, no, that’s Christmas Carol, a whole ‘nother set of blog posts.

…to be continued…

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¹ A Pattern Language: book, website, pdf.  This book has been influential in my life in many, many ways.  Highly recommended.