Eve in Search of a Wolf by Ilka Cohen (online e book reader .txt) 📖

to bring some of mine the next day. The playa provides, as they all say here. Also, the playa knows best. It is an attitude to go with the flow and trust that it will take you where you need to be.


2nd Day (August 31)

After 4 hours of sleep, the need for a walk to the potties drove me out of my tent. The toilets are definitely my least favorite place here, even though the sanitation people are really working hard, pumping the whole mess out probably 4 times a day. Pretty though, the city at sunrise. Its streets empty but the music of the rave parties still going on in different places filling it like a heartbeat. Which makes it impossible to go back to sleep once one has recovered from the point of absolute exhaustion. So 4 hours became the standard, except for the two nights when I somehow just stayed up till sunrise all together.



Morning cleansing takes longer than at home – thorough use of baby wipes from head to toe, lathering on ample amounts of moisturizer, followed by sunscreen, followed by some body glitter. I cooked some oatmeal, which turned out fine even though the package insisted it could be prepared by microwaving only. Goes to show that ignoring instructions can be a good thing. A neighbor came by in search of soap and gave me a joint in gratitude. Good deal, but I felt it was more than I could handle on my own and put it aside to share later. Then I finally opened the program guide I had received at the greeter station. Almost threw it away in exasperation an hour later. There was just too much. Every hour could be filled with 4 or 5 activities I would have liked. And that still leaves out about 60% of the offerings that I would never consider, all the explicit sex – I don’t feel really comfortable with the concept of public masturbation or anal probing exercises – as well as all the yoga and exercise classes (too lazy) and meditation-related stuff and serious lectures. Being a good German list maker, I reigned in the frustration and jotted down my favorites. Then walked off to the first of them: Singing for Scaredycats. Teaching singing to people who, like me, can’t, have been told all their life they can’t, think of themselves as tone-deaf etc. That was seriously stretching myself. I love to sing but a lifetime of bad reviews has left me with a serious aversion to doing it in public. Encouraging 90 minutes followed. The teacher, a professional classically trained singer, had us sing scales, harmonies, chords in no time. Just 8 people, so I definitely could not hide my voice in a big choir. And it all sounded just fine and was so joyful. I learned several things: 1. I am not tone-deaf. 2. I can sing much better and at pitch if I do it loudly and confidently. If I half-whisper, I can’t get the higher notes out. 3. My brain reaches its limits when I am ask to do singing, snapping to beats 2 and 4, and dance steps at the same time. For a truly musical person, this is probably all connected. For me, these are 3 different processes that all need my full attention – I tense up.



Still humming, I walked along Esplanade on my way to an absinth tasting. I came across the Playa Name Booth where they help you to find your playa name if you don’t have one yet. I thought it would be more of a gag, the two guys in the booth just randomly assigning nicknames. But no, they took their jobs seriously. Which made for a long but rewarding wait. They talked to everybody at length to get a sense of their personality. So before it was my turn, a newly minted Spring, Green, Unity, Walker and Sky High walked away. Then Roof, the Frenchman from Lille who was my name giver, interviewed me for about 20 minutes, going over biography, interests, what makes me smile, first impressions and expectation of Burning Man, consulting the Goddess cards. I picked the one with my favorite colors and it was Eve. It was a perfect match. All the symbolic meanings listed on the card resonated with me. I had all the Eve-related symbols on me somewhere except for the wolf. So I became “Eve in Search of a Wolf”, or “Eve” for short. Unexpectedly, this little naming was no joke at all but a powerful moment. I could immediately imagine Aaron rolling his eyes at the thought that this French amateur psychologist with a penchant for symbolism would uncover my true name after a chat at the playa (got to see exactly that eye-roll two days later). And I do not necessarily believe that there is such a thing as a true name. But there it was – the name felt right and like a discovery. There is something liberating in picking a new name. Not that I was o-so-terribly oppressed before, but now I was Eve on the playa, cut off from the Ilka life, untethered. Which does not mean that I suddenly wanted to do the Tantra Sensuality Play, the Naked Pub Crawl, Shamanic Anal Pleasure, or the Slut Olympics (“Bring your knee pads and leave the prudes back at camp.”). I had become Eve after all and not Lilith.



So Eve proceeded to the absinth tasting, which was already in full swing. Homemade and strong. The recipe is to infuse a mixture of vodka and Everclear with wormwood (from some herbal store) and let it sit for 5 to 10 days. Their sign said it would not cause hallucinations. But I don’t know – it was 2:30 p.m. by then, hot, I had not eaten since the early-morning oatmeal, and I suddenly seemed to float a foot over the road and the dust. Not an unpleasant feeling, but perhaps a bit early in the day for it. So I pulled myself back to the ground with some beef jerky and fig bars. Looked like the more serious food items that require cooking would go back home, they just seemed like such a waste of time.



Now I went to take a bottle of brandy to the DPW saloon, stopping on the way to have my black and white portrait taken. A guy came by and handed out otter pops for the people waiting in line. But the wait still got boring. So I just asked the people in front of me to take a nice picture of me with my own camera. Can always turn it into black and white via photo processing later if I want to. They in turn had me take their picture – and we managed to cut the line down quite a bit this way. I passed the Mountain Rescue Camp, which sports a huge picture of Spock as their logo for no apparent reason. Then again, they also don’t do mountain rescues. Instead they offered hyperwhiskey. Being assured that Spock loves it, I had to give it a try. Whiskey mixed with guacamole and unidentified other substances. It smelled a lot like Icy Hot.
After finally delivering the brandy, I went to the Euro Burn Meet and Greet where I met Axel, the German Burning Man coordinator. Also some heavily pierced Brits, an Austrian woman named Doris and no less than 8 Swiss. The Swiss are out in force here apparently. Since I yearned for music, I moved on to the German Sparkle party. Which was unfortunately devoid of Germans or sparkle but named after a popular techno song. Not my sound, so after two half-hearted dances, I crossed over to the Wet Spot, a bar playing good old rock and roll, though not a dance place. Their special was a mix of vodka, light beer and lemon juice concentrate, quite refreshing. Their other specialty was to randomly douse their guests with cold water from time to time, closest to a shower I got in the first 3 days.
On I went to visit Oliver and his camp mate Gary, who has one startling blue and one brown eye, is wheel-chair bound and had an IPad that happened to kind of work at the moment. So I was able to send Aaron an email with my camp location. The people from the topless seesaw camp next door (a huge attraction) invited us over for grilled sausages, dinner was thus taken care of.



I tried to invite Scott Monkey to an AC/DC dance party but he was busy organizing the speed-dating. Instead I acquired an escort from among the guys waiting there. A Dutch sailor named Michel who handed out wooden tulips to the ladies. There I had a bit of a disconnect. The kid was probably younger than my daughter. I involuntarily started wondering whether my kids had done their homework looking at him. So somehow it did not occur to me that he was not in it just for the dancing. Naïve perhaps. I did not have enough cougar woman in me to enjoy that and since he seemed full of youthful optimism and incredulity about the rejection, I eventually just walked off. But only after “Highway to Hell”. Right around the corner I came across the performance of John Craigie, folk singer/songwriter from San Francisco and great fun to listen to. I added my name to his e-mail list, hope to catch one of his more local performances some day. Then dropped by at my favorite DPW saloon for a margarita, some talk and to watch an apprentice fire dancer practicing. They closed at midnight. Walking home, a guy asked me for a bar recommendation. So I invited him for a glass of wine at my camp – the bottles had to be opened at some point. Alex in the jester cap was from Houston, at Burning Man for the 6th time and recently back from Germany. We ended up discussing the Euro and European politics. Then the Raver kids from the left side of my tent dropped by for a bit, handed out little Buddha statues before heading off to the next party while I went to bed a the decent hour of 1:30 a.m.

3rd Day (September 1)