Build week is its own chapter of the Burning Man experience. The main focus is obviously building and organizing our family home, but to those of us who keep coming back for those few days, it carries a lot more significance.
Our Burning Man experience starts on the Tuesday before Burn week when we land in Reno from our respective corners of the country and world. We make our way to The Sands to meet up with any members who have already arrived and await the arrival of the rest. In the meantime, did anyone say Walmart run?? As more and more members trickle in, the excitement and atmosphere grow. The joy of seeing each other again and meeting new members added with the anticipation of what we’re embarking on creates a beautiful and energetic reunion. And as our Vulcan tradition demands, we go to Mel’s Diner for our go-to dishes and milkshakes. Then it’s 2nd run to Walmart o’clock!
The next morning we find ourselves at Mel’s again, where Frank and Amaya usually bond over their usual breakfast wrap order and talk about how a breakfast wrap with no avocado belongs in the East River. Austin is in full planning and logistics mode, and some people are somehow repacking their suitcases.
We hit the road and caravan to the desert with a stop in Gerlach for some last-minute camp and personal necessities. We have a few minutes to check out the pop-up shops for any swag or Burning Man necessities that only a desert dweller would understand the dire need for, like LED string lights and pasties.
We’re so close to playa we can taste the dust. One of the most epic moments of the burn is riding into the desert with our homies blasting our celebration music as our wheels hit the dusty ground. With no lines or traffic, we’re flying to the perimeter… at 10mph. The views are always even more beautiful than we remember them, and we eventually roll up to the plot we’ll call home for the next two weeks. Now we build.
They say Burning Man is built from nothing, and the build and breakdown crews get to witness that first-hand. We land in a desert divided into empty plots of laid out tools and materials, unable to imagine this turning into the Burning Man that we recognize in just a few more days. We open up our trailer, and it’s all hands on deck to unpack it. Michael Parker has expertly created a map of what Vulcan Empire is to look like this year, and the Vulcanites-turned-colony-of-worker-ants lay out the boxes and materials in their respective corners in preparation of each project. The kitchen goes up first to quickly get the freezers set up. A team gets together to set up the carports while the rest continue to unpack the trailer. MP is wizarding in the background because only he holds the knowledge of where each obscure tool may or may not be and where it belongs. Snowflake and Luba are starting their magic in the kitchen because only they have the valor to organize and wingardium leviosa a kitchen out of an off-the-trailer-clusterfuck. (Occasionally a person will try to help in the kitchen as a way to seek refuge from the sun and shortly walk out, fleeing to lug bikes and bins in the heat over taking on the piles and mountains in the kitchen that only Snowflake’s and Luba’s patience and brilliance somehow have a vision for.)
The camp’s speaker is unburied, and we play pump-up jams because we mean business. The days are hot, and the work can be grueling, but it’s in these conditions that a lot of our relationships are fortified. While working together, we discover what each other is made of and respect each other that much more for it. Most importantly, we support and take care of each other. A couple of people, referred to as “the fluffers”, are designated to make rounds misting people and serving water, gatorade, and sunscreen. (Katie and Helen would do this with a lot of fluffer-fairy flair. Snowflake does too, but in a scarier way like you might get sent to a shady corner if you get too engrossed in your work and haven’t taken a break in a long time. Frank may be her biggest challenge. Not even he, however, will refuse the gifts of the radiant watermelon Goddess named Luba. Once you're fed cold watermelon in the desert, you too shall understand.)
All work stops during the hottest part of the day. Some of our beautiful colleagues will have made food for everyone, and we hang out until the sun is casting some shadows again. After the sun goes down, you may still see Alex and his crew shuffling around with headlamps on, preferring to work on the camp shade or other projects at night when the conditions are more forgiving. The next day, Katie will pull out her stilts and she and a flock of Vulcanites will gather to put up the last tarps, using hundred of ball-bungees and possibly fighting a casual dust storm to do it.
Saturday is when the spin school goes up. Frank has become the brain of that project, fine tuning the logistics every year in hopes of eventually erecting it in a single day. (It’s the structure he and Sara got married under in 2018, and just a few days earlier he was building it with his own hands alongside his friends, climbing onto box trucks because ladders would only slow us down.)
By the time other campers trickle in on Sunday, camp has taken its shape with five carports for the kitchen and dining lounge, the A/C yurt, a shower, shade for the campers, a carport lounge out front, and the spin school with all of its signage. When Vulcan builders lift their head after finishing their tasks at the end of the week, we’re surprised to see that the rest of playa has taken form as well. “When did that happen??” It takes thousands of worker bees to create this indescribable world that we keep going back to every year, and it’s an incredible experience to be the Vulcan Empire square in that patchwork. So many people from different corners of the country and world have come through and camped under the structures we’ve built. Many come back to us every year. It’s a project the Vulcan Empire leads feel very passionately about and a gift to the community that anyone can participate in. As one of our core members likes to say, Vulcan Empire only exists because a lot of people put in a lot of work to make it happen. It can be challenging, but it is even more rewarding, often exposing a person to a side of the Burning Man experience that burn week itself cannot provide: radical team-building.
