Friday, September 17, 2010

If I only had a brain, just a brain! Yeah!

Burning Man Samba Moment #2 occurred during the marching band competition, which was one of the best events of the week. But I was a little late because I had run into some fire dancers. Yeah, I know you've all seen fire dancers - they're a dime a dozen at this point - ho hum, fire dancers, more common than alley cats - actually I've started feeling sorry for all the acrobats and street jugglers and buskers of the world, because I guess it's just not enough any more to just juggle machetes any more, or play drums - now the machetes have to be ON FIRE, the drums have to be on fire, your leotard has to be on fire, every goddam prop you have has to be on fire. Sheesh. BUT, I had not seen a hundred of the nation's very best fire dancers, top of their form, in a head-to-head competition in an actual gigantic Mad Max Thunderdome geodesic dome, complete with gas-masked spectators howling from the beams and a ruthless judging panel ripping the contestants to shreds. Seriously, I almost expected them to put the losers to death!.The girl who finally won could dance on her hands while keeping four flaming hula hoops going all at once. And during the whole competition, only 1 flaming fire implement went zinging into the crowd, and it hardly even touched anybody.

I could not ever seem to get anywhere at Burning Man because I was always running into random stuff like that. Anyway, so where was I, I was a little late to the marching band competition because I had run into some fire dancers. ANYway, the marching band competition was EVEN BETTER THAN THE FIRE DANCER COMPETITION. There were five bands competing:

The first band was an adorable old-school marching band composed of adorably cute people in their 60's with adorable cruise-ship type outfits, singing some kind of innocuous and adorable tune. I was afraid the cooler-than-thou, techno-dancing burner crowd would eat them alive; but to my surprise they got a HUGE ovation from the audience.

The second band was Gamelan X. Gamelan X's rhythms were so weird, and so highly arranged, and so tight, that I actually got kind of scared; it was sort of like a 60's Hitchcock film track, all gongs and cymbals going off at random moments until you almost expected Tony Perkins to come ripping through the crowd with a steak knife. Gamelan X had a large number of strange and eerie gongs, and they also had six people with teeny-tiny cymbals who were running around doing unbelievably tricky, syncopated, bursts of clattering at the most unpredictable moments. I could not get a handle on any of it, but it was UNBELIEVABLY TIGHT. Knocked my drummer socks off.

The third band seemed to be pieces of March Fourth and the Kazum acrobat troupe, but under another name. So, basically, a punk marching band. You know the type - a bunch of highly skilled drummer kids who have come up through the drumline ranks, but have finally escaped from their regimented college football bands, and who now want to put their skills to work in something much cooler and weirder and funkier, and who have drafted a bunch of crazy horn player friends to put together a slightly evil, twisted, funkified, sort of vaudeville act, with maybe some sexy dancers out front, and some fire dancers or acrobats or contortionists just to spice things up. There's a whole subculture of this type of punk marching band. Portland's got a couple bands like this, most famously March Fourth, who they are fantastically good, and man do they put on a show!

The fourth contestant was a samba band! Well, sort of. It was the Lloyd Family Players, an Oakland-based group who I've heard about but had never seen. I say "sort of" because they weren't playing traditional samba or samba-reggae; more like a funkified version of samba-reggae. But definitely samba-rooted and using a samba instrumental lineup. They turned out to be super tight. (generally speaking, the playing quality at this whole competition was off the hook) And I have to add that the Lloyd Family Players had The. Very. Best. Stage Presence. That I have ever seen from any bateria outside of Brazil. What I mean is, not only were they playing tight, but they were DANCING. They were dancing their HEARTS out! Like they MEANT it. Like they COULD NOT KEEP STILL. Like they were having the VERY BEST TIME OF THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. With GREAT BIG HUGE SMILES!! And boy did the crowd respond!!! I so wished that certain of my band members could have seen this. (And learned something from it.)

The fifth and final contender was another punk marching band, a really killer one from Seattle, Titanium Sporkestra.

All five bands gave stunning performances, but in the end the winner was supposed to be decided by audience response, which the organizers were carefully measuring with an actual decibel meter.

I felt sure Gamelan X would win, because not only were they tight as hell but they also seemed to me to be the most original. But the decibel meter turned up a tie between... Titanium Sporkestra and the Lloyd Family Players! Modern punk marching band versus a samba bateria!

The tie-breaker turned out to be that each band had to draw, at random, one of 5 possible song titles - classics of the American marching band tradition, I gathered. And then they had to perform that song. But wait, I thought, that's totally unfair!!! Why would a samba bateria know any American songs? This wasn't advertised as an "American marching band" competition, just as a "marching band" competition. Why should any Brazilian bateria - or Gamelan X, come to think of it - know any American songs?

More to the point, how on earth is a Brazilian bateria going to be able to perform any song at all WITH JUST DRUMS? The Lloyd Family Players don't have any melody instruments!

But them's the rules, and the Lloyd Family Players drew "If I Only Had A Brain". You know, the Scarecrow's song from the Wizard of Oz, the one that goes:
"I could while away the hours
Conferrin' with the flowers
Consultin' with the rain.
And my head I'd be scratching,
While my thoughts were busy hatchin',
If I only had a brain!"

And Titanium Sporkestra drew "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." As if the whole situation weren't unfair enough already, it turned out that Titanium Sporkestra ALREADY PLAYS "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" - it's in their repertoire - so all their horn players know it - damn! argh! and! plus! The Lloyd Family Players had to play immediately with no prep time at all. So, while the Lloyds were playing, Titanium Sporkestra had several precious minutes to plan their own strategy (and indeed they spent the next several minutes in a tense, excited huddle - right next to me - working out an elaborate arrangement).

I was standing over on the side positively STEAMING about all of this, when the Lloyd Family Players trooped out gamely to the center of the performance arena. What could they do, really? It was clear they didn't know the song. (why would they? They play Brazilian music! Not old American show tunes! argh! damn!) But, hell if they didn't just charge into an awesome funky reggae-based beat. Totally a damn-the-torpedoes moment. Dancing like hell and leaping around and having a grand old time, while one of their members grabbed the microphone and started singing the following song:

If I only had a brain!
If I only had a brain!
Just a brain, just a brain!
Yeah baby! A brain!

He was totally making it up. I could NOT stop laughing, the whole thing was so ridiculous. And the thing was, his randomly made-up melody was actually kind of catchy, and he had such a great funky voice, and the groove was so cool, and they all looked like they were having so much fun.

It was definitely the most creative, coolest, grooviest version of "If I Only Had A Brain" that I have ever heard.

Titanium Sporkestra then played a perfectly fine version of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," And they won. But honestly, trying to describe it now I can't quite remember exactly what Titanium Sporkestra did with that song. I'm honestly sorry, but I actually can't seem to remember much about Titanium Sporkestra... (hey, they had the disadvantage of going last, and I was a bit sleep-deprived and had had to sit down at that point because I was so tired. I'm sure they were great, I just can't remember, I'm really sorry!). While I have an EXTRA-VIVID memory of "If I Only Had A Brain" that is probably going to stay with me my entire life. So in the end it was the Lloyd Family Players who knocked this one out of the park. Kudos, guys, and keep up the dancing.

Does anybody know how to play a samba?

In the midst of that Burning Man week of dragon cars and 1,001 Fire Dancers, two samba moments stood out.

Samba Moment #1. I was heading to a drum jam at Center Camp. Actually, I was a little late because I'd been distracted by the most terrifying free climb I've ever witnessed - a man was climbing UPSIDEDOWN, FIFTY FEET IN THE AIR, with NO NET AND NO HARNESS, along the OUTSIDE of the massive towering sculpture in Center Camp. This was witnessed, as far as I could tell, only by me and another girl who'd also happened to glance up. We both stood there transfixed, in mixed dread and amazement, for nearly twenty minutes, certain that he was going to fall and die and that we were going to have to run over and attempt CPR on him after he fell. But he climbed alllll the long way up, and then, thank goodness, alll the long way back down. (At first I'd thought he must be stoned or insane; or that possibly I was stoned or insane. But he turned out to be a professional climber, and I, of course, was just at Burning Man.)

Anyway, so I got to the drum jam a little late and it was already well under way. To my surprise it was really quite good; several skilled conga players and bass drummers, two solid bell players and quite good snare drummer who had his snare under control. The few djembe players that were present actually knew how to play djembe. (poor djembe, it's gotten such a bad reputation, because of the hippie drum circle guys who insist on abusing djembes whenever possible.)

So we played a variety of West African and then Cuban rhythms for a while. I joined in on chocalho for a while and manage to terrify several nearby people, then switched to a bell to try to spare people's eardrums a bit.

And then a marvelous dancer entered the circle. She was fantastic. She was incredible. She was gorgeous. She transfixed us all. Because everybody was watching her, she managed call us all out to a stop. An expectant silence fell over the whole drum circle, and she looked around the entire circle and said hopefully - with a slight Brazilian accent -

"Does anybody know how to play a samba?"

I was standing in the back with some kind of bell thingy in my hand. I thought someone would start playing a samba, but nobody did. All the conga players and djembe players looked at each other mutely.

She looked around again plaintively and said again

"Please! DOES ANYBODY KNOW HOW TO PLAY A SAMBA???"

Then I suddenly remembered that I had my pandeiro tucked between my feet - it was already out of its bag, ready to go. I dropped whatever I'd been holding, grabbed the pandeiro and launched in with a simple, fast samba. Nothing flashy, just a good groove, but the dancer girl SCREAMED in delight - then she saw that I even had a real pandeiro, and she screamed again, with a huge smile, and started samba'ing at top speed. She and I just blazed away fora few bars (and of course she turned out to be a killer awesome samba dancer). All the other drummers got the idea, and they all came charging in on their own drums, and we were doing a ROCKIN' samba. YAHHH!! and the dancer chick gave me dozens of thumbs-ups and big beaming smiles, and then she pulled me up front and center and made me dance too; and all the other girls that were standing around started dancing, and everybody started dancing. Even the inevitable (at Burning Man) Weird Old Naked Dude Wearing Nothing But A Dust Mask, he started dancing too, like crazy, and things were all flopping around like crazy, but I'll spare you any more details about that.

Burning Man is .... um....

So after CBC I drove straight to Burning Man. Like most people who have been to Burning Man, I struggle when I have to explain Burning Man to those who have never heard of it before. You're talking about Burning Man and somebody says "Wait, what's Burning Man?" and you start to say "Burning Man is ... um ... well, it's this festival... party ... event.... thing.... for a week ... in the desert.... um... Burning Man is like...."

My artist friends had all been telling me it was the most wonderful event they'd ever been to, and kept insisting I had to go, yet seemed incapable of describing what it was exactly. They'd say stuff like "You cannot imagine the things people build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week." I'd say: "What stuff?" and they'd just start babbling. "Oh... thing like.... jeez, my god, the art cars! They're just... and there was this one thing - I can't even describe it - it was like - this giant lizard thing, except, it was a bicycle! No, but it wasn't exactly... And the desert, the dust is... there's this temple thing too, oh, I just can't describe it."

In contrast to those raptured and incoherent comments, other people were telling me it had been nearly the worst experience of their life: "You have NO IDEA what the duststorms are like. Don't bring ANYTHING you care about. Do NOT bring your own car or your own bicycle, they'll NEVER be the same." "The music is SO loud and annoying." "It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid art cars! Totally not worth it!"

The more I listened, the more I kept hearing echoes of how people used to describe Carnaval to me. In fact, some of the sentences were word-for-word identical to descriptions of the Rio Carnaval that I'd heard long before I ever went to Rio: "You cannot imagine the floats and costumes they build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week!" "The music is SO loud and annoying" ""It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid floats!"

So.... is Burning Man the North American equivalent of Carnaval? The one crazy, annual, blow-out party to end all parties? The indescribably topsy-turvy event that turns the world inside-out temporarily, in ways that some people adore and others hate? I decided to I had to check it out for myself.

Since this was my first Burning Man, my friend Bola at California Brazil Camp insisted that I needed to "practice" before going. So we inaugurated the First Annual CBC Mini-Burning-Man. "Practice" consisted of getting drunk and stoned and then (once sufficiently drunk and stoned) running after a simulacrum of the Burning Man water truck (aka Bola with a fire hose), dancing around like maniacs in the water, and then burning a tiny little wooden figure (6" tall, made out of twigs) that was pulverized to ashes in about 2 seconds with a blast from Bola's propane torch. Mini Burning Man was a grand success!! Meaning that we (a) had a great time and (b) managed to shock all the hundreds of campers in the entire lunch line into a stunned and puzzled silence. (Many thanks here to my fellow Mini Burners, Golban, Ara and Barbara; and special thanks to Bola for arranging the whole event. I can't wait for the 2nd annual Mini Burning Man! Also thanks to George for the bottle of Bulgarian rakia, which was an essential part of the process.)

Despite the excellent practice, though, I still wasn't quite sure what to expect from the real Burning Man. So now I've been. So here's my try at describing what Burning Man is. Burning Man is 50,000 insane people who build an entire city in the Nevada desert in a couple of days, and live there for a week ... bringing all their food and water with them, living in rows and rows and rows of elaborately constructed camps, in the middle of a razor-flat, barren and empty, duststorm-filled, alkali-flats prehistoric lakebed. There's no bands or stages; it's not a music festival. There's nothing for sale. Actually there are no scheduled acts at all. What happens all week long is up to the 50,000 people who have chosen to come.

But wait, that doesn't really explain it at all. Burning Man is like... um...

Burning Man is like, you know how you were at that wild party that one time, with your three craziest friends, and you all had that ridiculous idea to build a giant gumball machine out of helium balloons, and you all were laughing your asses off about your silly idea?

It's just like that, except, instead of just laughing about the idea, you actually BUILD it, and instead of three crazy friends, you have 50,000 crazy friends, and they've each spent a full year (and tens of thousands of dollars) building their giant helium gumball machine. Or their home-made roller coaster. Or their full-sized disco roller rink (with 100 pairs of roller skates available, and giant sound system blasting out vintages Bee Gees). Or their whatever-it-is. And they actually BUILD it. And everybody can go try out everybody else's insane ideas. For free. All week long. Everything is free.

So that's one difference; instead of escolas building crazy stuff in a slightly organized way, it's random people building crazy stuff in an entirely disorganized way.

Another difference is the drugs. As caipirinhas are to Carnaval, so drugs are to Burning Man. I've never been offered so many drugs of so many kinds so fast! On my first night alone I was offered pot three times, ecstasy once, and mushrooms twice... and that was all in the first half hour, from the same 5 people who were camped right next to me.

But oddly I felt no interest in drugs; because it had instantly became clear that drugs are redundant at Burning Man. What I mean is, suppose you accept the drugs from your campmates. And you get stoned. And you hallucinate that you're riding a clump of fuzzy, ten-foot-high, glowing, pastel-colored mushrooms through a blinding sandstorm ... for hours... sailing through the desert on a pink glowing mushroom... only to reach a miniature, pocket-sized movie theater that is all alone in the middle of the desert! And is only eight feet wide, contains a total of six chairs, and is showing a different triple feature every night. For free! Then your mushrooms get stuck in a sand drift, and you all have to jump off and push the mushrooms.

Or maybe you dream that you're on a functioning fishing purse-seiner boat that is cruising around... IN THE DESERT!! And you have all just spotted a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH that is also cruising along about a mile away, and your fishing-boat turns out to be staffed by real live Alaskan fishermen who simply cannot BELIEVE that there is a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH at Burning Man, and they immediately give chase after the unsuspecting neon tuna fish, in their impossibly fully-functional desert fishing boat, and they ACTUALLY CATCH IT.

Or imagine that you're so deeply lost in a blinding, swirling dust storm, visibility zero, and you think "Hell, I'm so totally lost I might as well just start playing chocalho, just to practice, till the dust storm ends" and there you are covered in dust and playing chocalho at top volume, when out of the dust comes looming... a giant motorized plate of nachos. The giant plate of nachos has heard your chocalho and has come to check you out. The giant plate of nachos does a neat circle around you, and then it heads away and vanishes into the swirling wind.

Or maybe you hallucinate that it's night time and the vast sky is filled with stars, and you're tugging a 1200-foot-long string of hundreds and hundreds of glowing, blue, helium balloons through your hands, against a star-filled sky, looking up at them and getting so dizzy that it seems that you're pulling a string of actual stars through your hands... and three random people converge from all directions, all on bicycles that are lit up like Christmas trees... and when you finally reach the end of the 1200 feet of balloons, you let all the balloons go, and they sail up into space, like a galaxy floating away, and it's THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN, and you and the three random people on the Christmas-tree bicycles all cheer! And you all hug each other in a spirit of shared camaraderie and triumph like you've just climbed Mount Everest together. Even though you've never met each other before.

Or maybe you hallucinate that you're riding in a parade of 5000 topless women on bicycles, with all your 10,000 breasts painted like flowers, while hundreds of men fling themselves to the ground all around you, crying out "You're all so beautiful!! Thank you! Thank you!!!!", or, you think you're on a homemade Tilt-A-Whirl made of sofas (with a sign reading "Safety Is Rule #3!") ... Or lost in a giant home-made maze made of sheets .... ... Or you dream that the camp organizer who you've been corresponding with over email for months turns out to be a 300-pound nudist who works for a major city ballet company, and who also has a successful side business selling whips, and who, when you arrive, is teaching an incredibly popular class called "Introduction to Flogging And Caning" that is so popular that there are lines of people stretching out the door. And who turns out to be a total sweetheart and becomes a great friend.

How ironic it would be if you thought these were all just drug-fueled hallucinations, when it actually IT WAS ALL REAL.

Like I said, drugs are redundant at Burning Man. The entire thing is a living, breathing, walking hallucination.

And yes, at the end of the week, on Saturday night, they finally burn the big wooden Man, which has been looming over the whole event all week. Tens of thousands of people sit all around the Man, and all the art cars form a gigantic outer ring. You all sit, rapt, watching the Man burn. Until he falls, and then everybody runs around the bonfire like maniacs (until they all get scared by a sudden windstorm of sparks and suddenly everybody flees in all directions). On Sunday night, they burn the eerie gigantic wooden Temple, which people have spent all week covering with thousands, upon thousands, of heartfelt written messages, to everyone from recently dead mothers to traitorous ex-boyfriends. All of it goes up in smoke. The next morning, the 50,000 people disassemble the entire city in a day - giant gumball machines, roller rinks, roller coasters, fire-breathing dragons, and all - and disappear... leaving not a scrap behind.

[cue whistling wind and lonely tumbleweed rolling across the desert]

Yes, it IS the North American Carnaval, I'm convinced. Nowhere else in North American have I felt the Carnaval spirit in such force as Burning Man - that free-wheeling, joie-de-vivre, damn-the-torpedoes, carpe-diem, joy-to-the-world spirit that is the heart of Carnaval. Yeah yeah, so some of the details are different. Yeah, there's a lotta techno music. So if you don't like techno, you camp in Hushville and you bring your earplugs. Yeah, hordes of college students come on the Saturday to watch the Man burn; but really they just swoop in on the Saturday; the rest of the week is great. Yeah, there are the 70mph duststorms, whatever, it's just camping, just dustier than most camping. You just resign yourself to washing all your stuff afterwards, scrub your car down (twice! with q-tips!), give it an oil change and an air filter, and clean the chain on your bike.

If you are the kind of person who loves Carnaval... the kind who loves not just the bateria, but also the floats, the spectacle, the whole crazy annual cycle, the topsy-turvy spirit that is at the heart of Carnaval; if you're the kind of person who would enjoy catching random rides on a mobile Victorian house, or a pirate ship, or a giant fire-breathing dragon, or a moving tiki bar, or an ichthyosaur, or a motorized porch swing; or if you would just like to hold a string of stars in your hand, then maybe you should check out Burning Man.

CBC placeholder post

I need to write about 20 posts about California Brazil Camp this year.... starting with the phone call that I got while I was pulled off at a gas station in southern Oregon, from the director of camp, asking about maybe getting in touch with Dudu Fuentes to see if he could come up at the very last possible second. Mestre Jonas's US visa had been declined and Brazil Camp was scrambling to find another top-notch Rio bateria director who already had a visa and who could come up to the US for two weeks (with about 48 hours' notice). We wouldn't be able to find an escola mestre at such short notice; but how about a bloco director? How about one of the new blocos that does other rhythms besides samba. Enter Dudu Fuentes, my dear friend from Bangalafumenga.

Long story short, Dudu came and we all loved him and it was fantastic and it was one of the great high points of all my time at CBC. And I translated (badly but gamely) all week for Dudu - not because my Portuguese is so good (it SUCKS, it SUCKS!!) but since I pretty much know all the Banga repertoire already and knew how to explain certain of his hand signs and what Banga is and so forth. And I ended up staying 3 days extra into Week 2 and pulling into Burning Man three days late.

But like I said I've got to write about 20 posts about all that. OK, this is just a placeholder post, check back later for more!

Packing

An intelligent person, when faced with a year sans income, would intelligently hunker down and try to not spend any money and try not to burn through one's precious and embarrassingly tiny savings. But, in the middle of July I had just wrapped up a five-figure contract job for a college textbook publisher (ok, just barely five figures, but still, five instead of four...). Armed with that bit of savings, plus the reassuring knowledge that I have a job waiting for me in January, off I went to Episodes 4 and 5 in Kathleen's Excellent Year Off. Episode 4 was California Brazil Camp; and Episode 5 was Burning Man.

(If you missed the earlier episodes, they were: Episode 1, a three-month Carnaval trip to Brazil; Episode 2, a stunningly beautiful month in Greece; and Episode 3, three weeks of high-altitude mountain fieldwork, complete with grizzly- and bison-dodging, in Grand Teton National Park.)

The problem with Episodes 4 and 5 is that they were right in a row in the same trip in the same car, and right on the heels of Episode 3, the Tetons fieldwork. And so I had to pack for them all at once, more or less simultaneously (though I did get a one-day turnaround in Portland to dump some of the Episode 3 bird gear, and pick up the Episode 4 drums and the Episode 5 water jugs). All three were camping expeditions, but all requiring slightly different sets of gear: from the drenching thunderstorms of the Tetons, to the chilly nights in the California redwoods, and then to the shimmering heat and notorious duststorms of the Nevada desert.

So I spent a week in July carefully studying my trusty midnight-blue Subaru Forester and all its possible configurations of gear-storage.... (while trying to ignore the small voice in my head that was saying "Hey... since the car is that nice blue color, you could paint stars all over it and turn it into an astronomically accurate constellation map!" Shh, Art Car Voice, that will only happen with the Forester is 10 years old, and it's only 8 right now.)

First I arranged my basic fieldwork gear. (I'm writing this out mostly just to make a list that I can refer to next year.) First, a sprinkling of new clean earplugs everywhere. New earplugs! Like manna from heaven - a pair stashed in every possible drum bag, purse, backpack and container that I own, plus a few more pairs scattered throughout the car and even some attached to the bike. Then the major packing begins. Tucked under the driver's seat: Jumper cables, duct tape, paper towels, extra pair of hiking shoes, scissors, jackknife, mallet, spare tent stakes, screwdriver, wine bottle opener; a little cutting board, camping dishes & silverware; a sack of spare batteries; and a big bag full of bungee cords and various lengths of rope. In the glove compartment: the Mini-Office, containing envelopes, stamps, paper and pens, and my brand new passport, birth certificate and international driver's license (just in case. Cause you just never know when you will suddenly be headed to Mexico.)

Under the passenger seat: rows and rows of canned food (tuna, pears, pineapple, peaches), with boxes of Triscuits and Cliff Bars piled on top. Nothing that requires any cooking. In the door pockets: band-aids, sun block, bug spray, sunglasses, compass, flashlight and headlamp. On the back seat: A big 5-gallon jug of drinking water, my Clothes Bag, my Bathroom/Shower Bag, and two towels. In the way back: A huge cooler stocked with beer, cheese, yogurt, fresh blueberries (which last way longer than any other berry, ya know), bread, and the Emergency Drug Bag, (containing a whole pharmacy of goodness, from high-altitude Diamox, to malaria medication, to prescription-strength painkillers and an enormous supply of at least four different antibiotics. All triple-bagged in ziplocs and kept in the cooler). Stuffed everywhere else: tent, tent fly, 3 tarps (one for under the tent, one for over, and a third for emergencies); and a sleeping bag AND 2 Ecuadorean wool blankets AND a comforter AND a pillow AND a big fat sleeping pad, AND the Sleep Bag (containing eye mask, earplugs, sleeping pills, fuzzy hat and warm socks); because if I've learned anything from twenty years of fieldwork, it's that You Need Your Sleep.

Finally, wedged in the corners, the Bag Of Foul-Weather Gear, plus the Bikini Bag, plus a helmet; cause you just never know when you going to unexpectedly be either on a beach, or freezing to death, or caught in a thunderstorm, or in a kayak or on a horse and needing a helmet. Or sometimes all of those simultaneously. You just never know.

OK. That's the basics that I take on any fieldwork. Then for the Tetons I added: solar shower, hiking pack, hiking shoes, binoculars, all 3 bird books (Peterson, NG, and Kaufman), the guide to Mammals of the Rocky Mountains, a giant can of pepper spray (ok, I didn't buy this till after I met the grizzly bear...), and my trusty old Banding Bag containing bird-banding pliers, color bands, my calipers for measuring tarsus length, my wing chord ruler, and a couple of soft clean bird bags. Last of all, a bag of spices and the necessary ingredients for Field Station Scones and the Amazing No-Bake, High-Altitude, Chocolate-Oatmeal-PeanutButter Cookies.

So far so good. Four weeks later I came zooming back into Portland. Sunburned, dusty, and full of that ineffable serenity that only comes from a month of falling asleep under the stars to the sound of nighthawks, and waking with the dawn.... but that's a whole nother story (see previous posts for a bit about the Tetons). Who would have thought pandeiro would go so well with cowboy tunes? Anyway, now it's time for the swift changeover. Feeling rather like an Antarctic explorer heading his dogteam for a crucial cache of hardtack, I headed straight to my staging ground at a friend's house, where I took a shower (running water!! oh my god!), dumped the Tetons-only gear, and grabbed the two piles of gear that I'd left there for myself a month earlier:

The Brazil Camp cache contained a repinique, caixa, pandeiro, tamborim and frigideira, the Edirol sound recorder (plus batteries), and the required straps and sticks.

The Burning Man cache contained: a bicycle; 15 more gallons of water; two camp chairs and a small carpet; two strapless silver sequinned tops; a variety of odd skirts and pants; three iguana hats, because, you know, you just never know when you are going to need an iguana hat; goggles and dust masks; a fistful of glowsticks; and several battery-powered strings of colored LED lights.

OK, so this is not all going to fit.

One trip to ReRack later, the Forester was freshly equipped with a rooftop cargo carrier and a rooftop bike rack. Said the ReRack guy: "You can't put that cargo carrier and that bike rack side-by-side on the same car. Well, I guess technically you could, but...." Me: "Technically? Technically is good!" The "but" turned out to be that I have to take off the bike every time I want to open the cargo carrier, but that's infinitely better than no bike at all!

I LOVED my new cargo carrier. I LOVED my bike rack. I packed everything in, got it all in with good clear rearward visibility, even; got the bike on top, and last of all I strapped the big foam sleeping pad on top of the cargo carrier.

I got in the car feeling so happy and free. No commitments; no jobs; my textbook contract job all wrapped up; all the supplies I need right here in my trusty car; free, free, free. I could go anywhere, follow any whim. I had two days to get to Brazil Camp. I thought: I want to sleep in a tepee. I've never slept in a tepee. So I found a hot springs resort near Mount Shasta (the stunningly huge volcano that dominates the northern California skyline) that had tepees for rent. OK, headed for Mount Shasta tonight for a hot springs bath and a night in a tepee!

And so I headed for Interstate 5. Southbound.

Half an hour later the foam pad almost flew off the car because I'd forgotten to loop one of the straps through a crucial brace. No damage done, though, so I just hopped out, grabbed the strap and secured everything. And then my cell phone rang; it was two sambista friends who'd just zoomed past and seen me by the side of the road. I assured them I was fine, and we all went on our way; but then I thought, jeez, how many sambistas are on interstate 5 right now, that within 5 minutes after I pulled over, a fellow band member would have seen me? Dozens and dozens, I soon realized; I passed some, and others passed me. (My favorite phone call from that trip was just: "Want a piece of gum?" - from a sambista friend in a car directly behind me) All of us southbound on I-5; from Vancouver, Seattle, Olympia, Portland, Eugene; all on our annual thousand-mile-or-more migration, down the Pacific Coast to California Brazil Camp. And all around the continent, whole bands were mobilizing, packing, catching flights; from Boulder, Tucson, Calgary, Austin, from New Orleans, from New York City, from Boston. (sambistas from Boston! I have to talk to those people!) Even from as far afield as Hawaii and Hong Kong and Tokyo, sambistas were en route. California Brazil Camp, here we come!