Becoming Interested In Burning Man
I became curious about going to Burning Man when I was visiting friends in San Francisco after I attended a celebration of the 100 th birthday of Buckminster Fuller in San Diego in 1995. My friends, Lissie and Peter, had been to Burning Man when there were only 300 people at the event. Now, it attracts 20,000 people to the Black Rock Desert in Gerlach, Nevada. My friends showed me photographs of art cars and people dancing nude in the desert in 100 degree weather.
At the end of the event, an effigy of a four-story wooden man is burned. The legend behind the event is that the founder Larry Harvey had a break up with a girlfriend. Heartbroken, he and a friend built an eight-foot wooden man and burned it on Baker Beach in San Francisco.
While living in Massachusetts, my friend, Joel Stanley, and I would dream about going to the event. Since we were living on the other side of the continent, it seemed out of our reach. Then I got a delightful email from a young man from Russia who said that he had read my online dissertation on architecture, The Gaia Religion, the Sacred Marriage of Art and Science, and asked me if I had been to Burning Man. I said “no,” and he replied that I needed to go because the kind of culture I was visualizing in my dissertation seemed to be the kind of culture that was developing at Burning Man. Of course, I became even more intrigued by the event.
I moved to Arcosanti an experimental urban laboratory in Arizona built by Paolo Soleri, in 1999. I had been studying his vision of architecture-- what he calls arcology (ecological architecture)-- for nearly a decade, and when I got the opportunity to work in his organization, I packed up my bags and moved out west. Actually, the story was more complex as to why, after living in Amherst for 18 years, I left all my friends and my support network and moved to a place where I knew no one.
I was feeling stuck in Amherst, so stuck that I felt that if I didn't move, I was never going to be able to dance again. During last few years at Amherst, I would go to Dance Spree, a drug/alcohol free dance studio featuring free-spirited dancing on Friday nights. But I got to the point that I just couldn't dance any longer. Most nights I just sat on the bench and watch other people dance away the hours. I was so confused about sex and love issues that I couldn't dance. It wasn't just sexual confusion that was getting me down, but that I couldn't find a companion that I felt comfortable with and who I shared a calling with. It got to the point that I would only feel comfortable dancing contact improv with my friend Jill, who was bi-sexual. But since I had dedicated myself to the opposite sex in terms of sexuality, I found what was happening to me disturbing. Had I given up on men?
It wasn't like men and women didn't want to dance with me, I was having problems with intimacy; even when dancing with strangers looking anyone in the eye who might want to love me was a painful experience. Dancing with the opposite sex, I would feel trapped, or in a situation that I found to be enslaving. Then, one night when there were two men competing on the dance floor for my attention, I had a break down. I went into the women's dressing room and cried and cried because I felt that becoming involved with either of these men would lead to my becoming trapped in the patriarchal system that I was trying with all my heart to change. No one seemed like a match for me to dance with; nobody seemed right.
The next morning I cried some more about my intimacy problem. In desperation to find meaning in my life, I went to the Arcosanti web page. In the ‘80s, while a student at the University of Massachusetts doing a research project in contemporary art, I had to choose one living artist to do a major research paper. After looking through several contemporary art books, I knew that I wanted to write on an architect who was curing the world's problems through design.
After much reading it became clear to me that Paolo Soleri was the one I should focus my essay on. After writing the essay, I was convinced that his ideas on architecture could revolutionize the world and open the way for us to live in a more evolved relationship with nature. I could see the idea of building arcologies as a way not only to save the world from urban sprawl, but from social inequality and poverty. The Cosanti foundation, Paolo's organization was looking for people to join their Paradox program, a new program he was starting bringing together cyberspace and arcology. I thought to myself that if there was any justice in the world, then I would be accepted since I had been promoting his ideas over the Internet for a half a decade. Another reason why I went was because it was 1999. I wanted to be in the city of the future at the turn of the millennium, and to be in an intentional community if the Y2K collapse of civilization happen.
During my time at Arcosanti, I became friends with a man named Bruce Bender who planned to leave Arcosanti because he was tired to being exploited by the Arcosanti management. We would talk late into the night. There was no sexual contact between us even though there was sexual tension that could not be release since Bruce was not at a point where he could trust the sexual love of a woman. While at Arcosanti, he impregnated a woman who then ran off with their child leaving him a psychological mess and dependent on alcohol. Nevertheless, Bruce and I liked each other.
I liked him so much that I didn't want to have sex with him until I knew we had a solid friendship and it was what we both wanted. During last month there, I took him to Oracle, Arizona to take a tour of the Biosphere 2 project. Even though we had to sleep in the same double bed together in the hostel since they had no single beds left when we arrived, I didn't make one sexual move on him the entire night out of respect for him. I cannot tell you what a difficult night that was because all the cells in my body and soul wanted to hug him. But I resisted, repressing all the love I had for him.
Bruce had a way to bring people together to hear him talk about his wild ideas on finding a new building material called secrete, made from salt water, that was stronger, he said, than concrete. Since he was unable to carry out his dreams under Soleri's rule, his plan was to move to Oakland, California and experiment with the material since he would be near the sea. When he got good results with the new construction material, then he would move to Mexico, start a bronze foundry to make chess sets and other bronze items, and then start an arcological community with the money he raised. But he would make the arcology structure so that there could be a decentralized social structure that allowed for individual liberty and grass roots participation, unlike at the Arcosanti project where the elite few make all the decisions and the workers have no decision-making rights at all.
I wanted to be a part of his vision and life, but when he left Arcosanti, he left alone. If he had asked me to go along with him, I would have gone. The best he could do was to give me a goodbye kiss, the first touch of physical affection he had given me during our entire time at Arcosanti. I had come to the conclusion that I was just not sexually appealing to him, or I was too old, that something else kept us apart that was invisible to the human eye.
Before he left, around the turn of the new millennium, we invited the Arcosanti community to join us in doing a birth ritual. I was trying to create a way for the Arcosanti project and arcology to be “born,” since during its three decades of its existence, it had not reached Soleri's goal of becoming a model ecological, pedestrian city of 7,000. The present population of Arcosanti is only about 60 people. The way I perceived it, the birth of a new global culture was in order, one manifesting itself in a new communal architecture that balanced collective life with individual freedom.
I felt that the Arcosanti model could do that. We invited people to wear costumes, the wilder the better. Some of us did psychedelic mushrooms. I wore a beautiful wedding dress in a 1920's style that I had gotten from the Salvation Army that I bought years ago in Amherst waiting for the special event in which to wear it. There was enough room in it for me to put a pillow which made me like pregnant. Then I mixed red paint in a bloody color and poured it over the dress. Finally, after the effects of the mushrooms started taking effect, I attempted to paint my face in psychedelic patterns.
Bruce gave out rope tied in a knot which I thought symbolized a true lovers knot. He said the rope represented umbilical cords and that we were all tied together. As gifts during the ceremony, I gave out condoms which I had taped Blessing Cards that I had gotten at the Findhorn Community in Scotland. So, you might get a condom which read, “Success,” “Adventure,” “Acceptance,” “Wisdom,” “Acknowledgment,” “Change,” “Grace,” “Friendship,” etc. They were fortunate cookies for sex. The one I drew I still keep in my wallet, “Vision.”
Even though the ritual didn't end up the way I wanted it to, that is, with all of us in each other's arms, it made me much more interested in the role ritual plays in life. For me, if ritual led to alchemy, then it was the Ars Magna or the royal art, the way to conduct the invisible forces to work towards the liberation of the human species-- by bringing together the sexes in building a new type of city that nurtures loving relationships.
During our nightly conversations, Bruce would tell me about his experiences at Burning Man and his dream about that artistic movement becoming part of the Arcosanti project. Since Arcosanti is attempting to build a community of 7,000 people, for Bruce it seemed possible to convince some of the Burning Man crowd that it is time to build a Burning Man Arcology in the Nevada desert. He said I needed to witness how in a model city during several weeks of the year, thousands of people come together to express themselves in thousands of different, bizarre, and thoughtful ways. We dreamed about creating a camp together at Burning Man and drawing people to our site.
Bruce left Arcosanti in 2000. I left a half a year later and moved to nearby Prescott, Arizona. Following our departures, I had little contract with Bruce. I heard that he was living in his school bus and he had gotten a job in Oakland delivering bread. I had not seen Bruce in a year and a half, but I forwarded him a press release over the Internet about a protest that I had attended at the Nevada Test Site. I was asking people to help support the cause by contributing to bail money needed for protesters that had been arrested. He replied to the message saying that the last time he went to Burning Man, his bus broke down right in front of the entrance to the Nevada Test Site. None of the workers would stop to help him fix his bus in the blazing hot sun.
He asked me if I was going to Burning Man this upcoming year. When I wrote him back “yes,” he said that he was going to be brutally honest with me and ask me if I would do a sex ritual with him on the playa. He had it in his mind that we could wear little clothes and “fuck like monkeys” on an altar that we would arrange. He admitted to me that he found me very sensual, but that he had one condition. I could only see it as a performance and not as any commitment thing that lead to a future together.
I was amazed and stunned to read his message. So he really did find me sexually appealing! I was so happy for a while thinking that our dream of erotic union could actually come to pass after so much time! After doing a millennium birth ritual at Arcosanti, a sex ritual at Burning Man 2001 seemed to be a perfect move.
I wrote him back that all sex was a ritual performance and how could I have sex with someone if there was no hope of a future? What I needed was a form of tantra where the mind, body, and soul of a person are united with the divinity of the other. If a future for the couple grows from that bond that is wonderful. But, at least, I wanted the possibility that something more meaningful might develop. After all, we had never been close together, so we had no idea if our physical chemistry would work. He wrote me back that he was into learning about tantra with me, and that he would be going to the Burning Man a week early to help set up. He asked me to join him so that we could practice our tantra ritual performance art piece before the actual event on the playa.
For around a month I didn't hear from Bruce, even though I went ahead and thought about how I would like the ritual to take place. Ideally, I wanted it to be a ritual about the union of sex and love, and I wanted us to be vehicles of moving cosmic love energies through our bodies. I visualized us doing the ritual underneath the moonlight as we lied on a map of the world illustrating Fuller's idea of a world energy grid fed by renewable resources. I wanted this to be a world love and renewable energy ritual because I couldn't see any other way for our world to evolve beyond the peril of nuclear weapons other than by starting a Lovolution, a concept that I had been developing for years; but I was in desperate need of a partnership who would help me initiate the paradigm shift. I asked Bruce to bring a jar of water from the Pacific and I would bring water from the Atlantic to be part of our sacred sex ceremony. His idea was that we would make a sacred circle in which to place our altar in the playa.
During the month that I was waiting for him to reply, I traveled to the ZEGG community about an hour train ride from Berlin. I was speaking at the International Communal Studies Conference there on the problems of the Arcosanti project and ideas I had for it to become a more liberated place. I would have never dreamed of what I discovered at ZEGG. German philosopher and art historian Dieter Duhm, ZEGG's founder, had built a community around the notions of “free love,” “liberated love,” and “knowing love.” Ecofeminist ideas were part of the mythos of the community. There was no traditional marriage as they transcended sexual and social boundaries. The most remarkable thing is that it was a culture in support of global justice and world peace through planetary disarmament. It was the closest place to utopia that I had ever been. They even stated in their literature that their goal is to create a practical utopia.
Duhm felt that in his years of experimenting in social living that the worst problem a group had to overcome was jealousy. In order to move into a communal living space, people had to not be possessive and let the erotic energies flow where they wanted to go. For Duhm, we could not create peace in a society which was sexual repressed. In order to move beyond war, free love between the sexes was needed. He realized that love couldn't exist without freedom and sexual repression leads to war.
While at ZEGG I had to wait in line sometimes as long as an hour to check my email. After one such check and having received no message from Bruce, I realized that he was not interested in doing the tantra ritual with me. The reason why I was motivated to go to Burning Man was dead. But I now possessed a two hundred dollar ticket, and my friend Len had already made arrangements to fly to Arizona so that we could drive to Burning Man together. What was I to do? It seemed that I had no other choice but to go. If I could have sold the ticket I would have, but since I had promised Len and he had already bought his ticket, it would not have been right for me to have backed out. Even though I had not officially heard that Bruce was not interested in performing the ritual with me, I knew in my heart that the ritual would not be conducted.
Two weeks before Burning Man, I flew to the Great Lakes Action Camp in Chicago, a week-long action and educational camp focused on the problem of nuclear power. The purpose of the camp was to renew the anti-nuclear movement. I had been to the first action camp outside of Brattleboro, Vermont several years previously. I was so moved by the experience that I wrote a long essay on what I learned there. At this action camp, I requested to hold a workshop on Lovolution and nukes, which looked at the problem of building alternative peace communities within the territories of the nuclear establishment. The workshop ended in a water ritual at the Fox River.
Coming back to Prescott to get ready for Burning Man, Bruce finally emailed me telling me that he was not coming to the event this year. He didn't have the money to come he said because he was hoping to buy a piece of land in the wine country of Northern California. Having an intuition that our sex ritual would not happen, and wanting to find some purpose for going to the event, I went to the Burning Man web site to the volunteer section. Reading through the list of jobs, the one which caught my eye was for journalists to work on the Black Rock City Gazette, one of the newspapers published during the event. I wrote to the editor Mitchell Martin and asked him if I could be one of his journalists. He responded positively until I told him what I really wanted. I want to write a column about the possibility of holding a Burning Man event in southern Nevada on Western Shoshone land across from the Nevada Test Site. He suggested instead that I do a column on women artists at the event.
Black Rock City Gazette
From: "Doctress Neutopia" < neutopia@lovolution.net >
To: "Mitchell Martin" < 74776.656@compuserve.com >;
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 10:03 AM
Subject: Editorial-- Conceptional Artwork
Yes, I would be interested in writing a story from that angle for the Thursday's edition. Will you have computers available for writers? Or should I bring my laptop? What about electricity? Also, can I use digital images with it?
What I really would like to write is an editorial. For my artwork at Burning Man, I want to do a conceptual piece that brings together art and nuclear politics or what I called artitics. In order to do this, I need to have the mass media's help.
The conceptual artwork is the idea to move next year's Burning Man to a camp site across the highway from the Nevada Test Site several hundred miles south to where it has been in the past 16 years. (Mercury Exit , US 95. 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas ) The reason for this is that the US government is still doing sub-critical testing of nuclear weapons at the Site. I witnessed trucks of radioactive waste travel to the Test Site when I was there for the Mother's Day protest. In order for this to become a reality, the Burning Man team would have to talk with Corbin Harney and the Western Shoshone Nation. Please see their web site at: www.shundahai.org Corbin says that he needs 40,000 people at the Test Site to be an effective force against the US military. By moving Burning Man to the Nevada Test Site would make more creative people aware of the issue. The world would take notice of such a move.
My slogan for this year's Burning Man is: “Burning Man? Stop the Nevada Test Site by Moving Next Year's Burning Man to the Test Site!" If this change in place could occur, then the theme for next years Burning Man could be: “ Artists Create World Peace .” There seems to be that there is a natural connection between Burning Man and the Nevada Test Site!
I could have the editorial in to you before the event. If I can't have a way to publicize this idea to the people through the mass media, then I will have to do it on a person to person bases which will not be as effective. This conceptual artwork needs the press!
What do you think?
From: "Mitchell Martin" < 74776.656@compuserve.com >
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2001 6:12 AM
Subject: Editorial-- Conceptional Artwork
Great that you'll work on the women artists piece. We do have computers available, in a nice air-conditioned trailer that is supplied with all the juice you require (and it is generated on site, no nukes involved). We ONLY deal in digital images, think of playa dust in a dark room! Check out our website at www.bitethe.com/brg for more info about our oasis of a theme camp.
Dunno about the other though. The Black Rock Gazette is meant to be a newspaper for Black Rock City . While we do not entirely ignore the outside world, if we started covering non-BRC issues, we'd never have room in our two daily pages for our own affairs. You might argue that where Burning Man is situated is a matter of concern to everybody, but unless many people felt that it ought to be moved, it wouldn't really be a BRC issue. Sorry to chicken-and-egg you here, but if 100 people in a theme camp wanted to move Burning Man for political reasons, that might be of
interest; if only one or two or even 10 wanted to, that probably would not. If there were a lot of interest, that would be an article, not an editorial, and I think we would want to have somebody unaffiliated with the concept reporting the story.
(Besides, would we have change the name of the paper to the Glowing
Rock Gazette?).
cheers
Passing the Nevada Test Site
I was disappointed by Mitchell's response even though I expected it. I started to feel that Burning Man was really not a place for my ecofeminist neutopian artistry. Patriarchal thought ruled most everything, so why would Burning Man be any different? Was I the only one who could see the connection between Burning Man and the torch of nuclear war? Maybe I was. So, I put my idea for the column on the back burner, and went ahead with his suggestion to report on women artists in the playa. At least writing about women could give me a purpose for being at the event. The assignment wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I had determined that while at Burning Man, my persona was going to be the anti-Nuclear War and Power Queen.
Len arrived from Massachusetts the day I got back from Chicago. I spent the next few days writing a reflection on the Great Lakes Action Camp, posting it on Indymedia, and shopping for the things we needed to camp out at Burning Man. I was starting to dread going to the event. It was such a long drive. How could I find any meaning there? How could I stop thinking about the possibility of nuclear war and all that jazz? I had traveled a lot in the summer, and now I was ready to settle down and reflect on what I had learned. Burning Man seemed like it was going to be a week of watching hedonists parade around nude in the hot desert sun.
Len thought it best if we woke up early in the morning of our departure date in order to make it up there in one day. So, we got up very early. I woke up in a bad mood, finding out, when we got to Hoover Dam, that I had left my camera behind. Since I had planned to act as a journalist while there, this was very disappointing.
We arrived a Hoover Dam early enough to take the first tour of the day. I tried to talk myself out of my bad mood about having to go to Burning Man. At least I learned a lot about the construction and operation of the dam while on the tour. The states of Arizona and Nevada, the city of Los Angeles , the Southern California Edison Co., the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the California cities of Glendale , Burbank , Pasadena , Riverside , Azusa , Anaheim, Banning, Colton, and Vernon, and Boulder City, Nevada were all getting power from the dam. But what was so interesting was that it was completed several years before the government predicted it would be. It was a major engineering achievement. If we could build such an energy source, why couldn't we build a new kind of city that was sustainable?
The drive through the desert past the Nevada Test Site seemed endless. As we passed the test site, I wondered what was one suppose to do pray, or hold one's breath? I tried to explain to Len what sinister things were going on out there. I wondered why some people could understand the folly being conducted by corporations and the US government, and others just couldn't grasp it. Why wasn't there a peace encampment out there stopping the end of the world from happening? And why on Earth was I going to this Burning Man festival when what needs to happen is to bring a halt to the Nuclear Age?
Passing by the Nevada Test Site (NTS) operated by the Bechtel Corporation, I reflected on the Mother's Day protest I had attended at the NTS two months earlier. It was the most bombed-out place in the world. From 1951 to 1992 there were approximately 900 above-and below-ground nuclear tests that released radioactive plumes of iodine-131, cesium-131, strontium-90, plutonium, tritium and other isotopes traveling south and east. Several Native American reservations were effected--Ely, Duckwater, Moapa, and Goshute—as were a number of small rural communities in Nevada and Utah .
Driving through the desert scrubs, I could not forget the voice of Corbin Harney, a Western Shoshone medicine man elder who started the Shundahai Network at the Mother's Day protest when he said that the white man looks out at the desert where they explode nuclear weapons and sees nothing alive. But, the Native people see a desert full of medicinal plants, berries, and pine nuts and wild substance plants they need in order to survive. The Great Basin area, where the test site is located, at one time was a giant lake. Now, there is an underground aquifer being threaten with contamination from the radioactive waste that will be stored at the Nevada Test Site.
I recalled that Dixie, one of my trip mates, asked us if we would like to visit the Temple of the Goddess that was built near the NTS. We said yes. [To get there take US 95 north of Las Vegas past Indian Springs to Cactus Springs. (At the first possible left in Cactus, pull off. Then follow signs for the temple.] Dixie told us that when Genevieve Vaughn got the vision for the temple, she asked the Shoshone elders for permission to make a sacred place near the test site, and so they gave her a piece of land to build it on.
It was a magical experience to enter into the Temple of the Goddess before going to the NTS. It was spring, and the yellow flowers were blooming all over the desert. The mountain peaks were still covered with snow. There were musical instruments in the temple, and places to sit and talk. It was made of natural materials, straw bale that was painted white, and there were mirrors on the walls and artworks that reflected the female love of life. I recognized the sculpture that the Shundahai Network used in their literature of the mother holding the world in her lap.
It was such a powerful statement to be there before going to one of the worse places in the world. Goose bumps ran down my arms when two fighter jets flew over the temple. Could the Goddess of love and peace change patriarchal thinking and the lifestyle of urban sprawl that went along with it? Could we go back to a womb-centered culture that didn't worship the phallic symbols of skyscrapers and nuclear missiles?
After visiting the temple and arriving at the Mother's Day encampment at the NTS we were greeted at the entrance of the gathering by a man who told us where we could camp and park. He also told us that we had to follow the rules of the Shundahai elders who had organized the gathering.
One of the rules was that women could not take part in the “big circle” where the political discussions took place if they were on their “moons,” nor could they work in the kitchen, or serve themselves food. The kitchen and the political circle were off limits because they said women were so powerful at these times of the blood that they could contaminate food. (What being on one's “moon” meant was having one's period.) We were also instructed that if a woman was on her “moon,” she couldn't take part in the women's sweat. (There was a men's sweat and a women's sweat.) There was also a special place where women could go who were having their “moons.” Since women on their moons couldn't go near the kitchen, they had to rely on friends to bring them food, and to wash their dishes.
“What!” I exclaimed to the young women in the car. “Are we going to follow these sexist rules?” Dixie explained to us that we needed to abide by the “cultural sensitivity” rule and not criticized the “moon” customs of the indigenous peoples. Who were we to criticize their ways, being white women? We were on their land and we needed to follow their rules even though were not in agreement with them.
On our way to the Mother's Day protest, driving through Las Vegas, we had to stop because one of the young Prescott College women, Fria, was having terrible menstrual cramps. We had to stop since she was in so much pain. I let them know that I too was on my period, but since I was in my 40s, my period only lasted a few days with no cramping. Now, we all knew who were on their “moons.” Dixie said that she would help Fria by bringing food to her at meal time.
I didn't like the idea, and I let the other women know it. But they felt that since we were on the native people's land that we should follow their rules. During times before meals, when people “circled up” for announcements and prayers, it was the responsibility of those of us on our periods to not join the circle and sit in the back. What that meant was that women who were on their periods became politically impotent.
Some women who were sitting on the side lines said that they enjoyed the custom since they had a week off from doing dishes and preparing food. But I felt that the whole practice was sexist and unfair to the female sex. If we were so powerful during those times when we were bleeding, then shouldn't we be in a position to talk about our insights? Shouldn't we be allowed in one of the centers of activity at the gathering, the kitchen? How embarrassing it was that menstruating women were targeted so that everyone knew that they were on their “moons.”
Sitting outside the circle, I felt a sense of disempowerment rather than the “power” of menstruating. How were we ever going to stop nuclear testing and create a better world if the alternative movement was engaged in sexist practices, and there was no forum in which to oppose it? I knew that if I went into the circle and brought the issue up, it could well result in me being ostracized. So I waited, taking in the experience of feeling discriminated against because of my sacred blood.
The final day, before the direct action, the gathering broke down into a women's circle and a men's circle. A traditional Shoshone women named Catherine facilitated the women's meeting. She started by lecturing us about why Native people ask women to observe their “moon” customs. She said that it was a way to honor mothers and to make them understand how powerful they are as life givers.
Finally, I found a place where I could bring up my concerns about the practice. I said that discriminating against women who were on their periods was sexist since it centered on the importance of reproduction and motherhood rather than seeing women as individuals who were important political actresses. Having women who were on their “moons” cast aside for a week took them out of the decision-making process. If we were going too evolve beyond the ways of patriarchy and its weapons, then we were going to have to move beyond sexist customs, no matter how ancient. Catherine and the other Native American elders were upset with my statements and tried to steer the conversations in other directions. But other women took up what I had said. The discussion became enlightening to a number of women who had been under the spell of “cultural sensitivity.”
Needless to say there were not enough of us there at the Mother's Day protest to stop the testing of a new generation of nuclear weapons.
As we passed Beatty, Nevada, I told Len about going to the courthouse in Beatty to try to get three of the protesters, who were arrested, out on bail. I had been a supporter and a photographer with the group of protesters who woke up at dawn to make a “soft blockade” of the buses carrying Bechtel workers to the Test Site. Our goal was to stop business as usual for as long as they could. A group of around eight protesters stopped traffic going into the test site for about 15 minutes before the sheriff got out pepper spray and started threatening to spray it into their eyes. Those of us who were behind cameras starting crying for him to put up the spray and to use non-violent methods of removing the protesters.
At the same time this was going on, Greg Geddy began holding up a banner in front of a bus with NTS workers in it. The Wackenhut Security guards seized the banner, and Greg crawled underneath the wheels of the bus. Kathy Barnes, the other photographer, and a medic observer starting yelling at the bus driver that there was a man underneath the wheels of the bus and that if he moved the bus, he would kill him. Several of the Wackenhuts were too fat to pull Greg from underneath the bus, so they called in some thinner ones who had pepper spray as their weapon. But when they shot the spray towards him, Greg pulled his hood over his eyes and was safe.
During that time, the workers on the bus were moved to another bus so that business could go on as usual. Buses and cars going into the NST drove by flashing their security passes at the guards. We also saw several trucks of “low-level” radioactive military waste drive in. Susie, who works for the Shundahai Network, informed us that in some weeks there are as many as fifteen shipments of waste. They dump the waste in designated areas of the NTS using what Susie called the "cat litter approach" which means they dump it in barrels, and then, cover it with sand. It took them around 30 minutes or so to remove Greg from underneath the bus. When the sheriff asked him why he did such a “crazy” action, Greg said that these tests were designed to kill people, and they must be stopped.
The folks doing the soft blockade were physically assaulted by the Wackenhuts who put pressure on sensitive body points, and then carried them to holding pens. While they were deciding what to do with them, two of the women, Katrina Worthing, and Rosanna Hatch climbed on top of the porta-potty next to the fence, unraveled the barbed wire, and jumped free, running and screaming about freedom through the desert until the Wackenhuts recaptured them. It was quite the scene as the two young women cried out for freedom from the nuclear establishment, while male guards put them back in the holding pen! I was a witness to anti-women's liberation, because no woman can really be liberated as long as nuclear weapons testing and the structures that produce it continue.
When Kathy and I went to the court house to see what had happened to the three protesters, we found out that all three were charged with the misdemeanor “crime” of public nuisance. Kathrinna and Rosanna were charged with “escaped prisoner,” a gross misdemeanor, and given a $2,000 bail. (Since the direct action took place on the last day of the Mother's Day protest and gathering, most of the week-long tent community had gone. So, there were few people left to give support. This was one of the problems with the week-long protest. A resistance community is here today, gone tomorrow. Just as the peace community was learning about itself, it was time to move on. It makes it difficult to build sustainable working relationships with other protesters living such mobile existences.)
We asked to talk to the protesters. They allowed us to see them for a few minutes one by one. Greg was glad that he had been arrested. He didn't want us to bail him out. He wanted to take the officials to court. He was not a bit afraid of the consequences of being in jail, and he said that he was OK with what had happened. I was impressed by Greg's courage and devotion to peace.
When we got to see the young women, they were upset. Katrina was very afraid and said that she was planning on telling the court that she was guilty-- anything to get out of going to prison. They had no idea that they would be charged with such harsh crimes when they escaped. They were just having fun. Katrina broke down in tears when I said that what she did was right, and she had not brokenthe law of love by escaping from the pen. She was on Western Shoshone land which included the NTS in the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863. It was the government and the corporations that were guilty of crimes against humanity, not her. But she said she didn't care. She just wanted her freedom. It was apparent to me that she and Rosanne were playing with fire when they became part of the blockade, and they were not ready to play with fire. Playing with the poison fire can be very dangerous. One must have strong convictions to go up again the Nuclear Establishment.
Rosanna said that she was a vegetarian and the living conditions for women were not good. She didn't know what to do about the food situation, but the food that they had offered her was inedible. So, after our short visits, I asked the sheriff if he could provide vegetarian meals to the two women. He started screaming at me and said that jail is not a hotel, and they would be served what the jail ordered and nothing more. Prisoners don't get special treatment. But when I said that they were innocent and they had not been proven guilty, he told me to get out of the court house or he would arrest me next. How could he do that, I thought to myself. I hated that he was intimidating me… but nevertheless I stepped out the door.
Beatty, Nevada is a company—NTS—town. People there are more concerned with gambling than nukes. Money clearly ruled over health. That was obvious to everyone who went to the arraignments of the three protesters the following day, when we were told that the regular judge was in the hospital dying of cancer, and that another judge would be residing over the court.
Nothing else really significant happened on the drive to Burning Man except that I talked my way out of a ticket going through a small town. The police officer gave me a warning, but when he examined by bummer stickers on my car, I got a little nervous that he would classify me as one of those tree-hugging environmentalist and slap me with a $100 fine. But that didn't happen.