Tuesday, August 30th, 2005. Somewhere in the far East Bay, CA.
I had only decided to go a week before. I had been debating it back and forth until late one night I quite clearly heard a voice in my head say, "You'll regret it if you don't go." So I told myself, "If I can still get a cheap enough plane ticket, I'll go." I could, and I did.
I packed a single duffle bag full of clothes and camping gear and flew on Monday, August 29th, from Connecticut to San Francisco. I would be camping with False Profit, a camp with extensive communal infrastructure, so I didn't need to worry about food and water.
Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Amanda and a guy named Jordan picked me up from my friend Angela's house in Berkeley. They became the second and third people I would know at Burning Man, the other being my friend Ken, my connection to all of this and already on the playa.
We stopped at Ken's mom's house on the way out of town to pick something up for him. On the TV in her living room were confusing images out of New Orleans. They didn't make sense to me. They looked third-world, foreign. "BREAKING NEWS," said the caption on CNN. The city appeared to be underwater.
Tuesday, August 30th 2005, was the day the levees breached after Hurricane Katrina. Those were the images I carried with me that hot August afternoon as we got back in the car and began the drive to Nevada, to my first Burning Man.