I’m riding solo this year to Burning Man – just me and my bag of cameras. On the road already - car packed to the gunnels with survival basics, I still have unfinished business to attend to. I’m soon somewhere south of Oakland heading completely contra life’s natural flow, talking on the cell phone.

Dude! ….all the way back to highway 808, next stop Sacramento.

San Francisco to the Black Rock desert, Nevada, through the flat productive farmland of California’s Central Valley, over the tedious conifer-lined high pass over the Sierras. It’s turn left after the high desert strike it lucky Reno – a journey that takes ‘more together types’ just on five hours. It will take me nine.

But where is the woe? - it’s that time of the year again. The highway has its usual spattering of playa migrant cars. Yet to be branded with corrosive alkali playa dust… they are instantly recognizable. It is of no consequence how colossal the vehicle, it overflows - PVC tubing, rolls of carpeting and home made paraphernalia. Decorations bob and flutter in the slipstream while art cars crouch on trailers and bicycles cluster, clinging tenuously to the bodywork like parasites, fearful to be left behind.

Knowing glances are exchanged between peripatetic ‘burners’ as we cruise by each other in a kind of a slow motion cosmic freeway trance. The air is like an oven down here in the valley but it’s still cool. Hey, everything is pretty cool! We no longer journey outback 'Aussie style' wave madly at every partisan 'soon-to-be-cactus-passing-car', bracing ourselves for the inevitable dehydration and delirium, the last drop liquid sucked in outback clean-out-of-tukka desperation from the radiator (and there is still no sign of the flying doctor). It is 2004 - GPS will guide them in their
‘do-they-really-know-what-the-heck-they-are-doing-bringing-such-smart-vehicles-to-the-playa-cars, on their anointed way.

But no, it is not we alone who are emerging from the slime. The red neck nation in their big Central-Valley-gleaming-farm-boy-trucks are unperturbed. They look on knowingly…god knows, even admiringly, as the freak migration traverses their

grow-everything-bigger-and-juicer-in-endless-rows-horizon-to-horizon territory.
We all cruise the same highway though the same wall of heat, past the drifting turkey vultures. This is the ‘West’ – it’s ok man! - We all reach for freedom in our personal lives.

And we all turn the key and hit the pedal to drive to our personal Valhalla.

Dixon! - the Dixon Fruit store - it’s a habit – “go get stuff from where it is grown” - ugly produce, sluggish service, but it tastes better for all of that. Park, pluck up courage - cross the melting hot tar to get into the door. “Hey” - a rough neck drawl spurts from the half open window of the next vehicle - engine running, air conditioner full blast. We exchange phrases,

“Heading out into the desert?" he says.

“Me? sure”

“Where you from”.

“Oh, Africa, London, Scotland, Germany… all over!”

“London eh!” he says the broad corvid American voice begins to break and crumble – a trace of 60s Cockney back-slap-mealy-condescension breaks through the accent-rasp and my 'not really hearing right, in the heat-stroke choke'.

“I own property in Cable street”.

“Oh yeah - Jeez man! – Wapping!?", I says. 

”Wow.. heck eh!...Wapping - London!”.  What else would I say?

“My old studio”- “Metropolitan Wharf”, “Prospect of Whitby pub”…”you know – the good old the old days in Blughtly, before ‘digital’ and ‘the developers’”. That was me man!

Fact is I hardly believe any more any word that dribbles from an epic past, past my lips into the common parking lot air. But it is magic - and according to ancient traveler’s logic I just did the right thing. We are now confirmed street buddy pals.

The unmasked Anglo lays his insistment on me:   "you  must hear this”.  he tells me; “I talk American when I go back there , on purpose”

“I lay it on thick” - “when I get on a train I just point out of the window and ask them in the broadest accent” - “how much would that one cost?”.

For an Englishman, on his favorite subject (real estate) to the gullible American tourist, the answer just has to be ‘millions and millions of pounds’.

He says , “I just look at them straight and say - hey! not bad, not bad”.

...And then he chuckles and almost thanks me for listening - but we don’t go on. We don’t need to stand in the sun and repeat that the sun never sets on English one-upmanship – even here in sweltering back-end-of-nowhere-Dixon, CA.

Where I am heading, it is another world – far, far from Dixon-Produce and Wapping Wall.

“Hey man I gotta go get fruit”.

It is true - a fact I never need doubt - I just 'gotta get fruit and get out of here fast'.

“Will call you from Truckee” – I told a pal in London who was keen to follow my progress - till the cell phone silence of the desert finally swallows me up into Nevadan-communication-free-purdah for the week. Were it not that -problem account-, he would have been riding shotgun with me right now. But he is not, It is getting late back there in the ‘Smoke’ and it has to be now instead.

We talk clean across a continent and an ocean while, I cruise mindlessly through Sacramento oblivious to the signs. I blather endlessly on about the magpies and the heat. “Hey you must know that they shun the Pacific coastal plain”. Soon I realize that I have screwed up bigtime again.

It is ‘historic gold rush country’ and suddenly “you gotta head all the way back to Sacramento”, or “why not take the winding mountain road…you lost an hour whichever way!” Whatever - but its still “you have a great time at Burning Man you hear!”.

I may be running late but at least I am on my way. None of these folk will ever make it to Burning Man - nor will the checkout-have-a-nice-day-supermarket-staff in all the small towns, whose stocks of drinking water are annually vacated by thirty plus thousand locusting revelers heading out to the Black Rock Desert for the greatest art event in the world. It is of no consequence, but at least they all know how important it is. Their eyes show what they feel it in their bones – ‘no one packs a car that full if it ain’t real important’.

…Heading down the Sierra’s rain shadow to Reno now.

Reno, Nevada - last chance for city glitz, slots and slick supermarkets. Viewed skeptically from the freeway, it slips uninvitingly by, but it’s last stop for me for my I-have-to-assert-my-African-background-with-biltong thing.

Quick stop suburban Safeway, a slab of beef in a Styrofoam tray. “Ja, - you just get it and then you make it”. Naa man, no over-flavored American factory jerky sticks for me, Life just belongs to those who take life by the horns, you know!. Me - I am fit and ready - I got cameras. Jussus man, now I even got my horns.

....But not so much as a pot or a camping stove. There is no need - it’s a breeze to make biltong in the dry desert breeze!

Self-reliance - it’s a catchphrase for Burning Man… But now I must make Navaho lands fast - sun getting very low and very big. Small roads - to stop there - slice, string thin strips of flesh. String-em-all-up! - past the passenger window - where the parched mummifying desert air blows.

There! a clear roadside patch - it’s now or never - wheels crunch on roadside gravel, then stunned silence and that desert sagebrush smell. Long-distance-drive-heat-head-spinning still. It is a perfect cowboy sunset set - “yoo-hoo, cameras and action!” ... “where the bloody hell is my crew?”

Hey, but this is really no time to be flippant... Devilish sharp new Safeway knife – and feeble-car-driven-shaking-hands slip and struggle to slice beef on hot hood in hasty pace. It is a race with no rules now - either a slip-mis-cut to the juggler (so, so sad at the roadside) or the setting sun brings me darkness first.

The day breathes a fast last gust of wind carrying with it a pair of mourning doves, racing overhead into the hills - like canon shells out of a howitzer. This is barren Navaho country and its spirits are stirring. Trying to tell me something, I try to listen but my city-boy-busy-thoughts mask the approach of a phantom. It appears soundlessly, as if from nowhere. Polished gleaming - the ripe sunset sky reflected in chrome and dark door paint, bearing the words ‘Highway Patrol’.

The frenzied spirits’ calls echo hollow in my rapidly stunning head. I search my city-boy words for those I may use to explain. Knife-flesh-hacking-red-handed-in-Indian-lands - - suddenly more beautiful than ever - the sunset in the driver’s window, the feathered fronds of fading orange tinted clouds are replaced by the face of hard dispensing justice from a thousand tawdry movies.

“You ok?” he says “You broken down?”

I am surprised. This voice is not the ‘soundtrack’ version. It is softer and more detached.

“Me? - Sure, patrol officer!”, “er, no!, I just stopped to…you know – then Jerky!”.

My words are foreign - from a foreign dimension - he does not need to hear any of this stuff. The last glow sunset reflects - in his squinting eyes, His mind has traveled up high into the hills where the doves went.

Out here, perhaps we can talk about cars guns and breakdowns but not flesh and spirits. The night approaches, it’s that Burning Man time or year again, while the weather teeters from summer as the world tips again on its axis. And anyway, words won’t work for wordless things.

“Have a good Burn” he says gently.

He reaches and lights his headlamps silently. The highway phantom disappears into the rapidly descending cool as the blanket of night covers us.

Some desert critter scuttles across the road ahead - too far to make out. I sweep through the night air, part of an endless spacious caravan of car lights. A half mile apart – we reach across barren space - horizon to starry horizon. This lonely road - one lane empty, the other a slow moving petroleum legion. The vast open landscape - neither dwelling nor street lamp breaks horizon in any direction although ahead, the destination of every tail light is never in doubt.

And then the moon... From this moving rattling platform, it bursts ‘big-moonrise-hot’ from a scarp on the mountains to the east. The yellow-glow benevolent globe peeks past the sway-in-the-wind desiccating beef cargo - and the landscape which was lost when the day died, it is now born again. The shadow of the mountain stretches for the miles that are this space, and here across the plain everything is simple – the moon is a ‘place’ - and here, all of this - this high barren desert, it is a place too.

It is earth, our planet – what else might anyone with a scrap of sense in their head wish to say.

The odd sleepy collection of Indian dwellings, the convoy creeps though – ‘25 mph mandatory’ - and then, deep, salty and mysterious, it’s Pyramid lake.

“Shoot the sunset at Pyramid” – yeah! - another big deal desert plan that is now plain desert dust.

"Boyo!, If you didn’t mess up back there on the highway you would have still had daylight to spare for your happy snaps".

…‘Big-deal-city-driven-boy drives desert strip eh! - - Shoots takeaway film-strip from the hip …er, trip’.

To go - to take-home – to love and to hold – flat foldable tokens of life …or lifelessness! Is this what photography is all about? - tokens? - living but lifeless tokens? (or is that lifeless but living tokens?).

Now I have time - for token thinking on token thoughts - in the moonlight. And sure, I feel it - a firm answer is just around the next bend.

…Whenever was it not?

I smile at the moon which smiles back at me and then suddenly there is far too much life in my life. Tailgating bright blinding lights blight my jaunted rear view mirror. They intervene my moment.

Fuel-fumes and engine screaming, tearing up my cool it passes and burns up road. Car after car – fast and passed, fast and passed.

No thoughts! - just drive your motor-drive model of life and go, go, go!

….Thinks:

No person needs so much to ‘get ahead’ - but people just do… and they do.

The orderly convoy maintains its tidy procession to the plateau’s edge and when the last scurrying brake light flash is seen - and the faster-than-a-speeding-slug-country-boy-truck escapes my event horizon, I look right:

In a vast laid out valley void I see a glimmer, a galaxy of twinkling lights in the huge dark distance of another playa night. There a luminous desert-flower city blooms and dies within a week. And instantly as my mind’s eye is transported, I see a distant soup of a myriad glowing pendants which flit hither and thither to the thump of a thousand electric sounds.

In the gust blowing dusts of my mind I see the answer to a question I had not time yet to ask:

Why is it that you are always 'driving to work'? Don’t you know not to 'dis' what you see and feel?

Wise up!

'life' is not a game, it is a party.

Value it.

Celebrate it.