Our time in Europe fades away in the rear-view mirror. Well, not really... in some regards. We still consciously and unconsciously use it as a point of reference, and the idea of returning there one day lives on. But day-to-day life is what commands one's attention, and wow... it commands a lot of attention these days. In fact, in those last few weeks in Europe, I found myself wondering: "Will I continue blogging when I return? I'm afraid my life will be so boring there, by comparison, that I won't feel the urge." In a certain sense, I couldn't have been more wrong. The main reason I find myself not blogging is that there is always so much to do here; I am often too tired in my free time to do anything but drink a beer or sit in the hot tub.
In my recap of this last month (a month which was dominated by Burning Man), I am going to start at the end. Because it was a crazy end to the month, and because it is pretty fresh in my memory.
Money has been tight (more on that later) and so I decided at the last minute to truck my project back from Burning Man myself rather than pay a professional trucker to do it for me. When I say "myself," what I mean is that I drove my truck (AKA Atlas) hauling a trailer, and my friend Mike Ferguson (AKA Fergie) helped me out by also driving his truck hauling a second trailer. Our good friend Peter Kolshorn came along, because it's always better to have more drivers.
I didn't really want to do it this way. It's a lot of work, it's barely legal, and it's stressful. But I didn't really have a choice.
On the Monday that Burning Man is over, my team and I are usually overcome with a desire to get the hell out of there. This year was no different, so after a week-long party of Herculean proportions, we mounted a similarly Herculean effort to break down camp and break down the sculpture and Leave No Trace and get loaded and get out of there. The drive from Black Rock City (the temporary city which is Burning Man) to Fernley, Nevada, which should normally take about 1.5 hours, took 4 hours. The road was embarrassingly strewn with trash. Other than that it was pretty uneventful.
The next morning the fun began. Peter and I were shouting at each other (the normal mode of having a conversation in my loud truck) when suddenly a HUGE noise totally drowned us out. I quickly determined that the noise was proportional to the turbo pressure, so when we stopped I was totally focused on the turbo, thinking it had died, when Peter pointed out that the exhaust had completely come apart.
About 10 minutes after getting onto the freeway I heard another similar sound, but this time my turbo pressure dropped to zero, along with the truck's power, and I knew that I had lost a hose clamp in the turbo system. I don't much like stopping on the shoulder of a freeway because it's dangerous, but there wasn't much choice. Fortunately I carry a bunch of spare hose clamps and we were on our way again soon.
When Christina and Kodiak and I moved into our apartment in Zehlendorf (Berlin), we were sort of forced into buying a bunch of furniture from the previous tenant. When it was time to leave we decided that, since we were sending the sculpture home in a shipping container anyway, we might as well bring some of the furniture. In particular, we decided to bring a pretty nice couch... well it's not spectacular, but it's nicer than the tired old couch we've had in Taos for all these years. So, that couch went to Burning Man and at this point in the story the couch is wrapped in bubble wrap, strapped on top of my big trailer on the way home to New Mexico. After fixing the turbo we were rolling down the highway again when I noticed that the tail of the strap holding one of the couch pieces had come unwrapped and was flapping in the wind. I didn't want to make another dangerous shoulder stop so I kept an eye on it and carried on. In the process of keeping an eye on it, I happened to be looking in the rear-view mirror at just the moment when the tail caught under the tire of the trailer, pulled violently and broke the strap, thereby allowing the couch to start shifting slowly towards actually falling off the trailer. So... another stop on the shoulder to address that.
In the morning of day three of our journey we were descending a long, steep hill in Utah when suddenly the truck started beeping loudly. Hearing that loud sound in the cab which is telling you that you are running out of compressed air, which is necessary for proper braking, is kind of scary. Fortunately I knew this was a possibility, and I had come prepared. We pulled over (in a rather "emergency" style), and proceeded to fire up a generator that we were carrying on the back of the truck, in order to power a small compressor that we were carrying on the back of the truck, which we had to plumb into the air system of the truck in order to supply enough air to the braking system of the truck so that we could safely continue our descent. All this, because the truck's onboard compressor (which I installed brand new just before we left for Barcelona) is failing. Even though it sat for 2 years unused, it's still out of warranty. Pain in the ass.
Later that day, after leaving Moab, Utah, Fergie somehow managed to let his truck run out of gas. We stopped and siphoned 5 gallons of diesel out of Atlas,
which got him going just enough for his sleeping bag to fly out of the back of his truck! I radioed Fergie and told him I would go back for the sleeping bag and that he should carry on to the next town and fill up with diesel. I then proceeded to make (2) 3-point U-turns in my 60-foot long rig (an adventure in itself) just to get the sleeping bag. And then... we found Fergie only another mile up the road, again pulled over on the shoulder. The 5 gallons hadn't been enough, his truck was running lean (and hot!) and he needed more fuel. So as the sun was setting, we made several ill-fated attempts to siphon more fuel, Fergie and I both getting mouthfuls of diesel, before we gave up. Just then, a fellow Burner stopped to help, and generously gave us a proper siphon. Only after he drove off did we figure out the siphon was broken! So finally we gave up on all that and I drove ahead to the next town, filled fuel cans, and brought them back. The extra fuel did the trick and we were moving again. We had hoped to make it home that night, but the delays in getting Fergie fueled up again meant we only made it as far as Durango, Colorado, before bedding down for the night.
At several points along the journey we traded trailers, for various reasons.
Here we are trading trailers along a roadside in Colorado...
The next morning we hit the road again, and were confronted almost immediately with a "pop-up" weigh station. I dread weigh stations, as they are always a chance for the police to give you a hard time, but we got lucky. Fergie flew past, while Peter and I got in line to be inspected. Fortunately we got the older, friendly cop. They always want to know if you are a "commercial" driver, and so he asked me questions about what we were doing, if we were getting paid, etc. I kept referring to the "festival" in Nevada where we had installed the sculpture. Finally he asked "Is this kind of like a Burning Man thing?" and I replied "Yes this is exactly like a Burning Man thing. I'm a veteran paid artist at Burning Man." He said "Well that's cool. Congratulations." He made us put a few more straps onto our load and we carried on.
We made it home later that day, approximately 68 hours after departing Burning Man. Luckily my truck waited until after we returned to have some sort of weak-battery problem! It's currently not starting.
In the end, the whole thing had a comical flavor, due to the fact that it was a series of small mishaps, rather than big ones. It's appropriate to count our blessings, such as the fact that we had no serious mechanical failures, no flat tires, no difficult interactions with law enforcement, we did not have to perform any repairs in the rain or snow, and no one got hurt.
And I want to thank Fergie and Peter for being such level-headed and competent partners in this ridiculous adventure. It makes a big difference when doing difficult and crazy tasks such as this to be with good people.
And, crazily enough... that damn couch which we lugged from Zehlendorf to Oberschöneweide, shipped to Burning Man and then trucked 1000 miles across the American West doesn't fit in our house! After all that. Tomorrow we are reinstalling the tired old couch we've had for years and I guess we will try to sell our fancy imported European couch (if we can ever find the legs for it!)
So... why did I have to truck the sculpture back from Burning Man myself, instead of leisurely driving in a passenger car while some professional trucker did the hard work for me? Because of money. In short, the shipping of the sculpture from Berlin to Black Rock City was the worst shipping experience I've ever had, with the costs ballooning to more than 3 times the original estimate. If I had had to pay a trucker to bring the sculpture home, our family wouldn't be eating.
I budgeted about $12,000 to get the sculpture shipped from Berlin to BRC, and back to Taos (breaking down to approximately $8000 from Berlin to BRC, and $4000 from BRC to Taos). This budget was not just a guess, but rather was based on good precedents.
I've worked in the past with a shipping company out of the UK (let's call them Company A) with whom I've had good experiences, and so I went to them first. I was told that they would not go directly to Black Rock City because of negative experiences they'd had in the past with Burning Man (the first red flag!), but that they could get the sculpture to Reno, NV, for about $12,500. Youch! That was more than my total shipping budget, and didn't even get the sculpture all the way to the festival, so I got another recommendation for a shipping company in Germany (let's call them Company B) who bid the job at $6500. Sounds good. About a week before the shipment was due to be picked up, I called to sign the contract and was told that there would be an additional $3500 in contingency fees (port fees, taxes, etc.) AND an additional $10,000 to cover Trump's new tariffs on steel and aluminum, bringing the total to about $21,000... and it had to be paid immediately! A few hours later I was able to demonstrate to them that only raw materials are subject to such tariffs, NOT finished products like sculpture, and so they backed off of the $10,000 Trump tax. However, I realized that they were either 1) incompetent with regard to the tariff issue, or 2) trying to pull a fast one on me and make a quick $10,000, and either way I did not want to work with them. So with only a week to go before the ship date, Christina called Company A again and they put things into fast motion, getting the sculpture picked up on time. So at this point, I am into the shipping for about $12,500.
A few weeks after the pickup, I was informed that the ship which was supposed to take the sculpture from Hamburg, Germany to Oakland, CA had been cancelled, and that in order to make the delivery date the sculpture was cross-loaded (meaning unloaded from the first shipping container and loaded into a different container) while still in Berlin, so that it could be put onto a different ship going to NYC. The reason for the cross-load was that the containers themselves are owned by the shipping lines, and the shipping line that goes to Oakland is not the same one that goes to New York. All the extra labor and port fees associated with the cross load meant that the cost of getting it to NYC was about the same as getting it to Oakland. Once it landed in New York, I was informed that Company A could arrange cross-country trucking to Reno, but that 1) the container would need to stay in New York, meaning another cross-load (another $1000), and that 2) if they arranged the trucking it would be very expensive. I was advised to arrange my own trucking! Lots of stress and emailing and phone calling later, I did in fact arrange a trucker for another $6800. So my shipping costs are now at about $20,300.
In order to find this trucker I was actually dealing with a trucking broker who has access to a wide pool of truckers, AND who specializes in moving big art... and he could not find a single trucker willing to go to Black Rock City (Burning Man is doing something wrong when no professional truckers will go there). The best he could do was Reno. So I contacted the people at Burning Man who connected me with a Reno guy who specializes in moving things from Reno to BRC... at a steep premium. Another $1500 for those 115 miles. Now I'm at $21,800. I was told by this latest trucker that he would have no labor present in Reno to do the (third!!!) cross-load, so I would have to be there. OK, no problem, I would show up on the agreed-upon date and perform the cross-load myself, with my crew. Then... next crisis: The cross-country truck shows up 4 days earlier than the agreed-upon date, and I am still in Taos! Lots of frantic phone calls and emails and another $800, and somehow some local labor is found to do the cross-load. Now my total is $22,600.
The shipping quotes I received to get the load back to New Mexico from Burning Man ranged from $4500 to $7500. Can you see why I had to do the damn load myself?
It was really the worst shipping experience I've ever had. Normally the load is never cross-loaded; in other words I personally close the doors of the shipping container... and 6 weeks later, at the destination, I personally open them again. This time the load was cross-loaded 3 (!!) times, by persons unknown, at great cost to me. I don't really know how this could have been managed better, other than to ask for a LOT more money for shipping in the future. Or compel the festival to handle the shipping. It was a nightmare.
In the short- to medium- term, this is a problem for our family, as it really impacts us financially. But in the long-term, it will all be gradually forgotten and what will remain is the fact that we built a kick-ass sculpture that I am very proud of, and I know Christina is too. Against tall odds, we shipped it across the world and debuted it in a ridiculously inhospitable environment (yes, Burning Man can be a very challenging environment), receiving an outstandingly positive reaction. And we got the sculpture and ourselves home safely.
I will follow this blog post pretty quickly with another, in which I will talk more about Burning Man itself. We had a lot of fun adventures, so I promise that that post will be lighter reading, and it will feature a lot more photography. There were lots of great pictures taken by our great little camp, most notably by my brother, the very talented professional photographer Themistocles Lambridis (AKA Cles).
So I will leave you with this great picture taken by Cles on the first night of the week, when we were fortunate enough to have a spectacular full moon....
Until next time... (and again, I promise an easier read!)
-C
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