Riding High

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The Man base and neon crews were scrambling all over the Man again on Wednesday, and they were working on installing power to the motors that will rotate the Man on top of his flying saucer. It’s the second time the Man will rotate; in 2005, he swung around on his base via human power.

The Man his own self was put on top of the structure Tuesday in an early morning lift. In a departure from previous years, there wasn’t the pomp and ceremony accompanying the operation. That may be because there just isn’t much time for it. This is an ambitious project, and the site is still very much a construction zone.

Tuesday evening, Stinky Pirate was kind enough to take us and another looky-loo up in the 135-foot boom lift, the highest on the playa, to get a look at the Man eye-to-eye. Actually, we were waaayyyyy over the Man when the boom finished its ascent. We couldn’t quite stop our legs from shaking, though, which was a bit unsettling. It wasn’t that we were in fear for our lives, because we trusted the machine. It may just have been that our body was telling us, hey, we don’t belong this high in the air. Get us down!

Pirate is one of those interesting, multitalented characters that one meets on a regular basis on the playa. He has a tall ships background, so being on a boom lift on a flat desert floor is nothing for him. “I used to climb on ships, and the difference was, you were a hundred feet up in the air, but you had got there by pulling yourself up on ropes, and then you were rolling back and forth, so no, this doesn’t feel like much.”

Maybe not, but to us it felt like an awfully fine place to be, and we are grateful to Pirate for making it happen.

Here are some photos of the Man being put atop his base, and from our ride with Pirate to the top of the playa:

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Crews worked to attach the Man to the base while a crane held him in place

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The Man already had his head attached by the time of the lift

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Metal Shop Heather did much of the welding to attach the Man to his rotating base

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The night before the big lift, a Man base crew worked long into the night to get the platform ready
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Sparks from a welding torch lit the crew up against the night sky

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By Tuesday evening, Smoke Daddy was back to work on the neon again

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As we went up in the boom lift, we could see workers who were hidden from below
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The view from the boom lift of the Center Camp Cafe
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Stinky Pirate, aka Davis Galligan, gave us a ride
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The Man from above
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Looking out toward the 3 o’clock plaza

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When we were finished our joyride, the neon team was ready to get going
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And guys from the Man base crew can’t seem to get enough of the Man

 

About the author: John Curley

John Curley (that's me) has been Burning since the relatively late date of 2004, and in 2008 I spent the better part of a month on the playa, documenting the building and burning of Black Rock City in words and pictures. I loved it, and I've been doing it ever since. I was a newspaper person in a previous life, and I spent many years at the San Francisco Chronicle. At the time I left, in 2007, I was the deputy managing editor in charge of Page One and the news sections of the paper. Since then, I've turned a passion for photography into a second career. I shoot for editorial, commercial and private clients. I've also taught a little bit, including two years at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and a year at San Francisco State University. I live on the San Mateo coast, just south of San Francisco in California.

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