(and this blogger’s final wrap-up)

Coyote (Photo by Cloe)

Coyote (Tony Perez) is our Clean-Up Manager. He’s also in charge of surveying (and superintending) Black Rock City, serving on the DPW Council, and telling bad jokes the whole time.

Jimmy

He drives around in a big yellow truck with delineator cones and empty beer cans in the bed, usually accompanied by a cute girl or two in the cab. He conducts the Golden Spike ceremony and the Green T-Stake ceremony, and the 4:20 Spire ceremony – then he goes back into town and tends bar at the Black Rock. Oh, and occasionally he’ll cook up a gourmet meal or two, while espousing common-sense philosophy and stories about Burning Man in years past.

This is exactly the sort of person you want in charge of things out here. It’s no joke when he tells you that the event hinges on him doing his job right. If he doesn’t run Clean-Up smoothly – if we fail that inspection – then the event doesn’t happen.

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The Green T-Stake ceremony marks the end of DPW’s work

As they say in the biz, it’s a wrap. Today, the cleanup crew swung the last rake, picked up the last traffic cone, chased the last piece of runaway moop. Black Rock City is gone, leaving no trace…

Lucky

It was a good day all around; in fact, it felt a lot like the last day of school. Line Sweeps meandered through the outer edges of the city, then took a walk down Gate Road. There was so little moop that we ended up taking a few unscheduled breaks, just sitting around on the playa and chatting.

Breaktime

Breaktime, more

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Yes, it was as scary as it sounds.

Mayfield was really excited about having a talent show. He kept announcing it at the morning meetings, almost ad nauseam. It sounded like a pretty dorky idea at first, but Mayfield has a knack for convincing people – and besides, he kept reminding us that we could do it DPW-style.

He was right, too. He had wrangled up a big group of volunteers for the weekend; the Black Rock Social Club was packed to the gills for the best talent show this little blogger has ever seen.

Click any small photo to enlarge it. And please excuse the dust on my camera lens!

The show was hosted by Tremain Calm and Sleep Dep. Pandragon and Tom each performed spoken word (which was excellent, despite Mayfield’s repeated warnings that anyone reciting poetry would be fed to Lazlo). Next up was a very disturbing clown act by Fitz in Your Mouth.

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