It’s happening. Tomorrow, I’m going to SOAK.

The last preparations are being made. Last deliveries are arriving at my door as I type, and (as of this writing on Tuesday,) I am raring to perform a trial run on how I am going to fit a tent, canopy, camp supplies, cooler, water tank, contact staves, typewriter, personal bag and a papasan in my car, along with another person and all of their camp supplies.

Once packed for real on Thursday, however, we will be on our way to SOAK. A four-day burn festival that takes place in central Oregon, near Tygh Valley. It’s essentially a regional variety of the Burning Man experience, adhering to the Ten Principles of Burning Man and ending with—what else—an effigy aflame.

The tickets usually sell out within five seconds of going live. But I managed to sneak in grab one with a rare act of patience. Only recently, however, has the sensation begun to feel real. And only recently has it begun to feel eerily similar.

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This is the first festival I’ve gone to since Fire Drums in 2023, but the experience feels more like the first time I went to Oregon Country Fair in 2015.

I sort of knew what to expect in 2023 for Fire Drums. I had been to a flow arts festival before. Workshops are offered in the day and a fire circle is hosted at night. The jist of that was familiar to me. The scale was not—Fire Drums’ fire circle is better described as the Burner Dome—but midway through the first night, I was settled in.

Oregon Country Fair, however, was my first music, arts and lifestyle festival. Before then I had never “glamped,” I had never witnessed intentional community and I certainly had never roamed around the woods in an altered state. Some might say I still haven’t.

That naivete abounded in ways I couldn’t quite plan for. I remember walking to the fairgrounds entrance thinking I had bought a ticket for the event, only to realize I had bought a ticket for the campground. To me, they were one in the same, and I was too lazy to know the difference until someone explained it to me. Radical self-reliance was a skill I had yet to discover.

But the festival taught me the first lessons. Luckily, it also wasn’t just me who made this error. It was a whole gang of us knuckleheads. All of us brothers from the same fraternity, all of us without a clue or a thought to make sure we had tickets for both the campground and the event.

And it fell to me to purchase tickets off the phone while in an altered state; the rest of my fellow knuckleheads were simply unwilling to dare speak with another human while watching both tent and tree canopies vibrate and hum. In the moment, I asked “why is it always me?”

In hindsight, I understand it’s because I was the only one persistent enough to try.

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Since then, each year has been a case of growing of into who I am now. I didn’t even know fire contact staves were a thing in 2015. Now I’m going on nine years of fire performance.

I would have faceplanted even harder had I tried to go to any festival outside of Oregon Country Fair in 2015. Hell, I don’t think I was emotionally capably of handling much more than a single festival per summer as recently as last year.

A hot mess of depression, unemployment and nonsense, my impostor syndrome had left me feeling like a constant burden for those whom I really, really wanted to share core memories. My recovery is only recent, and it is not guaranteed.

This what I learned in 2024. I was determined to make the event, even though I was without a job, seemingly without purpose, and really just trying to hide myself from me. When I attempted to purchase tickets during the main sale, I failed.

And I took that as a sign: not this year. Despite multiple friends and acquaintances offering to help me comp a ticket, I decided that I would not put myself in their debt. That I had not done the work sufficient enough as a person to merit going to SOAK. That my camp group, Cats in Space, would be better off without an albatross around their necks.

I let my doubt overcome my perseverance, and I completely missed the point; this is not Oregon Country Fair. It is not—and I say this with love—a temporary mall for hippies in the woods. Any form of Burning Man, regionally or otherwise, is ideally an act of intentional community, an exercise of anarchist ideals. A showcase that living a different way is possible when we decouple ourselves from a system of bean counters and speculators.

Still temporary, yes, but, on the whole, different. Just how different is something I hope to find out.

And, yes, I will share it all when I get back.

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