The coolest project I saw at Burning Man was the Bungee Truck, and not just because of Katy's company. A friend of hers, who had been to our house shortly after we bought it, constructed this cool but dangerous machine, which we tried out on Sunday afternoon. Imagine a pickup truck with 10 feet of vertical metal scaffolding bolted onto the bed. Hanging from one side is a counterweight, from the other (at the top) is an arm extending to the side with bungee cords hanging from it connected to a harness. You put a person in the harness, hanging several feet above the playa, and begin driving the truck slowly. The person begins bouncing up and down until at the bottom of their swing, their feet hit the playa. Now they are taking huge leaps across the desert, stepping 8 feet in the air with each stride. You can do backflips. Backflips are fun.

One of the best things to do with this was to find people lying on the playa, like a guy passed out with a beer, and a couple lying on a mattress under a sheet, or people just sitting and resting. You'd drive the truck right by them, and the person in the harness would leap over them and yell. So someone is lying down, and they open their eyes to see someone flying over them! We got lots of great reactions. The most fun, though, was jumping on top of portapotties. If the truck moved slowly and consistently, and the jumper had good timing, you could jump on top of a portapottie. If there was a row of them, you could then run across the top, and jump off the other side, scaring the hell out of whever was inside. As long as you moved only in the plane of forward/back and up/down, it was pretty safe, so the pickup truck could do things like speeding up and slowing down to whip you forward and back. As long as all turns were pretty slow, you never picked up much left/right velocity, which was the dangerous direction because the truck and scaffolding were on your right. Noone got hurt, and we all had a great time.

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