Tree of Ténéré by Studio Drift, Black Rock City.
You can't vibe-check your way into a community.
Everyone searching for one does the same dance. Bounce around, check the scene, read the room, keep one foot out the door. I did it too.
Gardeners have a word for actually joining. Grafting.
To graft a branch onto a tree, you cut both. The branch gives up its own roots. The tree opens its bark. Then you press the two wounds together and hold them, under pressure, through the awkward season where you're attached but not yet part of it. For the graft to take, the cambium layers, the thin green ring just under the bark, have to line up on both sides. Alignment matters more than strength.
That's the price of belonging. You open up a part of yourself and you put in the work.
And the community has a job too. A warm, open welcome is what gives the graft the surface area to take, to be nourished, to prosper.
It's Burning Man season, so I'm thinking about my own hops. Camp Bacchanalia took us in first. Then the Santopalato Supper Club in the French Quarter, the oldest neighborhood in Black Rock City, where elaborate dinner parties for strangers were the whole point. I'm so grateful to both, for welcoming us warmly and openly, for letting us graft, and for letting us grow until we were ready for a pot of our own. In 2014 that became Bao Chicka Wow Wow alongside Titanic's End.
Stephanie Hua wrote about the Quarter's culinary feats for KQED back in 2013, about the "heart and soul that go into these gifts of food and drink." Making frozen key lime pie in the desert while spit roasting a whole hog, manually turning the spit. That's what a graft looks like from the inside.
We even named a value after the lesson: Warm Bao Welcome. Every visitor met with open arms and a warm bao.
The grafted branch keeps bearing its own fruit, on shared roots. More leaves catching more light. Roots growing deeper to feed everything.
The fruit serves everybody, sweet.