Some people say that college life is the time for adventure, but Ashleigh Miller’s adventure began long before college.
“I was born in Ohio but, when I was 3 we relocated to Guam because they were still young and uninhibited,” said Miller, an ETSU graduate student whose master of arts work is on display at B. Carroll Reece Museum. The display is the culmination of the research she did at last summer’s The Burning Man Project in Nevada.
When she was 8 years old, Miller and her family moved to the Tri-Cities where she attended University School on ETSU’s campus. “After graduating from University School, I was quite eager to go away to school,” Miller says.
After much deliberation, she decided to attend Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., where she graduated with a bachelor of arts in humanities.
Upon graduating, Miller embarked on an adventure with a friend, backpacking through Europe in summer 2001. “It was a fun adventure,” Miller said. “We got to see about eight different countries.
“(We) went to the running of the bulls in Spain, visited a zillion museums in Italy, went hiking in Switzerland, heard an opera in Austria and got lost in Amsterdam. For poor backpackers we had some phenomenal experiences.”
For an average person, the trip to Europe would have been enough of an adventure. Not so for Miller. “I knew before I left for Europe that I wanted to join the Peace Corps,” said Miller, who entered that job in January 2002. “In fact, I had known since I was about 12 when I saw that ancient ad for ‘the toughest job you’ll ever love.’ ”
Miller spent more than a year in a village in Zambia working on health related projects. “It was the toughest job I’ve ever loved,” she said.
In keeping with her adventurous nature, Miller spent last summer traveling to the West Coast with her boyfriend. “(We) ended up park-hopping our way to the coast and back,” she said. “We stayed at free camp sites along the way and we were even able to pick up a random job with a Mormon family in Utah, digging out a broken water line for a woman and her seven children.
“She let us stay in an old Conservation Corps cabin she had in her back yard for a few days while we repaired the broken line.”
While this was exciting, it was not the part of the trip that she loved best. “The Burning Man Project was definitely the highlight of my trip,” Miller said.
The Burning Man Project began in 1986 when Larry Harvey and Jerry James burned a wooden man on a beach in San Francisco, according to the official web site burningman.com. This was supposedly the first recorded form of “radical self expression.”
Since 1986, the men have gathered once a year to build and perfect the man, and eventually, others gathered and helped them. In 1990, the project was moved from San Francisco to Black Rock Desert in Nevada and it has been there since.
“What appeals to me (is) the spontaneous creation of community,” Miller said. “It’s beautiful the way that 30,000 strangers can gather in the desert for a week producing an energy that inspires creativity and meaningful shared experiences (with the) result being a testament to the inherent nature of human kind and our need for recognition.
“And Burning Man allows, encourages and almost demands that everyone be recognized.”
Miller participated in the project by being a lamplighter, which is a person who lights and distributes kerosene lanterns throughout the “community” at Burning Man, in addition to gathering her research for her exhibit.
Don’t worry, Miller’s creative wanderlust wasn’t extinguished with the Burning Man. She plans more adventures. Miller will be graduating with her master’s degree in May but, she said, she doesn’t want to be stuck in one particular job. “Career sounds so permanent,” Miller said. “I don’t think I ever want to have a career, per se.
“I don’t want to be locked into one job or one type of job for my entire life.

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