: "Burning Man"

Thursday, August 31
I'm sitting here on the great playa of the Black Rock Desert with my 26-year-old son, Tarn, and surrounded by roughly 25,451 of our closest friends, all of us gathered together for the annual celebration of the Burning Man. Our camp is filled with nylon chairs, folding tables, two double-burner gas stoves, coolers of fresh meat and vegetables, and boxes with an assortment of fine wines and spirits. Tarn is humming to himself, this assemblage exactly the sort of Hemingway-on-safari scene he had envisioned, and one diametrically opposed to our usual setup, which consists of a single tent, two sleeping bags, and a tiny mountaineering stove.

While he's been enjoying the new-found luxuries of such elaborate car-camping, I've been thinking about both where we are — the four-hundred square miles of the second largest playa in the world that is the largest unimpeded flat place on our continent — and its antithesis, the great anti-playa of the Salton Sea in Southern California, which I had visited this summer with his younger brother, Mat. I'm also keeping a wary eye on the green surplus parachute that we've stretched in between our rented white Chevy van and Jonah Loop's black SUV. The wind is gusting up to thirty miles per hour, and the frayed nylon shelter, which we'd purchased already ripped at an Army surplus store in Reno for $69, flaps incessantly overhead. Jonah is one of Tarn's oldest friends, and despite the parachute blustering as if it might blow out, sits back calmly in one of the blue camp chairs, smoking a cigarette while Walter Grey fusses with brunch ingredients over our twin Coleman stoves.

Jonah is the founder of a small digital special effects firm in northern California that caters to Hollywood producers making large-budget action films, which fits neatly into his obsession with the newest and fastest computers, massively quick motorcycles, precision engineered knives that open with little more than a flick of the wrist, and fencing. It's a lifestyle based on power and speed harnessed to aesthetics, and one that could come directly out of a contemporary Japanese anime feature.

Walter, who tops out around six-foot-seven and has twin thunderbolts tattooed down his back, fishes out a deadly looking blade from his jeans pocket to attack a package of sausage. A former member of the armed forces, as well as a short order cook, Walter is affable if somewhat impenetrable, and known to carry a staggeringly large sidearm about his person, which he has put aside in the spirit of the occasion. He's also a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts and enrolled as an architecture student at the University of Washington. In sum, exactly the sort of 29-year-old you'd expect to find at the world's largest playa event, a festival of art and what the Burners call "radical self expression."

Laurel Roth completes our party. At a willowy six-feet, and with cheekbones high enough for her to be a runway model in New York, she is nonetheless just short of shy, carefully pragmatic, and deliberate in her motions. She has, quite sensibly, had her brunette hair tightly braided beforehand into more than thirty strands, thus obviating the need to wash it during the multiple wind-and-dust storms that have been blowing through camp. A five-time attendee of Burning Man, she is a former crew supervisor for the Marin Conservation Corps and knows her way around a campsite. Like Jonah and Walter, she carries a knife lethal looking enough to simply scare off casual gadflies, and proudly drives a motorcycle fast enough to propel the living shit out of most people.

Tarn and I have had tickets to Burning Man since the spring in order to write what I think will be the last chapter in this book on playas. The others weren't planning on coming, but Walter and Jonah inherited a couple of tickets less than two weeks ago from Michael Hefflin, another friend in the circle, who was killed when his motorcycle collided with Walter's. The knife that Walter is using to open the sausage, in fact, was Michael's. Whenever he pulls it out, which is often, razor-honed German steel being second nature to this group, everyone tends to fall silent.

I slip outside the canopy to check on the weather. The week has turned unseasonably cold, thin bands of storm clouds marching in prematurely from the Gulf of Alaska, a pattern that normally doesn't set up in Nevada until late October or early November. It even sprinkled early this morning, the precipitation not enough to create mud, but to temporarily close up the small cracks in the playa surface that otherwise make it seem as if we're camped on top of an immense jigsaw puzzle. To my right I can see old shorelines of the ancient Lake Lahontan marching up the Granite Range. The waters here were once 500 feet deep, the last of the intact lake evaporating only 6,000 years ago. Since then, the climate has remained for the most part much warmer and drier, contrary to the evidence this morning.

Winds accompanying this type of weather pattern often stir up great clouds of dust from the Smoke Creek playa, which first become visible from here as a brown haze spreading over Gerlach, the nearest town, which is twelve miles to the southwest. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, as the duststorms reach the western edge of the Burning Man City, which is precisely where we're camped, the day turns dark. When the initial wave of dust hits the parachute, everyone freezes for a few seconds to assess the severity. If it's thick enough, usually not until mid-afternoon, people pull kerchiefs up over their noses in order to breath. Despite the alkali whiteouts that reduce visibility down to a couple of feet, however, it's actually a relief from the smoke of the forest fires through which I've been driving and hiking all summer, tens of thousands of wildfires burning up what now amounts to more than 1.5 million acres of the western United States. Burning Man is the fitting cap to such an apocalyptic season.

While I'm assessing the clouds, a tanker truck rolls slowly by, spraying water on the city's semicircular "streets" to tamp down the dust. In the other direction one of the two sanitation pumper leaves after having cleaned out some of the 350 portable toilets scattered throughout the gathering. I watch a highway patrol car cruise by, as well as vehicles from the Bureau of Land Management and the local sheriff's office, and two of our own Black Rock Rangers on bicycles. The deep level of organization all this implies is what makes it possible for personal anarchies to fluoresce out here for even so brief a period as a week.

Started as an intimate torching of an eight-foot-high figure in San Francisco in September of 1986 by Larry Harvey, a local artist, the event was moved to the Black Rock in 1990 in order to accommodate the growing crowds that insisted on attending what was fast becoming a seasonal ritual. Like the burning of Old Man Zozobra in Santa Fe, and various neo-Celtic rituals consummated in the autumn, people took Burning Man as a vehicle in which they could declare summer to be over, and the winter of work about to be begun. Silicon Valley, the most task-obsessed locale in North America, now virtually shuts down for the event, at least half of the attendees here having a spectacular blowout on vintage wines, vodka and single-malt scotches, on psychedelic mushrooms and acid and marijuana brownies, on nudity and rave dancing and massive pyrotechnics – before returning to their cramped gray cubicles in which they routinely invent the dot.com future.

I'd come to Burning Man only once before, in 1992, when 600 of us camped out on the playa in a circle around a 40-foot-tall wooden armature that for the first time that year was outlined in blue neon tubing, which small noisy generators powered each night. Art projects were scattered around campsites, and Richard Misrach stalked good shots in the late afternoon light. When a small plane flipped upon its landing nearby, and the occupants staggered unhurt from the upside-down cabin, they were greeted with hugs and goblets of wine. At midnight, as the Man was torched after several hours of eating and drinking, intense drumming, singing, and dancing, we all proceeded to circle the embers clockwise in a kind of trance. Who needed drugs? The sight of a bare-chested man wearing a stag's head and baying at the fire was neolithic enough to send you shivering into another universe.

Things got a little out of hand the next few years, the crowds growing from 2,000 in 1994 to 10,000 in 1997, and finally this year to cross the threshold of what the U.S. Census Bureau defines as a city, 25,000 people. For the week it's occupied, Burning Man becomes the fifth largest city in the state. In the past the event has hosted a drive-by shooting range for automatic weapons (a practice now outlawed by the organizers), free-ranging road races across the playa (likewise forbidden since a fatal accident), and fireworks powerful enough to send small rockets halfway to the moon (also curtailed). In short, as things here have gotten larger, the Burning Man organization has separated out some of the crazier and more lethal aspects from the crowd. Still, my ticket reads as follows:

YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING
You must bring enough food, water, shelter, and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment. Commercial vending, firearms, fireworks, rockets and all other explosives prohibited. You agree to read and abide by ALL rules in the Survival Guide. You agree to follow federal, state and local laws. This is a LEAVE NO TRACE, Pack it in, Pack it OUT event. You are asked to contribute 2 hours of playa clean up before departure. Commercial use of images taken at Burning Man is prohibited without the prior written consent of Burning Man. You appoint Burning Man as your representative to take actions necessary to protect your intellectual property or privacy rights, recognizing that Burning Man has no obligation to take any action whatsoever. PARTICIPATE

I actually find this language reassuring, recognizing its roots in such science fiction novels as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by that master of the genre, Robert A. Heinlein, who, as he got older, turned increasingly to the conundrum of how to devise a government under which a social contract could be honored, yet "radical self-expression" would be preserved. The Mars novels of Kim Stanley Robinson deal with the same issues, desert planets being ideal stages for the play of great ideas.

The utopian experiments and literature that undergird the spirit of Burning Man also found expression in the Salton Sink during the 20th century, although there the organizers drove down a fork in the road leading to real estate development. Burning Man is organized successfully as a nonprofit entity, its $3.4 million annual budget devoted mostly to providing infrastructure, from a trash fence that runs around the entire five-square miles of the camp, to water trucks to keep down the dust on the streets that the volunteer Department of Public Works lays out each year. On the other land, the scheme for the playa that would become the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California, was centered around a fable of profit that collapsed on almost everyone involved, except for corporate agribusiness.

By the time I've thoroughly examined the weather, which looks as if it's clearing, and taken notes in the relatively dust-free passenger seat of the van (the driver's seat being inaccessible from the outside as the parachute is partially anchored over it), Walter has cooked up the sausage with scrambled eggs, hash browns, and bread toasted in a skillet.After serving everyone the late breakfast, he's already thinking about lunch. The guy can eat more than any three people I know. Personally, I'm ready to visit the caf€ on the edge of the center ring, and maybe see if I can find my official contact, Jim Graham, at the Media Mecca tent.

After the dishes are cleaned up and camp more or less secured against marauding dust, we all take off in different directions. We've only been here since late yesterday afternoon, and are anxious to see the place during daylight. Laurel and Walter will probably go out to where David Best, a friend and artist from Petaluma in Sonoma County, has been constructing a large wooden house during the last week. Before the fatal motorcycle accident, Michael had worked in his shop, and David had adopted the genial and footloose guy as an informal son. Originally planning to just make an empty house as a sculpture to be burned down on Friday night, now it's becoming something of a shrine to Michael, and they're anxious to see it. Tarn and Jonah wander off, as well, and I head toward the city center to register as a member of the media, something I rarely do when writing on location, but which is required here.

My route takes me up the axial boulevard that runs from the entrance of the city to the Man himself, a thoroughfare that bisects the great sweeping arcs of streets named after body parts. The walk into Center Camp from the perimeter of the encampment, where we've lodged ourselves near to the rambling and profoundly graffitied Department of Public Works compound, takes about twenty minutes. The sun has come out, and as quickly as the day warms up, off come the clothes. Guys are walking around with nothing on but penis sheaths, while some women sport shaved and painted pudenda. On the other hand, several people in bicycles pass me who are wearing suits and ties.

The central core of the city is devoted to the Man and the larger art projects, a circle of open playa many acres in extent where numerous pyrotechnic setups are separated by hundreds of yards for safety's sake. Surrounding the huge arena in a semicircle, the innermost ring of the city is defined by theme camps featuring entertainments from claustrophobic fabric mazes encouraging anonymous bodily contact with other participants, to elaborate performances projected on outsized screens. The next ring out includes all the practicalities, such as a compact but fully functional garage servicing bicycles, a large first aid tent, an FM radio station, and the media lounge area.

I don't see Jim Graham, with whom I've been communicating via e-mail for several months, but do find someone to check in with, a woman with a binder of release forms for authorized media people to sign. Sprawled on several couches in various stages of alertness are writers, camera crews, sound technicians, and reporters. The BBC is here, both The New York and Los Angeles Times, a crew from National Geographic, and dozens of others from the roughly 150 media outlets in attendance. Not everyone gets approved as mediaäa rave magazine wanting to do a story, for instance, was denied official access, since the Burning Man organization doesn't want to promote the false idea that the festival is an Ecstasy-fueled all-night dance party. And anyone found taking photographs without authorization is summarily ejected from the city. Privacy is a major concern from two standpoints. First, people are letting go here, which is the point, and although voyeurism is welcomed, most of us would prefer not to have our exuberant pictures in the hometown daily. Second, it's a matter of principle: the event and its contents are not for sale. You can buy a cup of coffee here, and a bag of ice, but that's it. All other transactions, whether they're for a pinch of salt, fixing a flat tire, or a massage are based on a gift economy.

While I'm shamelessly wandering around the Media Mecca in order to eavesdrop on my colleagues, a short, stout, and somewhat excitable young man strides in asking "Where are the costumes," a request the staff easily accommodates. The organizers encourage media people to get involved, to be participants even as they're documenting the proceedings. In furnishing the requisite props, they do actually help the cynics among us get more into the spirit of things. Personally, I'm happy to be clad in hiking shorts and a khaki shirt, though I've been teased while walking around for carrying a pad and pen.

One thing the organizers do well is give good meteorological advice, the collective well-being of the city dependent on preparation for various states of weather. The media handlers are letting everyone know that a vigorous windstorm is on its way, so I head back to camp. First I detour, however, over to the tented public caf€, which encloses several performances stages, the coffee stand (which has a long line in front of it), and any number of seating arrangements. Rugs are set out on the dirt, couches strewn almost but not quite haphazardly about, and potted bamboo that screens off little corners here and there. Rick's Bar in Casablanca has finally met, quite deliberately, the famous bar scene from Star Wars.

An acoustic guitarist is giving a solo performance at one end while a drum circle surrounded by dancers thumps rhythmically away at the other. The tent is so large, and the crowd just dense enough, that the two don't conflict. A woman dressed in nothing but thin black leather straps leads a man on a leash, his legs encased in insectoidal metal extensions so that he walks on hands and knees, but suspended several feet above the floor. A deeply tanned guy in his 70s sits nude nearby chatting with a man in a burnoose and long robes. The aesthetic overall is early 19th-century Orientalism, that English colonial construct brought back from around the Empire and fed to London audiences avid for titillating evidence of the Other. I take Burning Man seriously enough as an expression of our public unconscious to wonder if this isn't evidence that America is girding itself for a serious co-option of the Islamic world. If we can't overthrow their leaders, maybe we'll conquer them by adopting their dress code.

The rest of the day I spend in our camp, mostly in the van after the prophesied windstorms arrive, fifty-mile-an-hour gusts rocking it back and forth on its springs. We've cut strategic holes in the parachute to let the wind and alkali blow through, but it's still a surprise to see by dinnertime that the camp chairs, tables, stoves, and food boxes remain in place, if filled with dust. Walter and Laurel have returned from working on David's house with an invitation for us to join him that evening for some kind of celebration, but first we do some serious and well-vintaged rehydration along with pasta and salad. Only then do we head out for a nighttime tour.

Last night we'd taken a long reconnaissance around the inner ring of the city, and I'm reminded this evening how different the place is once the sun sets. During the day everything exterior is buttoned down and relatively colorless, coated with dust and bleached out by bright sun. Now lanterns, neon tubing, propane torches and kerosene-soaked balls of rags are burning everywhere. Huge fireballs rise into the air with a Whump! and the rank odor of hydrocarbons is wafts about. All I can compare it to is . . . as if the visitors thronging the Las Vegas Strip one night had climbed up into the lights and brought them down onto the street to play with them.

It's a poor analogy and I give up any pretension of analysis in order to enjoy myself. This turns out to be the right move. Reaching David Best's elaborate camp, made up of several portable storage structures arrayed in a star pattern around a tented courtyard, we find ourselves being guided onto his "Bar Car," a Jeep that's been chopped, had a full bar and a small dance floor welded onto it, and that is about to take off for a tour of the central playa.

For the next couple of hours we glide along in the dark, the driver, whose head is on level with everyone else's feet, taking an occasional bearing off brightly lit art projects here and there around the city's circular promenade. Walter keeps him supplied with drinks, while Tarn and Jonah stand with Laurel on the port side, talking and smoking. Mary Morelli, a pattern designer with the Levi Corporation in San Francisco, and who shares the front railing with me, compares the distant semicircle of lights to the Long Island shoreline, an image perfectly suited to sailing on a party barge across the playa.

Schools of bicycles ride up to and circle us, the riders and their machines outlined with glow sticks, those flexible cold chemical tubes emitting red, green, or blue neon-like light. It's as if we're on a submersible surrounded by those self-illuminating fish of the deep ocean. Occasionally one of the riders will leap onto the Bar Car for a minute or two for a drink, then depart gaily off the back into the dark. The ride is both a giddy frolic and profoundly lovely, a joyride and a procession for Michael, who can't be with us. One can't help but feel that much more of life should be conducted in such a fashion.

At midnight we return to David's camp, where we abandon ship, and decide to go examine one of the lasers projecting light over the playa. Several towers placed hundreds of yards apart trace an outstretched schematic of the Burning Man each night, the body as map beamed out for miles over the city, bright green argon-powered lines etching the night thirty feet over our heads. The laser we walk to tonight, however, is throwing up a sheet of light that weaves intricate and glittering patterns in the dust that dances in the air. It's mesmerizing, like so many of the light shows here, and even though we're getting cold, it's with reluctance that we return to camp.

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