Friday, September 1
The next morning I rise around eight, make coffee, and enjoy a clear sky and the morning sun, neither of which are going to stick around for much of the day. Once again the west is hosting bands of cloud, but today they're much thicker in girth. We're going to have not only wind, but a heavier rain, I think.

By ten most everyone is up and ready for a light breakfast. We're going over to a friend's for a gourmet salmon barbecue later in the afternoon, and in need of just enough carbos for now to counteract the mild excesses of Cabernet the night before. This morning Walter cooks, I wash, Laurel dries, Tarn and Jonah smoke. We rotate duties each day, though Walter is definitely and to our bliss doing most of the cooking. Afterwards everyone wanders off to check out art projects or talk to friends, leaving me alone to read and write.

It's a leisurely morning, the water trucks going by at regular intervals. I listen to two of the 41 FM and AM radio stations set up for the week, one featuring nonstop city news, including a confirmation that precipitation is forecast. The other station features a mix of contemporary music, some of which I know, most of which I don't, and all of it than what I'd find on the best stations in Los Angeles, save perhaps KCRW.

Twice during the morning lumbering prop-driven C-130 cargo planes, presumably out of the Fallon Naval Air Station or from the Air National Guard based in Reno, fly overhead at a moderately low altitude. Binoculars show them to be from more than one branch of the services, so I'm not sure where they're from, but they're outside the approved Military Operations Area and what they're doing is semi-legal at best, though hardly surprising. BLM officials in the Winnemucca Field Office, which is responsible for governing the Black Rock and issuing permits to Burning Man, have actually witnessed troops being dropped on the playa north of the city in other years, perhaps using it as a mock enemy encampment to be infiltrated. Navy SEALS, U.S. Army Special Forces . . . all the elite groups use the desert for such exercises, and we must make a tempting and entertaining target.

While I've been taking notes, the wind has been stealthily gaining strength, and by two o-clock everyone has returned to rendezvous for the salmon bake, which is a fifteen-minute walk along the outside circle of the city. Small planes are landing and taking off from the dirt runway that is the temporary airport, even though the wind is occasionally blowing hard enough to push bicycle riders northward without their having to peddle.

Our fashionably late luncheon turns out to be a laid back affair with an astonishing amount of fish and wine set out inside a tent. The meal is punctuated by another flyby of a cargo plane, a duststorm violent enough to unanchor part of our host's large geodesic dome, a parade of DPW vehicles (one of which every minute or so launches an alarmingly large jet of burning gas into the air), and three hundred women riding by bare breasted on bicycles, a perennial Burning Man favorite. We stagger home afterwards during a break in the turbulent clouds of dust rolling periodically through the city, producing short-lived whiteouts, and relax in preparation for a long night. A light shower passes through about five o-clock, so coating the windows of the van with mud that I have to turn on the windshield wipers to regain enough daylight so I can keep writing.

A primary objective for me today is to visit David Best's sculpture in order to see it before it burns, so Jonah takes me there just before twilight. As we strike out across the interior playa, what at first appears no larger than a small box on the desert floor soon grows into structure nearly three stories tall. Assembled out of scrap lumber ranging in thickness from an eighth-inch to a half-inch thick, the building resembles an elaborate Hindu temple: intricate in a thousand ways yet airy, its dim interior pierced with late light. We squeeze through a gap in the back wall and find ourselves circling around an altar with a small framed picture of Michael on it. Around us dozens of people are moving quietly and slowly, almost reverentially.

David is at the front door, a compact man with a short white beard handing out small pieces of leftover wood. "If you lost someone you love," he's telling two young women, "write down their name or something about them, and leave it on the altar. Then come back at midnight and we'll burn it all together." He waves them deeper inside, an Italian journalist and her assistant next in line and obviously confused by what he's saying.

"This is wonderful," she exclaims, gesturing around her. "Can we come back . . . ah, umm . . . tomorrow to film it?"

"No, no, we're going to burn it tonight," he replies, offering her a piece of wood. This causes deep consternation. She searches for words: "But how can you . . . destroy this . . . it is so beautiful!"

David seeks valiantly to explain, the woman sending out her assistant to bring in the cameraman, none of them speaking the best English. We leave David to cope and walk out the front for another view. Outside, hundreds of people are coming up to and going away from the piece. As David will later confirm, dozens of rumors about it are circulating.

"Yeah, he made every piece beforehand and numbered ­em all. Took him six months, and then he reassembled it up here."

"Spielberg's gonna come watch this thing burn!"

"Nah, they're not really burning it. Coppola commissioned it, and he's sending a cargo ­copter to come pick it up. It's gonna sit in front of his winery."

Some of the rumors, David confesses, were started by none other than himself. One year he brought a stuffed horse to immolate at Burning Man, and a rumor started that it had been the stand-in for Anthony Quinn's steed in the film Lawrence of Arabia. Then there's the dog he brought that people speculated was Old Yeller's stand-in from the movie of the same name, a tale he didn't bother to contradict. Born in 1945 and educated at the San Francisco Art Institute, Best has always found death and religion to be strong catalysts for his work, which he describes as being "found-object junk sculpture." It's a genre in which humor balances the more somber aspects of art.

Jonah and I mostly ignore the crowd and turn to observe the front of the house, which is now illuminated with spotlights. I finger the thin piece of hobby wood that David's given me. The load-bearing skeleton of the structure appears to be simple, a foursquare construct of two-by-fours with a ground floor and a second level open to the sky where people are still hammering. But its distinctive curlicues are complicated, produced by David sawing up wood that he salvages from other places where it's already been cut and left behind as scrap. The pieces are juxtaposed on the house in such a way as to make it appear almost as if gargoyles are perched on the corners. A vague organic morphism suffuses the walls, a perception that floats in and out of focus as your vision and imagination constantly trade places. The effect is akin to what some stained glass windows in cathedrals, as well as some abstract artworks, are supposed to do: cut apart and then reassemble the world into non-representational but evocative shapes that free your mind for contemplation.

It occurs to me a little later while in camp, while chasing down a light snack with vodka martinis, that being at Burning Man is itself like taking a cruise on a luxury liner, David's Bar Car an apt image for the occasion. The accommodations this week are a little more vernacular, but basically you eat and stroll from one entertainment to another, and then eat again. If it weren't for the amount of walking we're doing every day, we'd actually gain weight out here, although in years when it's hot on the playa, most people find themselves consuming only about half their usual amount of calories, the body simply refusing to hold much appetite for anything but liquids.

In any case, the one time I took a cruise, I felt guilty for days on end about our conspicuous consumption while crossing such a sublime space as the ocean. I'm experiencing a twinge of that now, caused by the transition from contemplating David's sculpture, and Michael's death, to the sybaritic snack. Tarn, experiencing this in his own way, has no appetite.

By eleven-thirty we're back in front of the house, around which have collected several thousand people, many of whom know that this is memorial event for a friend of the sculptor who's been lost. For the moment the wind and intermittent showers have ceased, and luckily, since otherwise the burn would have to be postponed until tomorrow night, which would create a clear conflict with the big burning of the Man.

Laurel, Jonah, and Michael stand at the front of the crowd. I hover behind them, not wanting to intrude. Tarn's elsewhere in the great milling circumference, not particularly wanting company for the moment. David, accompanied by a fireman in his heavy coat, and a couple of crew members go in and out of the building repeatedly, soaking diesel fuel into strategic places for the public immolation of sorrow and loss. Laurel alternately rests her head on Walter's shoulder, and hugs Jonah.

By midnight the crowd is getting restless, and despite the solemnity of the event (or at least our perception of such), begins to chant "Buuurn it! Buuurn it! Buuurn it!" I'm put off a bit by such a vocal demand, but David has taken the attitude that the more people who inquire if this is his artwork, the more it belongs to them, not him. It's appropriate, then, that at a quarter after the hour, a small flame appears in front of and beneath the altar, where it glows cheerfully for some minutes, but refusing to spread. One of David's crew sneaks in a side door and pours more flammables, then lights a second fire, which slowly joins with the first, the altar now beginning to smoke. Someone in the crowd throws a lit firework toward the house, an extremely unwise gesture that makes the crowd uneasy.

When the front of the house goes, at about twelve-thirty, it goes quickly, the flames shooting up ten, twenty, then thirty feet, the heat suddenly so intense that everyone moves backwards with alacrity. Fireworks embedded in the top of the house go off and huge clouds of sparks drift over us. We stop moving. As the fire eats deeper into the house and the initial blast of heat passes, push slowly forward again. A light drizzle is falling now, rain glowing in white streaks around what resolves into the giant and mostly intact ember of a house.

How often, I ask myself, can you watch a house burn with pleasure? This virtual funeral pyre is an exquisite icon standing free in the air, and as its timbers slowly collapse, it seems to take so much sadness with it. Laurel will write me later to say that the burning is a more satisfactory ritual for her than the actual preparing and throwing of Michael's ashes into the sea, and to wonder if the fascination and fear we feel before a fire isn't related to how we consider death, a thought with which the artist would probably agree.

We retire to David's compound, leaving the crowd behind to warm themselves around the coals. While Jonah and David open a bottle of wine and pass out cigars, the rain returns in earnest. I stand by myself to one side, lost in the heavy drumming of a desert downpour as they share toasts. When everyone sits down in a circle to pass around the wine and tell stories about Michael, they invite me to join them.

"This is something new for Burning Man," the sculptor states quietly. He's exhausted, but working up a second wind. "This wasn't just a piece of decoration to burn, and it wasn't something just for us. The more people put messages into it, the more it became a work of art. This was for everyone, it was empty until they filled it, and this is what Burning Man is going to have to live up to in the future."

I have no illusions about really being part of this tightly-knit group of friends, nor of being as integral a part of the Burning Man community as David, but I don't believe he's overstating the case when he calls the house "a temple." Too many people in the crowd had been talking about the scraps they'd written on and left in the fire, too many people were telling stories about family members no longer with them, and crying. David's not boasting about what he's done, just saying that the house has performed more than one function, added a deeper, more private, and unforeseen layer to people's experience here. What more could an artist aspire toward?

The wake goes on and on, and I rise to leave while there's a break in the rain. David's offering to cook everyone omelets, but I'm so tired I can hardly see. I hand him a book of poems that I've brought as a gift to thank him for so generously including me, then start the walk back to our camp. It's a hellacious teeth-chattering march. The hard-packed surface of the playa has turned to mud that builds up underneath my shoes until three inches thick, then falls off, first from one shoe, then the other, so I'm always walking lopsided. I consider crawling into someone else's camp to beg for warmth, but I've suffered playa mud before and press on. Several people are carrying bicycles over their shoulders, the tires immobilized by mud packed tight up into the fenders.

I crawl into my bag at three-thirty in the morning, rouse briefly when the others come home a little later, then awaken twice more to rain tat-tattering away on our tents and the parachute, but have no trouble falling back each time into a long and uncomplicated sleep.

Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday