Saturday, September 2
After a late brunch the next morning, I saunter back toward the Media Mecca. A long line of cars is leaving the city, reportedly a thousand campers fleeing the scene before the Man has even burned. Their tents have blown out, or they didn't bring warm enough clothes, or it's all just too much trouble. But this is exactly what the Black Rock is all about, cycles of sun and wind and rain burnishing relentlessly the floor of the basin down to a mirror upon which we watch ourselves walk. I'm delighted for those Burners who will stay. They're not seeing this place as a static stage, but as a process through which we're living, which is what landscape is all about.

This time I do locate Jim Graham, who, when I introduce myself, says: "Oh, yeah, you're the guy who's been walking around the playas for the last year. It's great you're here."

I find myself unexpectedly flattered to be identified with the landform, which not everyone would pick as their totemic landscape, and we have a quick conversation about how the event is going, much of which centers around the weather. We're interrupted by an older gentleman on a bicycle demanding to know who authorized a camera crew to set up near the Man, thus blocking off a sliver out of what would otherwise be an uninterrupted 360Ÿ view. Jim, a tall man with a comfortable waistline and a steady stance on the ground, is mild and unflappable in return. "We did. It's a webcast crew that will uplink a live video of the burn."

The man sputters in protest, incredulous that the Burning Man organization could be so crass and commercial as to allow such a thing. He rides off shaking his beard, muttering about the event not being like it used to. Jim smiles. This is a familiar plaint, but although I find the event much different from the one in 1992, it seems no more commercial now than when Misrach and Goin were documenting the event with still and video cameras. The photo agreement, which anyone making professional images at the event must sign, stipulates in great detail how they may be used, and that ten percent of all proceeds must come back to the organization to help with operating expenses, grants to artists working on the playa, and so forth.

I exit the tent when it's obvious that Jim needs to cope with messages over his walkie-talkie, and wander back to camp via some streets I haven't yet explored. Although some Burners are living out of backpacking tents or the bland interiors of rented RVs, our setup is pretty utilitarian compared to others. A white picket fence has been erected around one place, complete with a green plastic lawn in parody of suburbia. Signs outside other miniature environments advertise experiments in everything from black lights to sexual voyeurism.

Later in the afternoon I return with Tarn to hang out in the caf€, listen to music, and watch people. Beyond the aforementioned tendencies to dress like a refugee from an Arabic Star Wars, an aesthetic wisely derived from cultures much more experienced in desert living than ours, no law of averages is apparent here, the dominant aesthetic of personal appearance being a null set. Lots of tattoos and body piercings, yes, but also relatively clean-cut types like me in hiking clothes. Dogs are discouraged from attending, since they're relatively difficult to pick up after, but ferrets are in evidence, heads popping out of sleeves. I have no doubt that somewhere in the city a pet snake or two is coiled up in a basket.

Tarn stretches out on a rug and naps, while next to us a young guy recites his poetry from memory. No one is drinking publicly or consuming drugs, that being left to the privacy of each camp, a carefully negotiated understanding between the organizers and law enforcement officials that's mostly held up during the week. As a result, plenty of people are in a steady state of chemical alteration, but there's no menace in the air. No matter where I've walked or at what time of night, this is the safest I've felt in a city since working as a trekking guide out of Katmandu in the mid-1970s.

It's already after eight o'clock when we head out from camp to the Man himself, and by the time we enter the interior playa, we see that the figure outlined in magenta and blue neon is already burning. Yesterday people were climbing atop the eight levels of hay balesäwhich elevated him enough above the surface so he was visible throughout the cityäand having their pictures taken while standing in between the legs, as if tourists posing with a national monument. Now his stance is filled with fire, and only one arm is left upright, so fast are the flames climbing up the 50-foot-tallwooden sculpture. We skirt to the right to avoid the heaviest crowding, and end up climbing ten feet up a metal "Rib Cage-Bird Cage" sculpture we'd visited the first night.

The vantage point is a good one, and as the Man is reduced to a glowing heap, I'm surprised to see how different the reaction of this crowd is to the one eight years earlier. No impromptu mass movement around the bonfire occurs; there are just too many people, and it becomes obvious that Burning Man is no longer about the center of the event, but the periphery.

Before we can climb down, a man below us starts playing a calliope that shoots flaming propane out of its vertical tubes instead of notes, an event that has its own crowd of hundreds. Careful to keep track of one another as we depart, we next visit the "Thunderdome," a huge geodesic jungle gym inside which fire slingers twirl kerosene-soaked balls on short ropes, and a man in black exhales flames from his mouth. Dozens of people cling all over the metal structure watching the action. Around midnight we witness a thirty-foot high penis made of lathe and chicken wire coated with playa mud slowly melt from intense fire drafting up its shaft. A large van parks nearby, upon the roof of which are positioned two enormous Tesla coils, which have apparently been liberated from the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein. Standing in between and dressed in an insulated suit, Dr. Megavolt draws forth crackling bolts of lightning, the thick writhing snakes of blue electricity incinerating objects tossed up to him by spectators.

I leave Tarn and the others to contemplate what must be at least two dozen kinds of up- close and personal pyrotechnics, ranging from the almost cosmic power of Megavolt to people with candles lit atop their heads, the wax dripping down about them. It's more than I can absorb in one night, and I'm wishing we'd gotten here a couple of days earlier, and wondering if we should come back next year.

Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday