Burned Man

Exactly one week ago I stripped off my clothes and let the Black Rock desert sun burn away my job stress, my preconceptions. I became a part of a community. I paid for the experience: A new alternator for my car, some torch burns on my back, a desperate sense of job burnout. The latter two already fading.

A week later, after four days of exhausting Silicon Valley start-up work, I wish I had never left Nevada. I exchange giddy e-mail and hidden smiles with those who shared the experience; we make big plans for next year's Burning Man. RVs! Exploding goats! Shadow mazes! Take the whole week off -- no, a whole month!

I can't remember when I first heard about Burning Man; years ago, probably. I wanted to go there from the beginning, but normally I travel with friends to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival during the Labor Day weekend. This year Ashland fell through, and at the last minute I joined Jennie, Taff, Rob, Rich, Kevin and Kris. Three cars left; only two returned. We were very group-identified, staying together from the moment we were united on Saturday afternoon. (All of us experiencing far more difficulty with the cars actually getting there than in the difficulty of surviving in a desert environment -- where the immense heat of the day is in such sharp contrast with the winds and dust storms and the night freeze, and where no amenities exist except for a few grudging porta-potties). We were too group-identified maybe, nearly in violation of the Burning Man principles of participating rather than spectating, and sharing and forming communities with neighbours. We did some, but not enough. Next year, next year.

I thought my mustang would be the most patently useless and impractical car I would see at Burning Man; but no -- the car in front of us as Taff and I pulled into Black Rock City was a white stretch limo.

I couldn't possibly document all the moments; they're still too much a part of me now, from the peeling skin on my back to the flecks of black nail polish I can't quite fully remove from my fingernails. My car floor is covered with playa dust and bits of green and yellow body paint. I'm surrounded in my living room with a dusty sleeping bag and air mattress and filthy clothes -- I'm still too relaxed to clean everything up.

In talking to my co-workers, I've already focused too much on the mundane details of how we got there and what we saw. Dramatic moments, yes -- like the knot of fear as my car glided, powerless, in pitch black on Highway 80 to Reno, Taff sleeping in the passenger seat while the last of my battery drained away, to wake as we drifted to a stop near the side of the road opposite Gold Ranch, twelve miles shy of Reno.

Like the mad stumbling as I fell backwards into the Citronella torch during a Sunday night circle dance and the scream of pain I let out, only to calmly bike to the First Aid trailer at 6:00 & Neptune for burn ointment, rejoining my friends by the Little House on the Playa a while later, sucking on limes and spraying water at each other and flailingly trying to remember words to songs, any song, to sing together in our charming (annoying?) off-key way. "Come on Eileen," we started, as our neighbour shook his head in disbelief -- "Anything but bad '80s pop, please, anything." He joined in on the show tunes.

Like the Man himself, erupting on Saturday night in a hail of sparks and Roman Candles, beneath a vast ceiling of green lasers, surrounded by a circle of 2,000 flashing amber lights and 20,000 people, of who some bayed and some cheered and some danced and some gaped, some passing out and some swallowing fire and some gulping water, some dressed in neon and some in leather, others in jeans, and many in nothing.

Still, I want to set down the other moments, the surreal moments, before they fade from me completely:

• Saturday night, long after the Man burned, after the rave (at a stage with six giant video screens, beneath the fantastic green lasers -- all lugged in by truck, powered by generator, and all of which disappeared early on Sunday leaving not a trace), after the titanically misguided and pointless Opening of the Lotus Flower event, we walked, linked arm in arm, looking for another rave or the next stop on our journey, when I begged us to stop near a campfire made of burning art and sofas. Some low-key drumming and dancing around the fire; those hundred or so of us gathered there would move closer to the twin campfires as the temperature dipped, only to scramble backwards from the heat of the surging flames as a new pile of lumber was tossed on. A middle-aged Asian woman, sitting near her boyfriend or husband, whispered to him, then slipped off her clothes, to dance around the flames, not the only one doing so (Rob did, I almost did) -- but what caught my eye was when she casually tossed her silver blouse into the fire, laughing and saying to her dour-faced boyfriend, "Oh you should have stopped me from doing that, you know I'm going to regret that later."

• Near the Spacecamp Lounge, on the "quiet" side (ha!) of the clock co-ordinates, not far from our own camp at 2:30 and Venus, I saw something that my eyes literally could not understand: What seemed to be a 10-foot hunched four-legged spider, slinking to and fro in time to the trance music emanating from Spacecamp. My gaze kept travelling to him, my mind rejecting what my eyes reported. Only in walking closer did I see how the man had constructed his costume using four stilts.

  Other sights also, like the neon fish bicycles, or the nearby puppet show imploring passers-by to beg for water, or the Sonny and Cher bus -- a roving bar of naked revellers, or the car showing a diorama of a giant spider destroying a city, or the band of giggling people suddenly running by in full body paint, some blue, some purple, some green, some yellow. These memories stay with me.

• Sunday morning: Rob yawning and standing up to display his ass inadvertently lined with Froot Loops, causing Kris and I to howl with laughter; Rob's bemused expression as he brushed them off, an image I couldn't forget if I tried.

• Near our camp, a testimony to the artistic philosophy of Burning Man: A group of hardworking engineer/construction types huddled over a mass of strange machinery and propane tanks. They hammered for hours. Finally, I asked, and they turned out to be responsible for the rocket engines that had launched indescribably huge gouts of flame straight up into the sky as part of the burn of the Man on Saturday. Sunday night, for six hours, they worked. We had danced, and sang, and walked around, while they worked. We came back and gobbled down Rich's life-saving vegetarian chilli, and we huddled together as they worked nearby. Finally they started to wheel their huge tanks out into the central playa. Where are you going, I asked. Help us push the tanks and find out!, one woman replied. But the rest of the group was staying behind, I was hungry, so I didn't help them. Later, as the seven of us huddled together and dozed or watched the shooting stars, we were listening (as if we had a choice) to the jungle music from the giant bucky dome nearby (remixing such odd found ingredients as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and the Sesame Street theme song), and then there were suddenly shouts of glee in the playa distance. And there again, the gouts of flame erupted, six or seven short blasts, turning the whole sky orange, a roar loud enough to drown out all three raves nearby, the wave of heat enough to turn around the wind chill and make me yank off my sleeping bag, tiny beads of sweat forming on my chest -- six or seven blasts and they were done, the culmination of six or seven hours of intense labour (and who knows how much expense for the fuel). That is Burning Man: You labour for your art, all the effort and energy funnelled into six or seven perfect, hallucinatory, temporary seconds.

• Monday: In the immense traffic jam of the way out (near the sad-looking guy holding a "Lost Dog" sign), three long snakes of cars merging into one dusty lane on the way back to Gerlach then Empire then Wadsworth then Reno then home, a bulky man with a white beard and pilot's goggles playing excruciating cords on a two-string electric guitar, shrieks of what sounded like cats in profound pain emanating from his battery-powered amplifier, and when he paused for breath, I applauded from our convertible, and he fixed all of us with a sneer -- "All of these goddamned fucking spectators," he snarled. Guilty as charged.

I love Burning Man. I love its non-commercial edict (No Vending! No Logos!), participatory nature (No Spectators!), its pointless-but-ultimately-meaningful theme, the community it constructs, the Leave No Trace ethic, the changes it makes in me.

In reading the Burning Man site (trying to sustain the feeling by reliving it over the Web?), I came across this quote from a speech in 1998 by Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man:

You know, if this was just an event, I would get bored and I'd quit. But it's not an event, it's a phenomenon, and it's flowing out beyond our horizons. When you go home, don't say, "I'm waiting 364 days until Burningman, to get that wonderful experience that 'they gave me'." Realize that you can do it too.