The Tuesday after Labor Day, 1998, my telephone rang with an odd, urgent peal. It was an old college friend who had just returned from Burning Man. Excited, impassioned, she could hardly stop rambling, yakking on and on, blabbing all about her recent cosmic revelations. Her description of drug-popping postmodern hippies mingling with neo-nudist techno-geeks made the week-long Burning Man festival sound like a modern day Sodom and Gomorra. "Next year!" she insisted emphatically. "You're going!" Sure enough, I attended Burning Man 1999. Without a doubt, it was the most awesome, ineffable, mind-boggling experience ever.
Burning Man occurs once a year, in a remote corner of Nevada called the Black Rock Desert. There's no water, no vegetation, and throughout the year, no inhabitants on the sun-scorched terrain. But during the week leading up to Labor Day, twenty-five thousand Internet-connected city-dwelling urbanites wheel their way up a two-lane county road, set up camp on the parched desert floor, and create an interactive spontaneous city. Many citizens of temporary Black Rock City are Bay Area artists, some who rent moving vans and giant cranes to set up their huge, elaborate art installations, all of which are set aflame the final night of the festival.
The eponymous Burning Man is a forty-foot- tall wood and neon structure situated out in the center of the playa -- playa being the Spanish word for beach, which festival participants call the dusty, deserted, ancient Black Rock lake bed. The Man, standing in the center of a mile-wide circle, is surrounded by sporadic art installations -- some as wacky as a twelve-foot pyramid of smashed microwave ovens, others as elegant as huge red ribbons on ten foot poles, shimmering like fish in the hot desert wind.
On the perimeter of this mile-wide circle, festival participants set up their camps, some with dopey, interactive themes: Body Painting Camp, Shampoo Camp, even Elvis Yoga Camp. During the days, participants hop on their bikes and cruise out onto the playa to visit the art installa- tions. At one point, while cruising around on my little-girl's bike, I spotted a solitary man walking naked across the playa. Approaching him, I asked if he could please explain the significance of the Man. "It's not about the Man," the solo stroller told me. "It's more about the people."
He was right.
There's one main tenet at Burning Man: "Participate -- Don't Spectate." As participants of an art festival, people freely express their inner selves. Of course, not everyone has the means to drag a two-ton iron cube out to the desert, but everyone can dress up in crazy clothes and crafted costumes. There are hairy men in high heels and slinky lingerie and women on stilts wearing flaming mohawk helmets. On Saturday afternoon, more than a thousand women remove their tops, decorate their breasts with paint and glitter, then mount their bikes for a wild ride all through Black Rock City. People deck their bikes with strips of foil and colored cloth. Some build wacky-shelled motorized vehicles, some resembling insects; others build cocktail bars on the back of flatbed trucks, then cruise around the playa. In a phrase: It's a post-apocalyptic, gender-bending fashion show.
At first, these visual images are quite shocking, repellent even, but the unconditional kindness of strangers helps quell the nerves of even the most terrified first-time "newbie." Everywhere on the playa, people are forgivingly affable, polite and friendly in their everyday dealings. They barter rather than vend. They smile, they hug, they even kiss strangers -- even while waiting in the porta-potty line. Some participants prepare delectable gourmet meals, complete with wine and creme brule; and what they don't consume themselves, they simply give away, offering up a potluck potlatch to the costumed citizens cruising by.
When the sun sets, the drumming begins. Reverberations are felt across the desert, from miles away, from neighbors next door. Techno- raves pop up on the playa and people dance for hours, some elucidating on Ecstacy, wandering on LSD beneath the Milky Way. At Bianca's, a theme camp dedicated to love and sensual pleasure, participants lounge on beat-up couches, legs and arms and lips intertwined, tongues making friends with the smiling mouths of strangers. It's a Hellenistic, Dionysian lovefest.
For one week, day follows night and night follows day till dusk arrives on Saturday. In one tacit, communal procession, the twenty-five thousand festival participants gather in a ring around the forty-foot neon Man, who, to the beat of banging drums, is ritualistically set ablaze. Whoops and hollers echo off the nearby mountains as revelers circle the burning embers, chanting, drumming, reverting to their pagan, primordial past. Eventually, after the sun rises, participants begrudgingly return to their camps, strike their temporary desert homes, pack their cars, their moving vans. A long trail of white dust rises from the playa as festival participants make their exodus back to reality -- back to their quiet homes, to their isolated office cubicles, to a place where people are less kind, less open, less aware of the common simplicity and overall benevo- lence of a spontaneous human culture.
The Tuesday after Labor Day, 1998, my telephone rang with an odd, urgent peal. It was an old college friend who had just returned from Burning Man. Excited, impassioned, she could hardly stop rambling, yakking on and on, blabbing all about her recent cosmic revelations. Her description of drug-popping postmodern hippies mingling with neo-nudist techno-geeks made the week-long Burning Man festival sound like a modern day Sodom and Gomorra. "Next year!" she insisted emphatically. "You're going!" Sure enough, I attended Burning Man 1999. Without a doubt, it was the most awesome, ineffable, mind-boggling experience ever.
