Burning Man I
What began as a Fellini film on steroids suddenly became a Dino de Laurentiis disaster epic. Michael and Maria brought Munson and me to Burning Man in 2008. When the idea was first proposed, Munson and I had some concerns. Neither of us like to be around strangers, let alone 50,000 of them. Forty years earlier, we might have considered camping, but it sure as hell wouldn't have been on a dry lake bed in the middle of the Nevada desert. Lastly, even though it was decades ago, I can still recall promising myself that I had seen the inside of my last port-a-potty. Despite our misgivings, we agreed to go. Michael knew us both very well and his pitch was simply, "Trust me, of all the people on this planet, the 2 of you do not want to go to your graves without seeing this".
Michael turned out to be right. Maybe I've seen less in my lifetime than others have; but for me, Burning Man was easily the most incredible man-made thing I ever saw. Having been there however, is not enough for me to do it justice with the written word. I will describe our trip to Burning Man purely as an exercise to see what I can still remember.
The camping area and everything else about Burning Man was very organized. The campsites formed a semi circle based on a 2.5 mile diameter. The camping area was but a small part of the total area cordoned off for the event. A perimeter fence 9 miles in length encircled about 15 square miles. 75% of the entire area devoted to the event was nothing more than the perfectly flat and bare dry lake bottom called the playa. When you leave the campsite area and walk out onto the dry lake, you become aware that you are moving across the surface of a sphere. The sun-bleached white surface you stand on extends out to where a slightly curved horizon line meets the base of a massive blue dome above you. Not everything at Burning Man is man-made.
The larger camp sites were called theme camps and were allotted the amount of space required to house their structure(s) and their campers (usually between 25 and 200). We camped with a group of Michael's friends, many of whom share a passion for midnight bicycle rides through various seedy and untamed areas of Los Angeles. The theme for our camp site was bicycle repair. With the immense scale of the event and no normal cars allowed, bicycles are how most people get around. People would ride their bike into our camp everyday to have parts repaired or replaced. It was a free service as is everything at burning man including food, booze, psychoanalysis, and just about anything you can imagine.
When we ventured out beyond our campsite, there was way too much for us to be able to take in even a fraction of all that was going on. It was completely overwhelming. Every 100 yards there was a campsite blasting out techno music from condominium-sized speakers. Techno from the different sites would merge, surge and throb (at what had to be illegal decibel levels) every day and night continually from 9 a.m. to 4 a.m. Techno engulfed the entire 3 square miles of campsites. Ear plugs proved useless, no one slept through it and you could barely hear each other talk. Techno came at you from every direction. You couldn't escape it unless you walked a half mile out onto the empty dry lake. The only sound competing with the techno were the massive mobile and stationary contraptions that periodically produce mammoth roars as they shot out huge propane fireballs.
We spent half of the first day checking out the various other theme camps. These included a 3-story geodesic dome with walls resembling the honeycomb of a bee hive with dozens of people climbing in, out and around every bit of it. There was a 30-foot high Scheherazade style tent complex with dozens of curtained rooms filled with cushions to explore that must have covered 30,000 square feet. Of course there was an outdoor shooting gallery. Only instead of pistols or rifles, you donned a fire-retardant suit and used actual flame throwers to torch manikins at 30 paces. There was an open-air roller skating rink, multiple-story temples, massage parlors, public showers, body paint stalls, performing theaters, climbing structures - there was literally no end to it. In the half day we explored the theme camps, we saw maybe at the most 40 of them. There were 706 others that we didn't get around to.
The theme camps as well as all campsites were populated by a total of 50,000 people in various forms of dress and undress. The costumes beat the nudity hands down. In addition to thousands of people in radical costumes constantly walking, running, riding bikes, dancing to techno, or climbing on structures; there were others motoring slowly around on over 600 mutant vehicles. Mutant vehicles (also called "art cars") range in size and appearance from a modified scooter to a full-sized Spanish Galleon. The large-sized mutant vehicles are bigger than a Greyhound bus and take the form of a 50-foot long, anatomically-correct duck; a Mac truck cab made of Legos; or perhaps an entire movie set with full cast and props straight out of a Fellini film. These art cars slowly glide along within the speed limit of 5 miles per hour on the playa powered by any means that will produce no sound. A mutant vehicle may have one to 80 people on board in full costume, serving free booze and blasting out huge propane fire balls as well as its own techno.
In the evening, the sky filled with stars and we stood in the open playa area watching mesmerized as hundreds of mutant vehicles, bicycles and costumed nut cases all lit up like Xmas tress and belching fire balls, swarmed around us for hours. We watched as an upright piano was set on fire, launched impossibly high into the night by an enormous medieval catapult, and exploded as it struck the playa 80 yards away. The previous year a ten-story structure resembling an oil derrick had consumed 900 gallons of jet fuel and 2,000 gallons of liquid propane to propel mushroom clouds 300 feet up into the sky. God only knows what else we may have missed.
It didn't seem possible that we would ever sleep again but we gradually wore down. I woke up just before the sun came up and was amazed at the silence. The techno had shut down and for a few brief hours, 50,000 people were nowhere to be seen or heard. I got out of my sleeping bag and rode a bicycle out onto the playa to tour the artistic installations that were referred to as "placed art". These were various types of sculptures, structures and constructions that were spread out over 15 square miles of barren landscape. Many of these creations take a full year to make and are installed prior to the opening of the festival. The variety in size and form is beyond imagining. Some would fit in your living room while others are 6 stories tall. There were 285 placed art pieces in 2008. I spent 4 to 5 hours and saw maybe 30 of them. Most of that was travel time spent on the bike shuttling from one piece to the next. The area is so vast that even though there are a few hundred to see, it's a long haul to each.
One of the placed art installations was an S-shaped stack of semi-trailers, connected end-to-end like a snake that rose 4 stories up off of the dry lake bed. It had a pathway inside that you could take all the way up through the middle of the trucks to the top of the S. Another more modest piece was a V-shaped gauntlet of thousands of snow skis stuck upright in the playa. I entered the wide mouth of the V and walked through the fiberglass forest to the apex where a memorial was etched on the final ski for the artist's friend who had died in an avalanche.
I came across someone who was struggling with a quarter mile long filament line that was anchored on one end, with the full length held aloft by helium-filled balloons spaced 20 yards apart. There were 3 separate lines that soared hundreds of feet over the playa and from a distance, became congruent fluttering lines powered by the wind high above the lake bed. The fellow had simply grabbed an end of one of the lines where it was tethered to the ground, reeled it in by hand until he reached a tangled section, and was working on unraveling the twisted and knotted line. I joined him and held the line to create some slack and allow him to use both hands. He wasn't the artist. He simply came by and thought it would be a good idea to straighten things out. Twenty minutes later, the tangles were removed and we released the line back up into the sky. The following morning, I again woke early and total silence had returned. I could see from our campsite that one of the balloon lines was tangled and rode over to repeat the process, but this time on my own.
When I came back to camp the wind had started up. In less than an hour, Munson and I were driven into a cramped one-person tent by a hellacious dust storm. The surface of the playa can be either hard packed or loose silt depending on the amount of rainfall in a given year. Soon, visibility was down to 30 feet and we were told there was no way to determine when, or if, the wind would quit. After a few hours of increasing wind and decreasing visibility, Munson and I looked at each other and knew we were done. It meant we would not be there for the grand finale where 50,000 characters surround a 5-story tall wooden man full of explosives, and cheer as it all goes up in flames.
We told the people at our campsite that we were going leave. Someone said, "You can't leave now. You'll miss the burn".
I assured them we hardly felt cheated.
"Besides," I said, "We're just not into closing ceremonies."