The Bureau of Land Management capped Burning Man at 50,000 for 2011. By mid-July, tickets had sold out for the first time in the event’s 25-year run, sparking desperate pleas for tickets and exorbitant prices set by scalpers. Those fortunate souls with tickets traded them in for a snow-globe of dust and sensory overload, becoming citizens in a fabled city of radical self-reliance mixed with radical mayhem and an eternal bass, a testament to human expression and the boundless senses of humor stretching over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
We’ve been on Highway 17 for 20 minutes and have already watched three coolers slide off the truck bed toolbox and then get run over, my load of 60 Tecates spitting through traffic. It’s an auspicious start to my first year at Burning Man, and it appears the 2011 Rites of Passage year will be taking my burner virginity in a swirl of chaos.
My ticket was found after the infamous sell-out date by my good friend Michael Baba, driver of truck and securer of coolers, and I’m camping with a group of friends who went up on Saturday to reserve a campsite and set up the shade structure. Thirty-six hours and an overnight stay in Reno later, I’ll be looking for Initiation and 8:30, and hoping that they got the spot.
The sun falls in the Black Rock Desert as the wind kicks up, and it takes three hours to get through the car-infested gates. Monday night has rolled around to find me at the promised I and 8:30, but it isn’t rolling nearly as hard as camp leader Bert, stumbling in the dark as I put up my tent at around 2am.
“I’m so happy to see you,” he smiles as he collapses in his tent with his feet sticking out into the night. I finish unpacking alone and try to clean off some of the dust already covering my arms and ankles with a package of wet wipes; this world is already too overwhelming for the weary.
Day One
Campmates Bert, Brett, Jason and Garwong are up and about by the time I crawl out of my sweltering bed. We can hear the woosh of Max doing Whip-its in his tent, and while we’re still boiling our breakfast water another Santa Cruzer arrives.
“I couldn’t bring up a bike for you, Kate,” Marty says by way of hello. “But I did put pegs on mine for you to ride.”
My fate is sealed. The pegs are too fun to even consider riding the bike Bert brought for his girlfriend Anya, still en route from California.
We discover that all tents, trailers, domes and yurts are arranged in a half moon around a desolation void of natural shade or wind breaks, necessary to cross for anyone trying to explore the other side of the city. This was the Playa, a 7-mile-wide dried-up lake bed, flat and cracked and surrounded by the scrubby Black Rock Mountains and a terrible heat. The only crop is a white powdery dust, save for one fertile week on the August/September cusp when the desert sprouts art installations like weeds, remote islands that no one saw arrive and which will be leaving in flames.
A movie theater sits near the edge of the fence. A white igloo carpeted and padded. Massive canopy beds arranged into a circle. The elusive Bar-At-The-End-Of-The-World. A mailbox filled with letters that will never be sent.
A giant bourbon barrel.
Smack in the middle of the half circle stands the giant wooden Man, and towards the deep playa the Temple looms like the ruins of Angkor Wat; both will be infernos by the end of the week.
Between these vacation destinations run the mutant vehicles of Black Rock City, bumping electro from their decks, portals, mouths and other orifices, leaving me staring up at a 70-foot party-yacht or historically accurate pirate sloop and hoping to God that the only way to get it there was on the freeway.
I stand blinking in the middle of a huge white plain and watch a giant chattering wind-up mouth motor away. Burning man has been branded as a “music and arts festival,” but as I salute the driver I start to feel in my bones that the real goal is trying to be as balls-to-the-wall awesome as possible.
The Trampoline Camp and the jungle-gym filled with packing foam agree with me.
“The real surprise is why the fuck all these people would want to put this here,” Marty shouts from the seat of his bike. Neckerchiefs are wrapped around mouths and our goggles are up against the dust that coats skin and hair in an instant. I laugh and hang onto his shoulders, looking down to find my legs caked with dust from boot tip to knee, and remember the fury of wet-wipes from the night before.
He’s right: the climate is harsh for a festival. I bought 17 gallons of water and food that could sit around in the heat for years. Beef jerky, anyone? Perhaps a reconstituted egg omelet that came in a bag? There aren’t showers or water. There isn’t any food sold. If your group doesn’t bring a shade structure, you get to reenact Jesus in the desert.
The official reasoning makes sense: the black rock desert is a completely blank canvas, flat and open and down for whatever, and since Burners and the Bureau of Land Management enforce “leave nothing but footprints,” it isn’t any worse for the wear.
The first day is heavy. We lurch around with our mouths hanging open, pointing and laughing with wonder at the weird and unable to do much except acclimatize. It’s a dub stepping dream: Bass Camp, Opulent Temple, Hookah Lounge and all the other sound camps vie for attention with a thousand other big-gun noise systems, round-the-clock dance parties in the city that never sleeps.
An empty pavilion filled with couches emerges on the other side of the playa, down a side street and completely empty except for me and my giggling driver.
“Would the owners mind if we pulled one out into the road?” I ask, then answer my own question. “How could they care if we’re just watching the sunset? Who would tell us to obey the rules of couch palace and sit in a dark tent instead?!”
Madness seemed to be us not dragging it out, so we couched magnificent people-watching and a pink mountain sunset, while cool hits from the nineties drifted from an RV.
Burners get to do what they want in Black Rock City as long as it’s beautiful or awesome and doesn’t hurt anyone. I’ve never seen a more beautiful sky as the one where the sun goes down in Nevada, in an uninhabited stretch of country that gets me dirtier in five minutes than I become after five days of non-shower in Santa Cruz. Burning Man makes sense when the grime doesn’t factor in as grime anymore; from dust we came and to dust we shall return.
Day Two
Seven square miles, and me without my own bike.
Our small fleet crowds the front of the camp, decked with flags and fur and baskets, and if Marty hadn’t put pegs on the back wheels of his massive pink cruiser with tires the size of my arm, I would be in the same position as Jason the gypsy-cowboy: slow, hot and often left behind.
Although Burning Man prepares for losers like us who thought they could get along just by trundling through Playa dust, the mess of large green cruisers seems to equal about ten, and woe to he who leaves his bike in the open.
They must be snatched and stolen wherever they are dropped, or they’ll be hidden behind a tent to hide them from hawk-eyed walkers. Prowling for green bikes is a chore before each trek, and we leap from the shadows and seize a bike from someone’s camp with a hurried: “That’s the rules, man, sorry!”
With Jason mounted we ride out to make buttons.
By the way, were we and our 60 Tecates all aware that alcohol is free at Burning Man? (Trades graciously accepted…) The law of the land is Bring Your Own Cup, and while my driver rolls with a blue tin cup we found on the ground, I’ve been thumping a drinking horn on the countertop and roaring for a fill. Everything is especially silly after a party fun-time snack and as many free drinks as we can stomach.
A man in front of a wooden bar shouts at us as we pass: “I’ve got a challenge for you guys!” We gather around and he points to a bowl of chili. “I’ve got hot chili here, which will actually be the best part, and you should enjoy it. It’ll be followed by a shot of pepper vodka, and then we’ll give you a beer to chase with. The beer is a little warm, but it’s a free shot and beer!” He throws his hands up in the air and we cheer our consent. “If you can finish all three you get a prize!”
“Is it a hot beer?” Max asks, eyeing the can placed into his hand.
All is well until we get to the beer chaser. The pepper vodka is hot, but the beer is fizzy and warm and expanding in our guts, and I fight back the urge to be sick and watch Max and Garwong do the same, while Bert finishes and gets a sticker.
Max gives the rest of his beer to me with a grimace, and I jump on the pegs and sail away after Bert and Anya’s bikes.
The second night finds me closeted in my own tent as my campmates descend into the night, the victim of overstimulation and perhaps an illegal substance. All I could do was stumble into the tent and say “Eeee,” grabbing handfuls of sleeping bags and writhing in the nylon while being placated by a friendly hand that stayed with me in the tent, the very essence of tent, the handiest hand, as I grab handfuls of his skin, the bag, and say: “Eeeee!” And I’m grateful.
Not feeling bad but unable to process anything in the light, the eternal dub step eventually lulls us to sleep.
Coincidentally, because I went to bed so early, I popped up like a spring daisy when Sarah rolled into camp at 4:30am looking for a friend of ours. Ready for action, we invaded Olin’s master-tent and found him leaning over a bag of bloody tissues. High as a kite, he had come back home and started shaving with a shaky hand.
“It seemed like the thing to do,” he murmurs, scraping his jaw.
“I wanna do some Whip-its,” Sarah whispers.
The sunrise that day was the only one I saw the whole trip, peeking out of the tent flaps after Sarah went on her merry way and trying to persuade the other tent-dweller that while it wasn’t a giant luminous shark on wheels, it was still worth seeing. Across tent city I could see anyone with a tall structure standing up on it and looking towards the east, ready at last to go to sleep.
Someone starts bumping the “Lincoln Park Rapist” mash-up, and I watch three human sized cupcakes whirr down our street.
Day Three
Burning Man is on a tight schedule, and the sun allows no one to sleep past 11am. A thick, glossy book lays out all the events taking place at theme camps: group masturbation, how to sand-bath like a bedouin, intro to poi spinning. We decide on a mock sword battle out in the shadow of the Man, and as I realize that the dome across the street pounds out dub step crunchier than the stuff coming out of the bigger camps, we all pledge to be out on the Playa at 5pm sharp.
Until then we roam, roaring around the desert foaming at the mouth with sanity tied up and left for dead in a cooler. Outside the Anti-Capitalist camp I meet and hug a bearded shirt-cocker with wild eyes, because at Burning Man you hug people even if their junk is flopping out.
“I found this pill of mystery powder…I ate it but now I’m not wearing any pants,” he says with an inane giggle, and Brett sagely tells him it was probably MDMA. His pupils are the size of biscuits, and he throws a dollar on the ground.
“Watch me piss on that dollar.”
We watch, and then he persuades a shirt-cocking girl to do likewise. Another giggle, hoarse with drugs and dust, and then he bends over and his mouth is in her post-urination vagina.
Burning Man is not for the weak, and I wouldn’t make this stuff up.
It’s wise to keep in mind that probably 80 percent of Burners would fail most drug tests, and the rest are cops.
All part of an average day, and at 5 o’clock the shock is eclipsed by blood lust.
Around 200 PVC pipes wrapped in foam are provided for the war of the Man, and one of the guys from my camp shakes his head in disbelief as he closes his drug pouch and picks up a sword wrapped with purple duct tape.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this,” Marty says, as I wind up with a silver duct tape sword. “This is sheer mayhem. Absolute chaos.”
Armies 100 strong are separated and pointed at each other.
“We’ll rape your cats and… what will we do to their women?” Jason asks, shaking his sword at Brett across the field as our commander gives a final call to death and glory, and we roar something about honor as the sun blazes down on us.
“Eat them!” I scream, and Jason screams back that he’s peaking on acid. We slam into the other side hard enough to make William Wallace proud, bringing down the enemy with every slash of our blade and bathing in the blood of the fallen. Someone’s foam pipe hits me hard in the face and I know I’m out, but before I can join the ranks of the dusty and dead, I realize it’s Marty and how dare he! The blind fury takes over and I clock him as hard as I can in the ribs before bending to the rules of the melee.
With every corner brighter than the Vegas strip, it’s a miracle when we make it anywhere together, let alone a show on the other side of a nighttime riot 50,000 strong.
But we all feel tenderly towards San Francisco-based Beats Antique, and after standing around an Irish pub trading limericks for Guinness, we manage to arrive halfway through the set.
Birthed from a collaboration of dancer, musicians and producers, they are known for departing from the standard Burning Man “womp-womp” dubstep, even incorporating organic instruments. They played the Hookah Lounge stage at around midnight, and the only complaint was that they seemed to have left world-renowned belly dancer Zoe Jakes at home babysitting their instruments, and since DJ’s aren’t a very active species, their performance was limited to watching them pump the air and poke at their MacBooks. Although we came for an awesome show, settling for a seductive bass coming out of an awesome sound system wasn’t too disheartening. Our starry night at Beats Antique existed between fire dancers and torches, meshing minor-key eastern rhythms with glitchy electro for a strain that had burners writhing in their boots.
By the end of the set, our group members had made so many trips behind dark cars and nooks that we couldn’t see straight, crossing the playa sapped the last of our abilities and my bike escort forwent MartyParty.
Day Four
If it isn’t on fire or covered in LED lights, by Friday everything at Burning Man is gray. Bikes look like they were unearthed with the Pharaohs, and night is the only time when things look any cleaner than a post apocalyptic war zone.
In the back of our camp sits a kiddie pool and a pressurized spraying pump, to be used when I discover that my head is a dead ball of gray ash and that my tentmate looks like he just spent 50 years in a cave. I fold under the weight of my own grime and take something akin to a shower while the cave dweller shrugs, smooths his hair and eats a can of beans. His lips are getting as chapped as Bert’s, and the peeling skin is catching Chapstick in blobs.
“You look like a leper,” I say. “A very handsome leper.”
I throw a package of Indian food out into the beating sun and know it will be cooked by noon.
That evening, a 50-foot wooden Trojan horse is set to burn out on the Playa, kicking off the artistic destruction of the week. We go on foot to join the celebration, my peg-legs decorated with blisters and bruises. We’re all together at first, and all together regret not taking bikes after walking for 20 minutes and still not seeming any closer to the center. But the innards of the party circle seem different from the ground, and such a sparkle-time Christmas-town is easier to digest when it isn’t whizzing by. Everything is striking, but something cooler always seems to be farther up, and in a festival of centerpieces it’s strangely easy to do nothing.
Jump back to a conversation had while lounging in the heat of the day.
“HEY!” Max shouts to a passing bicyclist. “Get in here! Stop right now!” Man keeps going, looking back and probably wondering what we could offer him. Max laughs, “I love making them feel bad about not stopping. Next year I’m going to bring a bullhorn.”
In my mind I’m the bicyclist, and he’s already distracted by something cool up the street. But he won’t stop there either because further on there’s something even better, and even better after that, and he still can’t stop because he might miss the best thing, which must be just around that corner. Nah, that bar offering free drinks is pretty humdrum. Oh barf, that 70- foot yacht is playing shitty electro…fire dancers? Yawn.
There’s so much going on there isn’t anything going on. It seems like some kind of purgatory, especially on foot that evening when a weird mist drifts in 20 feet above our heads and Brett calls it the ghost layer. On foot, faces I can’t see are zooming past framed with glow sticks, and there’s a constant head count and feeling of being lost. The dub and electro in the background are stifled, muffled by the dust and the great expanse of desert space, the dust kicking up in patches looks like smoke, and some art cars belch plumes of hissing fire.
It’s like being in a giant pinball machine.
They set the horse on fire 40 minutes after they said it would go up, leaving us cooling our heels and wishing all the art cars weren’t parked in a massive head-banging clump around it.
For a minute Marty, Brett and I strike off on our own. I’d lured Brett out of camp by filling his head with mushrooms and he and I were getting antsy.
The most beautiful art installation I’ve seen looms above us, two massive iron hammers swinging around by way of people working giant gears. It’s like the Boardwalk’s Fireball except the hammer heads are cages filled with burning logs, and as they dip down and around and up, sparks fly through the air like the tails of two twin comets.
It’s huge and elemental, a contrast to the neon filaments dangling from every other thing on the Playa. I tell Brett it looks like something that belongs in Olympus, and he gets up to take a turn at the crank shaft.
“They said it’s broke twice already…” he says when he sits back down with a puff of dust and Marty bursts out laughing.
Day Five
It’s day five and I’m tired, sun-weary and fun-weary, and sailing on the pegs isn’t so peachy nowadays. Driver guffaws when he hears this, and “Oh, is it you who’s tired?”
The day passes slowly and he squeezes into my gold lamé leggings.
“I see you’ve been circumcised,” Jason approves. “Very nice.”
“Who wants to get free food? Brett asks. “I found a place that makes really good vegetarian stuff.” Away we go again, Bert in a witch hat tied to his head, Brett tucked into a speedo for the ass tan, me looking like I crawled out of the outback for the sixth time this week.
It’s our final hurrah since we’re planning to leave Sunday after the temple burns, but I’m scraping the bottom of my energy bucket, and still feel draggy after two extra strength five-hour energy bottles. Marty rubs my face with his head.
“It’s OK, Peggy. We’ll just have to eat whatever’s left in that pouch tonight.”
The Man burns at 9pm, and then the place will erupt into a Bacchanalian frenzy worthy of some roman emperor and unleash itself upon us all.
“Fuck!” Jason howls. “Someone stole my fucking bike!”
I mutter something about a nap.
Burning Man! Come and lose your friends!
Hopes of resting are buried when we roll in to find everyone else wrapped in giant furry coats, covered in glitter and attaching glow sticks to each other.
Diving into a sleeping bag for a theoretical half hour, I pledge that we’ll catch up with them at the neighboring Fuzz Patrol camp and all will be well. And then it’s 9 and we’re racing directly to the man, Marty pedaling and I encouraging, and right as we reach the edge of the crowd, we see the orange glow.
“Camera!” I shout, and he tosses it to me just in time to catch the hydrogen explosion that roars black and orange. The place erupts into cheers, and I leap off the pegs to get a better photo. People are dancing on top of art cars, and dancing in the dust, and Marty whoops as an arm falls off the man.
We watch until the thing collapses into a pile of fireworks, the destruction of art is complete, and the night is black and hot and the man is burning!
Out into the darkness of the deep playa to find a quiet spot to do something with the powder in the pouch, I can’t see the ground and I pretend we’re flying. The bike rattles across the flats, and we pass a lit-up unicorn and a playscape in the dark before coming upon our Jerusalem: a tall PVC jellyfish with silent wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. No one is in sight as we sit down, and I fall asleep on his knees.
The uproar from the sound camps is far away, and the glow from a thousand lights seems small. I wake up and out comes the pouch, but then so also comes a steady string of wanderers out from the glow, groups of three and four, lone riders, a man who lays down and goes to sleep. Away goes the pouch.
“Lets find a better spot,” Marty says as the next twinkle-party rolls up. “Less centrally located.”
The Playa is deep and dark and we’re all alone, jangling all the way to the movie theater before turning back, since American Graffiti doesn’t start until 2am. The wind is whistling colder now, and we decide to hit the jelly fish again and hope for fewer witnesses. We sit through waves of tourists until it’s just us two again, then doing our business and pointing the bike toward the raging chaos containing all our wayward campmates.
The music is weak but we are very awake. Boring electro and dub step with the variety of a bag of marshmallows. We jump around hopefully for an hour, and then hit a stage in time to miss the Beats Antique DJs. Instead we get Lowriderz, glitchy hip-hop we’ve never heard of, and which also slowly devolves into marshmallows.
We dance on with great fortitude until 2:30, then abandon the world and drink Squirt back at the shade structure.
Neither hide nor hair of Bert and the gang is ever found that night, but around 4 I’m woken up by the couple in the next tent over having uproarious sex.
Day Six
Judging by the shit I have left over, I was anticipating walking back to Santa Cruz.
I count five 2.5 gallons of water remaining, and half of my food store, and realize I only wore one set of clothes for the past seven days.
For our purposes Burning Man is over, and people move through the wreckage like refugees, covered in dust and dragging their feet. Sunday I do nothing, we eat all the food we don’t want to pack up, Marty cuts a watermelon and we give out the alcohol we don’t want to deal with.
It’s the evening for the temple burn, and all the confessions people wrote inside will accompany it to the night lands. Guilt will be released, the list of ex-girlfriends Max wrote on the wall will be lifted from his shoulders. Marty and I pegged there earlier in the week to see the triple hexagonal spires and the people on the sands floors meditating, reading about dead relatives and lost loves and the regret of 50,000 people.
We head back on Sunday with sharpies so we’ll also be moved when it burns, but we’re met with a chipper ring of caution tape and a construction crew packing it full of wood and other art pieces.
“I guess we’ll be keeping our guilt inside,” I muse, watching skaters do skating things on a wooden ramp. “What would you have written about?”
“Probably about a friend who died and who would have loved this.”
We leave to watch the burn at about 10:30, get through the obligatory losing and finding of a bike gang member, and make ourselves drinks at a table loaded with extra alcohol and margarita mix.
“This is going to be the biggest fire I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Marty says as we weave through the art car traffic. All the music is turned off for the temple burn, and people are quiet as the fire crew moves about the base. It’s a solemn world when feelings are burning, and we’ve been told that tears flow faster than the liquor.
It’s also the biggest fire I’ve ever seen, and the biggest silence. The culmination of a week spent living in a city based on giving and magic, and I remember the moment I entered Black Rock City and the ranger greeted us with a hug.
“Welcome home,” he’d said, and I thought I was just going to a festival. But Burning Man is less of a place filled with artists and stages; I only really saw Beats Antique at length. The community was the show and the residents all the performers I needed, their creativity was astounding and never ending, and the effort we all expended had made enough good will to make this a contender for happiest place on earth.
The fire soars away into the night and the towers come crashing down to the Playa while an escaped string of balloons filled with LED lights curls away through the stars, off to choke a dolphin.
