Burning Man: Heat, dust and dreams on the Playa
Credit to Author: Dave Pottinger| Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2019 22:33:53 +0000
Burning Man is famously impossible to describe, so I’m not even going to try. I won’t talk about driving 17 straight hours from Vancouver, picking up one of the few RVs available that week along the Western seaboard, and swapping it out for my car in Portland. I definitely won’t get into passing a massive U.S. military installation in Hawthorne, Nevada, since, along with nearby Area 51, it has severe access restrictions.
I can, however, tell you how, upon arriving at this sprawling cultural festival, us Burning Man virgins are made to roll around in the white-flour dust of the Playa, embracing the dirt we’d mentally prepared ourselves to combat. It takes mere seconds for the dust to cling to our clothes, skin and psyche. I’ve spent years waiting to get to this legendary cultural festival, and I am as nervous and apprehensive as anyone.
Egos and tops are often cast off at Burning Man. Robin Esrock
Nothing to buy? No taps, showers, or garbage bins?
70,000-plus people in the heat of the desert, and somehow all this is meant to be fun?
Burning Man is many things to many people: an art festival, showcasing thousands of sculptures, modified cars and creative installations; a music festival, with hundreds of professional and makeshift venues for DJ’s and musicians; a giant costume party, with everyone wearing something extraordinary, if they choose to wear anything at all; a conference for the mind, offering lectures and educational seminars from thinkers across the creative arts and social science spectrum; a religious festival, steering clear of organized dogma into the outer realms of spiritual expression, open worship of the universe, and a deep reverence for the beauty of diversity; a love festival — public displays of affection acceptable; a community of likeminded individuals gathering in a remote place to avoid the confused, ignorant reaction of those who simply don’t get it, and probably never will; a backlash against corporate America, where no brands advertisements, promotion or even commerce is allowed.
It’s the wildest, most hedonistic party you’ve ever seen. And, it’s safe to argue, Burning Man is none of these things at all.
Burning Man is part art festival, showcasing thousands of sculptures, modified cars and creative installations.
It started in 1986 with a small group of artists in a hostile desert, challenging their creative limits and engaging in a form of self-reliance and personal responsibility — this in a nation drunk on liability. There are countless ways to kill yourself at Burning Man, from exposure to extreme weather to getting toasted by a rogue art piece. It’s your responsibility to stay alive, even though just about everyone you meet will gladly help you out (including volunteer rangers and medical staff). Community membership is viewed as a privilege, and the underlying philosophy is: If you don’t get it, please don’t come, you’ll hate every second of it.
I didn’t expect the scale of the event to be so huge, the creative energy so vast. Black Rock City emerges overnight as the second-largest city in Nevada. It is shaped like a clock, organized by the hands of the hour and 12 long, circular promenades. Bicycles are essential if you want to see all that’s on offer, with the city stretching over five miles across.
Scenes from Burning Man
There are hundreds of camps and villages set up along the grid, identified as tribes ranging from a few members to several hundred. Each camp offers something of value to the casual passerby: Free cocktails, hot tamales, engaging conversation. Free massages, games of tennis, bowling, a mechanical bull ride. Free rides, free bad advice, free hugs, free kisses, free help. Free beds, free art, free costumes, free decorations for your bike. Everyone seems to bring more than they need and need less than they want. It’s a free for all, and it takes a while to recalibrate my capitalistic conditioning so that I stop asking what’s the catch.
I see things that shock, surprise, dazzle and delight me. Moments of beauty, moments of overstimulation, moments of bewilderment. Every time I stop to ask, “How on Earth did they get that giant _____ here?” I am reminded to stop questioning and start accepting.
Scenes from Burning Man
My guides are friends old and new, veteran Burners and virgins like myself. Some thrive in the heavy dust storms that blind and sting. Others, including hundreds of families with young kids, thrive in the theme camps and villages. Some prefer the scorching hot day, others the cool, LED-lit night. Drawing it all in together is the Man himself, a statue erected on a wooden platform at 12 o’clock, gazing out over the playa. His design changes annually, and the Man during my visit stands 30 metres tall, regally awaiting the Friday-night climax of the weeklong event — his destined combustion.
Any second now he’s going to erupt into a giant fireball; sometimes he burns fast, sometimes he burns slow. A huge dust storm sweeps in, blowing fiery ash into the crowd. This is not cause for concern. The crowd is well prepared with the right gear and attitude. Only at Burning Man do harsh elements become cause for celebration.
The climax of the week-long event is the burning of the Man.
There’s a Monkey Chant in the Centre Camp, hypnotically blending voices to become a cacophony of sound. Hippies and corporate sharks, artists and number crunchers, Silicon Valley millionaires and homeless wanderers. Is the guy playing the flaming tuba really one of the producers of The Simpsons? Are those bikes among the thousands donated by the founders of Google? Was that Bono who just walked past me? Is that Mark Zuckerberg’s theme camp? What does it matter?
I spend a half-hour looking for a friend at Centre Camp, and realize that even if I walk right past her, I probably won’t recognize her, and she won’t recognize me. I am wearing red underwear with printed eyes on my thighs, blue wings made out of recycled water bottles, a bright shock of green wig, ski goggles and a dust mask.
Costumes allow anybody to become anyone or anything, and they do. Superheroes or furry animals, desert squid or neon robots. Women can be naked or topless without fear of harassment, as the Burning Man community won’t stand for young, drunken fratboys. The community is a self-regulating system, an entropic organism that shakes out the dust and arises.
My friend, Burner veteran and filmmaker Ian Mackenzie, is never shy to initiate a philosophical debate. “Is this the real world, or is the real world out there?”
“Perhaps the real world should be more like Burning Man,” I ponder.
“Look, it’s all well and good until the food and water runs out, and then it will quickly turn into Lord of the Flies,” says Vancouver-based public sculptor Bruce Voyce. Applying the lessons of Burning Man is a common theme at many workshops. Taking away the sense of community — of environmental responsibility, of respect for those around you — has led to dozens of regional “Burns” and “Decompressions” around the world.
The Temple is the spiritual soul of Burning Man. Anyone who visits it will instantly recognize why there’s so much more to this festival than flame-breathing dragon cars, stilt bars and half-naked discos.
The Temple at Burning Man: a sacred space.
The Temple is a massive, sacred act of wood, a solemn place to say goodbye to loved ones lost, dreams abandoned, or anything that needs to be released. People write on its walls, in the cracks, on the wooden platforms. I gaze at life-size photos of Burners lost before their time. Tears drip off the face of people in private confessions, sad waters hitting the dust like syrup leaking from a maple tree. I can only stand and watch, aware and grateful that this week marked a personal beginning and not an end.
It was here, in a camp dome surrounded by my tribe, that I asked my girlfriend to marry me. On our second visit, she was pregnant with our daughter. And so it is here that our lives moved to the next step. Mourning at the Temple with everyone else can wait as long as I can help it.
On the final night of the weeklong festival, with thousands already braving insane traffic to return to the real world, the Temple is set aflame, a raging inferno of emotional relief. We can feel the heat from far away, its unmistakable energy rushing through us, ash soaring into the starlit sky. It is beautiful, it is sad, it is magic.
In recent years, Burning Man’s influence has hit a tipping point, with the fringe gathering now featured across major media outlets, in sitcoms, as a punch line in late-night TV monologues.
Tickets sell out in hours, and there is deep concern within the community that it has got too big, at risk of losing its spirit and being shut down by the authorities. Time will tell.
Vancouver-based Robin Esrock is the bestselling author of The Great Global Bucket List and The Great Canadian Bucket List.