See you at Burning Man, hippie

When people have asked me “how was Burning Man?” I typically have made an extravagant face and said, “God.” The way I say it takes about ten seconds from start to finish. In this case, it hardly counts as using His name in vain.

Where do I even begin? You can’t even answer the question “What is Burning Man?” in a straightforward manner without committing the gravest sins of omission. Burning Man is unlike anywhere I have ever been, as unfamiliar as an alien planet. What made going there such a rewarding vacation is that it was even a vacation from real life. It’s not as if Burning Man achieves this effect by some single describable aspect of the event, or even a set of bullet points. It creates its uniquely surreal space by bringing together, into a relatively small area, so many intense, sometimes contradictory spaces and events that one feels profound sensory overload. Burning man is so many things all at once, everywhere at once.

For one, it’s an extreme dessert camping project. It’s held in the middle of the Black Rock dessert in northwestern Nevada, in a dried-up alkaline lakebed hostile to all forms of life, including ours. Temperatures rose to over 100 during the day and fell to 50 or so at night. The dried-up ground, known as playa, is so fine and blown around so constantly that you get coated in it in a matter of hours (imagine how we looked after a week or so [or skip to the end]). Sometimes wind storms would cause total white-outs for an hour at a time, during which you couldn’t do much more than hunker down and try to find indoor shelter. It’s difficult to understate the ferocity of these winds. I saw a large geodesic dome made of steel and canvas crumple like paper during one storm. Burning Man is not for the weak of body. Or mind — everything we brought had to be battened down to survive the same storms.

For another, Burning Man is an art festival, which is the straightforward sinful answer alluded to above. Everywhere you looked people were busy building, operating, or experiencing the most bizarre structures imaginable, all put up for the space of a week and then torn down, hauled away, or burnt. I spent a lot of my time riding around on my bike, investigating blips on the horizon to see if they were interesting, which they almost always were. Some of my favorite pieces included this PC Stonehenge and the giant scrap metal sculptures outside of center camp. But that’s to say nothing of the scale-model great pyramid, which at night glowed with an unearthly light from deep within, humming uncannily. Some of the art was political, like this piece commenting on the republican hijacking of America. It caught on fire one night, which everyone thought was intentional at first, but it turns out the lamps just got too close to the papier mache. A great deal of the art was functional, like the huge wooden structure everyone called the Belgian waffle. Lots of people took pictures of the waffle.. It didn’t seem like it should be free-standing, but it was, and they had enough confidence in its structural integrity to pack hundreds of sweaty dancers inside all night every night. One of the most remarkable sculptures resembled a giant pincushion made entirely of bamboo and lashings. Later in the week someone attached a climbing rope to the top to allow the brave (myself included) a chance to climb up. Then there was the human-wash piece parked on the Esplanade, which did nothing to scrub off the accumulated layers of playa but felt wonderful. Riding around with Jason and Miles one day, we took shelter from the noon sun inside a pyramidal structure we happened to ride past. Imagine our delight when we entered and found it was full of sod. I was constantly amazed by the lengths to which people went to create something extraordinary for others to experience.

For another thing, Burning Man is an all-day, all-night party. Dance clubs — many of them built inside giant geodesic domes — begin to spin up around dinner time and pump the music at full blast until well after dawn. Alcohol and other substances flow freely during the day — my second day I got drunk three times before sunset — and increases to a fever pitch once the sun goes down. Everywhere you go, whether it was to a theme camp, riding on an art car, walking around the playa, people give you free drinks. On more than one occasion someone threw a beer at me as I rode by on my bike. Incidentally, Burning Man has a gift-based economy — you’re not allowed to buy or sell anything, but you can (and people do) give things away constantly.

For yet another thing, Burning Man is an extreme entertainment spectacle. Take, for example, Dance Dance Immolation, which is a lot like the popular arcade game Dance Dance Revolution except that when you make a mistake they shoot you with flame throwers. Or consider the thunderdome built and operated by the Death Guild. The first fight I watched, between two girls, led me to believe the padded weapons had sucked all the blood out of the sport. Then two burly men entered, and one of them proceeded to wrap his legs around the other and beat him until he couldn’t stand.

The most interesting things invariably happened at night, away from the oppressive heat, and the entire experience was radically different from during the daytime. From out in the playa, the inhabited part of Burning Man looked like the Vegas strip, a constantly shifting and flashing wall of neon. Everywhere you looked, bizarre, colorful, and inexplicable things were happening. I’d be walking or riding, marveling at light-up costumes, trying not to get hit by any art cars, then suddenly random bursts of flame would flare on the horizon. Then an art car would clatter by, blasting techno music. Then a raver kid would ask me if I had any ecstasy. Etc. I spent a good solid couple of nights exploring the playa on my bicycle, riding from point of light to point of light, never failing to find something amazing, be it an art installation, an art car, a group of random people surrounded by glow sticks, etc. I can’t seem to find as many night-time pictures (hint: drunkenness), but I did stumble on a couple representative shots, such as this infinite mirror. Everyone spent some time gawking at this light display, understandably so. It created moving three-dimensional images and had a dozen or so different display modes, truly a wonder to behold. At any given time it was surrounded by a handful of drugged out burners worshipping its every flicker. Dr. Megavolt’s extreme electricity displays speak for themselves.

Finally, Burning Man is big. This year’s event drew 38,000 paying participants, plus probably a couple thousand more that snuck in. The camp measures about two miles in diameter, which is about as big as it sounds. I saw a tiny fraction of what it had to offer. To say what it “is,” besides “amazing,” is impossible. There’s something there for everyone. As a brief example, several days I volunteered for the Black Rock Postal Service, delivering mail around camp and accepting bribes in return. I met a lot of interesting people and took a lot of interesting bribes, and I got to fulfill my inner Boy Scout.

If I had to say what the event is “about,” I would have to answer: personal freedom. Burning Man is a place where the normal rules and demands of society just don’t apply. It’s a place where you don’t have to wear clothing if you don’t feel like it, where you can give out 3,000 home-made light sabers to strangers in order to recreate the battle for Genosis, where you can run as close to the Man as you want while it burns to the ground. You can even build a hugely unsafe amusement park ride, then let passersby, most of whom have been abusing substances all day, try their luck on it unattended. I rode a half-dozen contraptions at least as scary as the giant teeter-totter pictured, coming closer to injury every time, and never got tired of it.

Also, I was there with people, although I didn’t spend too much time with a lot of them. Some of them have pictures online. These include Ivone, Kelly, and Dave. Here is the obligatory picture of me playing guitar with my signature side-mouth singing.