As with most cults, Burning Man’s foundation myth is fugitive. I had read that Larry Harvey, the Stetsoned founder, guru and spokesperson, was the adopted son of “Exodusters,” refugees from the Nebraska Dust Bowl. Shy, they said, socially awkward and impractical. My kind of guru. The story goes that Burning Man began in the 1980s as an act of expiation following Harvey’s abandonment by a woman he loved. He denies this narrative. The first “burn” was purely an exercise in “spontaneous self-expression,” he insists. It took place not in Nevada, not in the desert, but on a beach, Baker Beach in San Francisco. Papa La Mancha, a model of equability and tolerance, and a Burning Man aficionado, had seen Harvey give a talk in London: “It was the single worst talk I’ve ever seen,” he said as he drove. “It was incomprehensible.”
I pulled out my ticket and read the back: “You must bring enough food, water, shelter and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment. YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING.”
* * *
—
PAPA LA MANCHA and I had been driving for two hours. We were about thirty kilometres from the edge of the Black Rock Desert. He and Mama La Mancha, who would be arriving later, were middle-aged Londoners who’d met at Burning Man years before. He was not an anarchist or a hippy; he was a London Underground station-manager and this was his annual holiday. His dream, he told me, was to one year lay a temporary branch-line to Black Rock City across the playa from the Union Pacific freight line, which skirted the edge of the Black Rock Desert. Burners would be able to travel by train direct from Reno and it would reduce the traffic jams that blighted arrival and departure. He was a practical-minded fellow.
The road followed the Truckee River along the floor of a series of broad basins dense with grey-green sagebrush, Nevada’s dominant flora. In its greyness it reminded me of the shrubby chenopods that covered the Nullarbor Plain, the knee-high, clumpy saltbush and bluebush. Ahead of us was a convoy of Burner vehicles: RVs, station wagons packed with barrels of water, bicycles strapped to the roof; a trailer full of plastic unicorns, an old yellow school bus with a couch roped to the roof on which sat a bare-chested man in a Viking helmet. A friend in London had told me to look out for “the guy with two dicks.” I’d know him when I saw him, I supposed.
There were thousands of “theme camps” at Burning Man. A few months earlier, on the internet, I’d come across one that called itself La Mancha’s Bar and Cabaret. There were about twenty members. The La Manchas seemed appealingly errant, and I didn’t want to go alone. I emailed the address on their website and offered to help behind the bar, which in practice would mean ladling pre-mixed margaritas from a bucket.
Close to the defunct gypsum-mining community of Empire, twenty-five kilometres from the Burning Man site, the locals had set out their wares—dust goggles, feather boas, leggings, el-wire, the faux-fur coats that were a playa uniform during the cool nights. I was glad they were making something out of the invasion. Since a claim was established here in 1910, Empire’s lifeblood had been gypsum, a mineral evaporate of the vast lake that had once covered the region. The United States Gypsum Corporation—“the Gyp,” as they called it locally—had produced dryboard for the construction industry, but with the recession production had slowed until, by 2011, the plant was no longer viable. It had been a company town, and when the company left, so did the citizens, two hundred in total. Empire had become a ghost town, like the defunct nineteenth-century silver-mining enterprises scattered along the desert’s edge. The streets were filling with dust; the zip code had been discontinued. Apart from seasonal hikers tackling the old migrant trails, few outsiders passed through.
The great yearly event on the playa twenty-five kilometres away would not start officially till tomorrow, but the chaos was beginning; the excitement was building and the locals were a contented part of it. The last hamlet before you hit the playa is Gerlach (“Girl-lack,” the ranchers call it), where dozens more stalls had been set out. “Absolutely Everything Playa!” read a banner. The sheriff’s men standing around their cars at the roadside did not smile; there was no banter. The new sheriff of Pershing County was less tolerant of Burning Man than his predecessor. “Burning Man taxes this county,” he had told a local newspaper. “Pretty much everything they buy, they buy outside…they leave Pershing County high and dry.” The advance guard of Burners was more welcoming. In the town’s store a stranger in the queue introduced his baby daughter to me, and proffered a hug: “Welcome home, man.” It was a kind of mantra, welcome home, and if there was a currency at Burning Man it was the embrace. One of the theme camps, the Hug Bank, offered a “menu” ranging from “businesslike” to “awkward.”
As we left Gerlach and approached the playa, the local radio station was playing Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” “Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.”
* * *
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LAKE LAHONTAN, which once filled the basin of the Black Rock Desert, no longer exists, but water draining from the surrounding ranges each winter has continued to flood the dry surface periodically, adding millennia of sediment to those layers deposited by the lake. This is the playa. In places the sediment is deeper than the mountains around it are high—mountains from whose very substance, weathered away, atomised, and washed down canyons, the playa is largely formed. It is these processes, similar to those that formed the claypans I’d seen in Australia, that account for the evenness of the playa’s surface, as year after year it is swept and scoured and polished by water.
Once we left the road that followed the foot of the mountains, it took an hour to reach the entrance to the site a couple of kilometres from the edge of the playa. In the dust thrown up by the vehicles I did not appreciate the vastness of the setting, a three-hundred-square-kilometre plane whose solitary concession to the vertical—when Burning Man is not happening—is the occasional dust devil. Only the bones of the city grid were in place when we reached the site allocated to our camp: the edges of the streets marked out with mini surveyors’ flags, the lorries and shipping containers of the major camps waiting to be unloaded, the portapotties unsullied in their ranks. (Each line of toilets was signposted with a red light on a six-metre mast. Somebody, in the prankster spirit of the event, had had the forethought to weld a red-lighted mast to an adapted golf cart, which over the next week they drove about each night, trailed by anxious Burners.) The rest of our campmates had yet to arrive. There was hardly any music and the silence of the desert hadn’t yet been driven out. The city had no coherence; it was just scattered clutches of half-naked people and half-built scaffold structures, as if there were some doubt as to our continuing presence here. It was impossible to imagine what it would become, the feeling of permanence, even of decline, it would acquire.
Like most deserts the Black Rock Desert has historically been a place to skirt or to cross as quickly as possible, even for the indigenous Paiute tribes. Seldom before has man hung around here without necessity. The reports of those who encountered the place as explorers or migrants testify to its hardships; precisely the hardships that we—ketamine brats, Oregonian coders, pale scribes from the drizzly shires—were exposing ourselves to at such leisure. (Not that the experience was leisurely exactly.) In 1843, at around the same time as Sturt was seeking the inland sea of Australia, the explorer John C. Frémont set out to find another nonexistent body of water, the San Buenaventura River. In the course of his journey he mapped an immense desert realm encircled by mountain ridges, some 427,000 square kilometres including most of Nevada and western Utah: he called it the Great Basin. Like the Aral Basin, the Great Basin is endorheic, having no outflow of water to external bodies of water. It is partly this circumscribed geography that accounts for its thirty-five playas. The Great Basin is also basin-and-range country, a landscape of faults and scarps, filled with lesser basins. Its crust, stretched like toffee by the movement of tectonic plates millions of ye
ars ago, broke into lateral ridges trending north–south: basins separated by ranges. The first thorough geological survey of the former Lake Lahontan was carried out by Israel Cook Russell in 1882. Folded into a flap at the back of the resulting volume, published by the United States Geological Survey one year later, is a large map of the Great Basin, showing the land as it was during the Pleistocene when the lake was at its height, a body of water intruded upon by islands and spits, stretching north-east from today’s Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada all the way to Oregon. The valleys of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt Rivers are shaded blue to their brims, and today’s deserts—the Carson, Smoke Creek and Black Rock—likewise are underwater.
It was possible to see, even today, the ancient lake terraces etched into the slopes of the ranges on either side of the playa. I was sometimes reminded of the dry bed of the Aral Sea—the flatness, the whiteness, the winding contour lines of gravel that marked its onetime shoreline. But while it had been hard to overcome the sensation, when strolling among the ruins of its grounded boats, that the Aralkum was Felix Fabri’s “image of death,” the Black Rock Desert, in all its lethal starkness, seemed fully alive.
* * *
—
BY MORNING the rest of our campmates had arrived. Bob was dressed as a badger, and it suited him. Occasionally he would appear as Tiffany from Accounts in her green miniskirt, or Consuela, who was a chambermaid and had been known to vacuum the playa. She was delightful, but with his beard and middle-aged paunch he made a more plausible badger. Beaker was a fire juggler and a member of something called the fire conclave; he was wiry and wired and in fire-juggling he’d found the activity for which he was born. Hawthorn was an academic with a magnificent heap of purple dreads piled high on her head and a leather utility belt jangling with carabiners. She was forthright and practical and hilarious. Some Burners adopt a “playa name,” an alter-ego moniker, and I assumed this was the case with Brocket; but Brocket, it turned out, was the name he used in daily life in San Francisco, just as Beaker and Hawthorn were also called Beaker and Hawthorn back in Britain. Call me Dryhenceforth.
Carabinered to a belt loop you carried a tin mug, and all day and night you went from camp to camp and got your mug filled with whatever happened to be on offer, which tended not to be anything so essential as water, and was very often a concoction whose only identifiable chemical was alcohol. There was a lot of nudity, lots of what Papa La Mancha called “shirt-cocking.” If you walked out of a dust storm and came across a couple screwing on the ground, they’d barely give you a second glance. Black Rock City was sometimes called a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a term coined by the anarchist thinker Hakim Bey, who defined the “TAZ” as “an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen before the State can crush it.” Burning Man was temporary, certainly: a key principle was “leave no trace.” Two months after the last Burner had left, the only sign that the thing had happened was a slight compaction of the playa surface. It was a condition of Burning Man’s licence that the playa be restored, but it was also part of its ethos. If it was not dust it was MOOP, and must not be allowed to remain. Matter out of place.
But Burning Man was hardly an uprising, and if autonomy meant a lack of social impositions then it was far from autonomous: the state, and the organisation’s interactions with it, were essential and visible everywhere. Not only Pershing County Sheriff’s Office and the Bureau of Land Management but the State Health Department and Highway Patrol and the Department of Transportation and the federal administrations of aviation and communication. In order to receive its Special Recreation Permit, Burning Man had each year to submit an operating plan to the Bureau of Land Management. It was a vast civic collaboration, even an achievement of capitalism, and while you were largely free to imbibe whatever drugs you pleased and walk about wearing nothing but a shirt (“shirt-cocking”), or, say, a leash, you were not at liberty to cross the fence that separated Black Rock City from the rest of the playa. Then there were the ten principles drawn up by Larry Harvey, principles that might be called rules, or laws. These were Radical Inclusion, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Gifting, Leaving No Trace, Immediacy and Participation. You were responsible for keeping yourself alive, and everyone contributed to maintaining the city and creating the spectacle. There was no advertising and, in theory, no spectators.
On Baker Beach, back in San Francisco, in 1987, the Man—Harvey’s first wooden man—had been maybe three metres tall, knocked together in his garage. Soaked in gasoline, it was gone in minutes. This was nearly thirty years ago, when there had been eight participants, including Harvey. Today something like ten thousand times that number were here. Tickets were hard to come by, and cost hundreds of dollars; some people paid thousands, and there were the so-called turnkey camps, which offered package tours to the Silicon Valley millionaires who wished to fly into the desert and stay in dustless luxury for the price of a Nevada ranch.
By 1990, the Man was more than nine metres tall, and eight hundred people packed the beach. The police began to take an interest. The Man was raised that year, but by agreement with the authorities he was not burnt. Harvey began to look around for alternative venues. One of his friends had visited a huge playa on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, beyond Reno, best known as a venue for land-speed records: the Black Rock Desert. In 1990 a flyer circulated in San Francisco: “Bad Day at Black Rock (Zone Trip #4)…the Zone Trip is an extended event that takes us outside of our local area of time and place. On this particular expedition, we shall travel to a vast, desolate, white expanse stretching onward to the horizon in all directions.” Burning Man has continued to take place annually on or near the site of the 1990 Zone Trip. This year the Man was eighteen metres tall and Black Rock City’s population, dispersed among hundreds of camps, was bigger than that of Nevada’s capital, Carson City. Arriving at the playa edge in 1990, the leader of the Zone Trip, whose playa name was Ranger Danger, reportedly stooped to draw a line in the dust. One by one, goes the founding fable, the participants stepped over it.
* * *
—
BROCKET HAD A tufty Mohican dyed in rainbow colours. He held his weight with daintiness, and walked with a patient, deliberate languor, as if carrying something that might spill. He would not be hurried. “This used to be a gay camp,” he told me mournfully, “now it’s a geek camp,” and that explained its location in Black Rock City’s gayborhood. I was one of La Mancha’s geeks, but he hadn’t meant it unkindly. He was a designer for Google, and dressed beautifully—with the absurd, coherent eclecticism of a celebrity drag queen. He had a new costume for each day: on one occasion a pink chiffon tutu so vast it was barely possible to make him out within; another night he was costumed as an orange, with a tiny orange cocktail hat; on Friday a dreadfully snug evening dress that might have been blue-and-black and might have been white-and-gold. He’d been a member of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and one night in the cabaret tent performed a karaoke rendition of “Close to You” that, at the time, seemed like the most exquisite thing I had ever heard. It was Brocket who would be my mocking guide to the city—mocking my reserve and my explorer’s attire. One evening I met him by chance on the open playa: “I used to be a bit witchy,” he confided. He’d been some kind of San Francisco wicken, he gave me to understand. “But then this one time I saw a malevolent presence in the mirror. That was that.”
On that first morning we set to work pitching the tents and canvas carports and shade structures that would make our time here tolerable. Papa La Mancha knew how to direct a workforce and saw no reason to accept discomfort. Every afternoon he would magic up an array of rare cheeses, prosciutto and good cold wine. It was one of many miracles of civility in the heat and dust. At one of the other camps, lobst
er was dished up nightly, first come, first served.
Our camp’s tents and yurts were pitched beneath a three-metre-high horizontal canopy. Ordinary tent pegs were useless; they’d bend when you hammered them into the hard playa, and would hold nothing against the gales. Everything was tethered to the ground with thirty-centimetre lengths of steel rebar. There were a dozen large iceboxes to keep the food fresh, a generator, three 2-ring industrial camp stoves and a shower with an evaporation pit lined with tarp. There were six plastic 120-litre barrels of drinking water, and three for washing-up and showers. From 9 a.m. we worked solidly for five hours, knowing that in six days’ time we would dismantle what we had built, just as the Man, erected over the course of weeks, would be destroyed. All those millions of hours and dollars. This was the point of Burning Man, of course—it would all be obliterated.
Over the mountains to the north-west, that first day, a terraced stack of lenticular clouds towered watchfully in an otherwise clear sky. It was a Martian sight. The clouds seemed gravid with something more than water, and they scarcely strayed over the following hours. As noon passed, however, and the wind strengthened, the clouds began to shred, until the dust in the air was so heavy that the sky was no longer visible. Our first dust storm. Already my skin was coarsening. A tightness in my head. By 2 p.m. it was impossible to work, to build our camp—we’d only had time to set up a canvas carport before the gale hit in its fullness, winds of eighty kilometres per hour, and under this cover eight of us cowered miserably and in silence but for the odd grunt of hangdog despair. Six more days.
The Immeasurable World Page 26