The sign in the store in Gerlach had read: WELCOME TO NOWHERE. Imagine the late 1840s, when Gerlach was nothing but a military outpost below towering grey mountains. What must those migrants from the fertile east have made of the playa when they came to it, knowing that it was not endless but with little conception, surely, of what hardship it held? Nothing in their experience, even the deserts they had already crossed, could have prepared them for it. Flatness they knew—they had crossed the Great Plains; but this pallor, this absence of everything but pallor? A different order of denudation.
Black Rock Point is a 180-metre-high prominence that marks the southernmost point of a mountain range that cuts into the playa about twenty-five kilometres north-east of the Burning Man site. As we approached it, the surface of the playa became bumpier, and we joined a track that coasted between grey-brown nebkha mounds of the kind I had seen in Arabia and the Taklamakan: metre-high hummocks crowned with clumps of iodine bush. The first vegetation we’d seen for nearly a week. Beyond the hummocks, where the ground was sandier, were bushes of greasewood turning yellow with the approach of autumn and salt-grass as rigid as broom-bristles. There were intermittent bursts of yellow-flowering balsamroot. Flowers! And all of this colour and abundance because of the mineral water venting from the fault that ran along the Black Rock Range. The mountains showed the violence of their origins, but this feeling of violence was eased at the playa’s edge by the water and greenery. We saw our driver off, and as the noise of her vehicle vanished into the playa’s silence, the plume of dust it had sent up was slowly pushed away, until the view to the south and west was clear again, except for the mighty updraught of dust from Black Rock City. The quiet. Just the wind, and when it dropped, our breathing.
The pool fed by the spring was about seven metres across at its widest point, rush-fringed and kidney-shaped, the steaming water surfacing from the volcanic depths at one lobe and growing cooler towards the other. What wasn’t clear was whether we too, as the site’s supposed guardians, were expected to refrain from entering the clear warm water, having spent five days in the dust and heat with nothing to clean ourselves with but baby-wipes.
Once I met Amy I came to regard the trip as payment for the hours I’d spent in the golf cart with Acumen. We decided to climb Black Rock Point. The Black Rock Desert is sometimes described as Y-shaped, but on maps it looks more like a forked flame. Black Rock Point is the tip of the range that separates its two arms. The climb was perilous; black scree tumbling behind us with every step, every handhold crumbling. Amy strode ahead as if she were climbing a flight of stairs. From 180 metres up we looked out at the playa’s western arm stretching thirty kilometres north. The alkali dust from the past five days had dried my hands and feet to husks and clogged my nose. My body reeking under its stale clothes was as pale and crazed as the playa. My beard had grown an uneven canopy of white wires. Never before had my beard grown white. I had been there for less than a week. We found a clutch of casings from a service-issue Smith & Wesson; a memorial scribed in iron and messily cemented into the rock; and small offerings to the dead woman—coloured stones, bullets, dimes, a shard of obsidian. We were not the first to come here, even if we felt a pioneer frisson.
The view seemed to rear up at you. The playa was of polar vastness, scattered with cloud shadows; and of polar whiteness, save for an ingress of dirty green at the mountain’s foot, where the spring watered the desert. The air was clear. One kilometre might be twenty. Clear, but for one section, mid-playa, twenty-five kilometres to the south. A tract about three kilometres across was in cloud; but it was not cloud, of course, or smoke, but the upcast dust of Black Rock City. It towered in a tendrilled column a kilometre tall—way above the mountaintops, way above the clouds that sat over the mountains. I thought of the dust storms of Hotan and the Aral Sea, the atomic clouds of Maralinga, and felt the guilt of one who has fled his homeland before its fall. Black Rock City was under siege by the wind, but it was the city itself, with its massed movement, that had unleashed the dust. Black Rock City, the most ironic place on earth.
I had begun to feel, before escaping that morning, that the place was intolerable—or at least that I could tolerate it no longer—and now that I had my freedom, temporarily, the thought of being deported back there was painful. The dust and the constant EDM. The crazed frat-boys, the unrelenting Californian shrieks of “Oh my God!”—a phrase that brooked such a variety of inflections that there was seemingly no circumstance to which it was not the perfect response. Hakim Bey had described the “TAZ” as “a guerrilla operation which liberates an area”; but the desert was already liberated, and there was a sense in which Burning Man deprived it of that liberty.
“I know where I’d rather be,” said Amy. Among the dust, she told me, were the tiny eggs of fairy shrimp, which with each flood would hatch and fill the shallow waters with swarming larvae. “Sea monkeys.” We were also breathing shrimp eggs, then. For this expedition, where crampons would not have been inappropriate, she was wearing flat-soled plimsolls and harem pants. She found me absurd, naturally. Desert boots. Oh my God. We were getting cold. It was time to go back down; down to the heat. She clambered ahead of me. I watched her edge down the scree facets and along the ridges of the black bajadas and onto the green rim of the playa, where we had set up a sail of cloth as a shade among the nebkha mounds. When I reached our small base, she was sitting on the wiry grass beside the wrecked chassis of a nineteenth-century sheep-herder’s cart, gnawing on a strip of beef jerky. “I know,” she said. “I’m an animal.” I looked to the south and the terrible cloud rising from the city.
* * *
—
IN JUNE 1846 an exploratory party from Oregon, seeking a less hazardous alternative to the established Oregon Trail from Missouri to north-west Oregon, reached the Black Rock Desert. Lindsay Applegate, one of the two brothers leading the expedition, echoed Frémont: the country “had a very forbidding appearance.” The party continued south-east to Black Rock Point and eventually discovered a chain of waterholes that connected to the California Trail, establishing a new, shorter route to Oregon. For those migrants travelling to California’s Sacramento Valley three years later, however, the route represented not a shortcut but a three-hundred-kilometre extension to their journey. What prompted so many to take it is unclear, but presumably once one wagon had turned off many others simply followed. Nose to tail is how we enter oblivion.
In April 1849, hundreds of wagons bound for California from the eastern seaboard veered north from the California Trail and followed the Applegate cut-off towards the Black Rock Desert. The testimony that exists makes pitiful reading. The party of Alonzo Delano, a dry-goods merchant from Illinois, had misgivings about the detour, but “it was decided finally we would go the northern route.” They would regret the decision. “Beyond us, far as we could see, was a barren waste, without a blade of grass or a drop of water for thirty miles at least. Instead of avoiding the desert…we were in fact on a more dreary and wider waste.” They left the vegetated rim of the playa, and set upon its cracked surface. “I encountered a great many animals, perishing for want of food and water, on the desert plain. Some would be gasping for breath, others unable to stand would issue low moans as I came up, in a most distressing manner, showing intense agony…” A drawing by one J. Goldsborough Bruff shows the scene his party encountered at a dry waterhole on the desert’s edge in September that year: dozens of dead and dying cattle; a sky full of “TV’s” and, floating above the mountains, the words “Darkness and harsh mts.”
A few miles from Black Rock Spring, Delano came upon a wagon. Inside was a young woman and a child, both weeping. “Where is your husband?” he asked. “He has gone on with the cattle,” the woman replied, “and to try to get us some water, but I think we shall die before he comes back. It seems as if I could not endure it much longer.” Giving the pair his remaining water—“ ‘God bless you,’ said she, grasping the flask eagerly”—Delano
led them north, and the party reached the springs the following morning, though most of the grass had been grazed to the root. He climbed to the top of Black Rock Point to gain his bearings and then descended to bathe in the springs. One James Bardin, crossing the desert in 1855, warned that the springs were “hot enough to scald a boy”; Israel Foote Hale, six years earlier, came upon “an ox that had been scalded to death, his hind part was in the spring and his forepart on the bank.” But Delano “with many others, availed myself of the opportunity to take a thorough renovation, which we found exceedingly refreshing.”
Amy and I stripped and knelt on the small jetty that extended into the water furthest from the vent and dipped our fingers, and then our toes. It was bathwater hot. Slipping off the jetty, we wallowed on our arses, the water up to our necks, sulphuric bubbles siphoning from the disturbed sediment. We were doing no more damage than a pair of hogs. A breeze tousled the rushes and a raven wheeled into the frame and hung above us for a few slow wing-beats, turning its head to eye the creatures lounging below. Mr. W. Hog. Mrs. A. Hog. Mark Twain was right: “nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.” Amy stood up and the bird flew off. I listened for the sound of the city, but all I could hear was the wind in the rushes.
* * *
—
BACK AT BLACK ROCK CITY she said, “You stink of eggs.” She had promised to take acid with her campmates that evening. We didn’t make plans to meet again, though perhaps we would. By now the air was clear and the sunset over the Calico Mountains was glorious, but on this penultimate day there was a sense everywhere of aftermath: the wind storm we had seen from Black Rock Point had left many of the camps in a state of partial ruin; it was as if the city had been sacked. The contents of my tent, once I got the dust-jammed zip to unzip, lay under a Vesuvian layer of dust, and many of the toggles that secured the communal shade structure had been torn off. I found my campmates slumped silently in a circle of camp chairs in the cabaret tent. They were dazed and covered in dust and they looked at me, without much recognition, from eyes ringed with goggle-marks. “Welcome to the we-don’t-want-to-party party,” said Brocket. The storm had been horrible. I was scrubbed and pink, and relaxed for the first time in days. Years, it felt like. I had abandoned them during the great battle, and I was glad. From all around, as the sun dipped below the rim of the Calico Mountains, there was a massed howling. It happened every evening at sunset, but tonight it was louder, and it came from far and near. We joined in, first Brocket then all of us, tipping our heads and baying to the sky.
The Man was due to burn at seven. A ring had been established around him containing firefighters and hundreds of fire-jugglers, -breathers and -eaters. The Fire Conclave—among them somewhere was Beaker. As the hour approached, we were no longer Burners but an ordinary civic crowd at a fireworks show or carnival, with all the usual impatience and defensiveness and jostling for position. There was a protocol, it seemed: you were to sit down, so that those behind you could see, even if that meant you could not. Anyone who contravened this was yelled at—“Sit the fuck down, man!”—and this person, the particular one in front of us, aggrieved and exhausted, bellowed back in return, “Dude, fuck you!” and the first guy rushed him and there was pushing, and an exchange of doggy-punches.
The Man’s arms were winched into the air and the flames took hold, and a crescendo of fireworks emerged from all around him. As the fireworks reached the apex of their intensity two vast explosions engulfed the figure in a hideous plume of flame and his arms dropped to his sides, vanquished. For twenty minutes he remained standing, headless, as he burnt, supported by a steel armature. By the time it all finally gave way, and what remained of the figure came crashing down, the crowd was dispersing.
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING MORNING the playa was scattered with hundreds of abandoned bicycles. The air reeked of smoke. Where the man had burnt was a smouldering pit of ashes. But that night something of the week’s earlier mood returned, a sort of tenderness. By now much of the city had been dismantled. Abandoned by the Man, it was easy to lose your bearings. It was Burning Man’s ephemerality that was so remarkable: that it re-formed itself, Brigadoon-like, each year, essentially the same city, and that the playa itself, the ground where the city stood, would be swept clean, and where people had been dancing and laughing and falling in love there would soon be no one and no human things, and the chief point of navigation for those crossing it would not be the Man but, as it had been for the pioneers and the Paiute tribes before them, once again that dark mound of weathered andesite. Black Rock Point had once been the place where your party regrouped, where you met others preparing for the next stage, to California or Oregon; above all, it had been a place of dependable water. It occurred to me how unimaginable to Delano would be the vast voluntary encampment deep in the desert that had caused him such anguish. We do not often hear the stories of those humans who died, some nine hundred bound for California alone; in their suffering, the animals—“gasping for breath,” “unable to stand”—must be their proxies. Was it us, Amy and Brocket and Hawthorn and me, for whom Delano and the other pioneers had opened up the desert—to allow his descendants, 150 years later, to abide in the “perfect barren” without risking death; and not only to survive in it, but to play dildo ring-toss and eat lobster in it? It looked like a blank, the playa, but it had a history just like anywhere else. Lives had been terribly changed by it; the Black Rock Desert had lodged in the memories of thousands of people as their worst place, a sort of death in life. And yet here we were, in all our frivolity, and it was glorious. This was how America had learned to love the desert—by vanquishing it: squandering its aquifers, exhausting its minerals, destroying its silences; by eating ham and eggs in it.
* * *
—
AROUND THE TEMPLE the following night, as we waited for its destruction, there was again the prohibited ring, again the firefighters in their quilted suits, the tens of thousands of us watching. But there was a subdued quality to the crowd tonight, and the only music was from someone who had taken it upon himself to blow “Amazing Grace” into some bagpipes. A whiff of incense. A procession of torch-bearers approached the Temple. When the first flames had become visible around the Man there was cheering and whooping, but this evening the main sound was the flames.
The tail of the giant spiral was lit first. As the fire took hold, and the flames began to climb the walls of the Temple, you could hear weeping, and someone far away shouted, “I love you, Dad” and someone closer shouted, “Oh God, Christine!” and another voice simply repeated, “Love you, love you, love you”—and then, from nearby, a thundering Californian snarl: “Burning-Man-two-thousand-fifteen-make-some-fucking-noise!” Nobody made any, apart from some stifled laughter that was almost pitying, and someone who recited, or read, those words of Beckett’s about failing better. I thought of all those written messages of love and grief. One year ago today my mother took her own life. Fuck cancer. Andrew, what happened to you? Travel safely, dear brother.
Then the only sounds were the intensifying roar of the flames, which had engulfed the whole structure, and the regular stark cracks as timbers snapped; then a muffled whoomph and the towering arch of the Temple toppled forward, throwing out a ten-storey wave of heat and sparks. I gazed up at thousands of glowing embers falling amid the stars. Holy shit, holy shit, uttered from all around as the inferno’s heart glowed red. Dust and smoke were indistinguishable from one another. Holy shit, holy shit. Within the inferno a tornado of fire developed, complement to the dust devils that had slinked across the playa. The firefighters were silhouettes, hurrying back and forth. The heat continued to intensify. I looked behind me and scanned the thousands of lit faces—dusty, burnt and weary—and saw that they seemed at peace, and that many of them, like my own, were wet-eyed.
* * *
—
IN SUDAN the Sahara is sometimes called Bahr bela ma, “sea
without water.” Charles Sturt had seen Australia’s Stony Desert as a “sandy sea” even while he maintained his belief in the existence of a real sea at the centre of the continent. For Bertram Thomas the Rub’ al-Khali was a “troubled sea”; Aurel Stein’s Taklamakan was a “choppy sea, with its waves petrified in wild confusion”…But looking out with Amy on the great lolloping heaving beast that was the Pacific Ocean, after the exquisite stillness of the Black Rock Desert, I thought the equation forlorn. What made the sea so awesome—in the Oxford as well as the Californian sense—was not its vastness or its openness, nor even its depth, but the global energy invoked by its movement. It was alive.
We were spending a week on the California coast south of San Francisco, after driving over the Sierra Nevada from Reno. She was still in the harem pants she’d had on when we met. Her hands were coarse as wood. Standing in the garden of a hilltop monastery, slightly nauseated by the smell of flowers, we listened to plainsong coming from the chapel, while far below humpback whales burst their blowhole vapour out of the dark sea. I thought of Lake Lahontan and the Aralkum, and envisaged the Pacific seabed dried out, with distant mobs of camels milling among the hulks of trawlers and the ribcages of whales.
Have mercy on me a sinner, went the monks.
Amy went “Ha!”
We ate colourful thirty-dollar salads at a cliff-edge restaurant then sprinted, drunk on margaritas, into Big Sur’s breakers, spluttering, euphoric. There were gulls everywhere, screaming; gulls and butterflies and dragonflies swarming; and every shrub you brushed against on the way down to the beach threw out a new scent. My skin revived, regained its elasticity; my nostrils lost their lining of dried blood. It was a return to life. Amy began to seem like a genius to me, in her articulation. Thirst and fire can both be quenched.
The Immeasurable World Page 29