Luke WeismanBurning Man1
Luke Weisman
WC7700
Burning Man
Burning Man is indescribable, I was told. And then people would give me snippets and anecdotes that formed a tapestry of mystery, but failed to capture the life, the impossible life, of the thing. I know, now, having traveled through it, that my attempt will suffer the same fate, and so as to give lip service to assembling it into a coherent whole, an experience (even if it is an experience I cannot even articulated non-verbally to myself), I will use the form of the linear narrative. And so where to begin? Obvious I should begin at the morning of, perhaps, one of the most intense and fantastic days of my life.
The Tuesday I Was There
Just prior to Burning Man I went backpacking with my mother in the Desolation wilderness. On the early morning of the day I arrived at Burning Man, my mom and I hiked out, got in the car, and drove to Reno where I was going to put her on a plane home, take her car, buy supplies, and head out to Burning Man. The hike out was down a rocky mountainside dotted with Cedars twisted by years of wind, and snow. Their hunched forms, rich in texture, the deep greens, the dusty browns, all set against glittering, quartz riddled granite, stood as sentinels as I left the wilderness. We hit the car, changed, and drove towards Reno. On the way we stumbled across a charming farmer’s marker where I obtained some fresh produce, including a delicious watermelon, a bag of organic black tomatoes that kicked you in the head with taste with each one, and some peaches that we ate right there, the juices running from our chins.
After dropping off mom, I wandered Reno, using a map and my classically bad navigation skills, trying to find the stores mentioned on the Burning Man website. I think I was nervous about beginning my journey, plus I thought it only was an hour out of Reno, instead of three, and so I frittered away time. But I had a grand time wandering supermarkets, watching hippie-skirted woman and grungy looking men lugging bottles of water too and fro in the parking lot, and purchasing my own water in vast quantities. In REI I found an awesome shirt that was sun-repellant, and, after I decided to buy it, I found out that it was on sale. I loved, and still do, the desert sage-green and the durable feel of the fabric. I also obtained a cooler and some other sundries. I was inadvertently doing the exact right thing with respect to joining a camp at Burning Man—bringing random, useful crap with no conception of a plan that I had to stick too. As my friend summarized, “prepare, but do not plan.” I was mellow and relaxed, coming off of a great wilderness experience where the trees were so beautiful I was tempted to buy a camera, ditch Burning Man, and go photograph them. Instead I asked around for a gym, managed to locate one, and made it over there due to a kind cashier drawing me a map at the supermarket. The gym was almost deserted, but they let me use the weight room and the showers for a nominal fee. I washed off the Desolation Wilderness dust to prepare for the legendary Playa dust. Fresh and clean, I sat in the parking lot, making calls on my cell, idling away time partly out of fear and partly because it was nice to be an anonymous wanderer in a foreign city with no deadlines ever, no how.
Eventually there was nothing left to fritter away, and so I got in mom’s car, found a radio station, pushed the seat back, and cruised out along the highway under the kind of sun that makes you want to go, to flee everything and be an anonymous American creature consuming gas in your independent solo journey into the unknown. I watched the cars grow more and more sparse along the road that cut through high desert, shrublands, and occasional industrial buildings. The hum of the engine ran into my back and butt; the music pushed the sensation of travel over the top, and so the hours streamed by in a blissful, idly contemplative haze spotted by the beautiful curves of the hills and the sensation of movement generated by a gently rocking car traveling at high speed.
As an hour or so past, and I became better aquatinted with the actual duration of my journey, I calculated I would not get to Burning Man as I had planned, but rather much later. This made me a bit tense, and I felt stupid for having wasted so much time in Reno. Eventually the music and the flow of moving stripped my anxiety away, and I continued on, eventually finding myself on a road dotted with cars all clearly heading to a common destination: nowhere. This road sliced across some beautiful land, and the setting sun swept across plains and stained mountains, leaving a world built around the concept of “vast.”
Along this road I spotted a parked truck and disengaged trailer, and a man trying to rectify it; some sense of humanity kicked in and I pulled over and jogged back along the road’s shoulder to the man to see if he was okay. Standing on the highway in the late afternoon with cars streaming by and no buildings in sight kicked in that romantic notion of travelers and explorers and land that has not been beaten down by many feet.
The man was fine—but he had been there half an hour or so, and I was the first who had stopped. I turned and looked at the steady stream of people headed to a festival built around the concept of community and collaboration, and felt a twinge of unease that folks could be so intent on being in a particular place to practice their sharing and caring that they would drive by a man stranded on the side of the road. The man, Tom, a grizzled guy around 40 or so, was a bit as a redneck mixed with a bit of migrant worker. He was short and thickly built, and radiated a kind of tense energy. He came across, due to nothing in particular, as one of those people who is, despite any effort, or lack of effort, on their parts, a bit of a fuckup. I was feeling fantastically good—and self-righteous—because I was running behind schedule, and yet I had nonetheless stopped. After futzing around and digging some tools and bailing wire (bailing wire! How classic for chrissakes!) out of my trunk to hook his trailer up, he asked if I could follow him with my emergency lights on since his rear lights weren’t working and I could thus provide a modicum of safety. “Sure,” I said, choking down the annoyance of arriving at the Playa 5 hours behind schedule, and proceed to head the rest of the way to Burning Man at a sedate 40 miles per hour or so, watching the sky drain of color and come out pitch-black, studded with stars.
Music was still good, and in flipping through stations I got hints of trance techno, distant wisps that came and went, and an uncertain expectation built in me. Eventually we passed a nothing town, turned on to the final, small, narrow road, and wound about and came over a crest of hill. In the distance was a morass of lights in the middle of nothing. An entire city, a disk of radiant light, that I knew should not be there floated in a calm sea of blackness. For the rest of that night my mouth was agape and I was ensorcelled by the purest essence of wonder. How could such a temporary façade present such a front, at night, of established power? We came closer and I could make out in the center of the disk of light the blue neon speck that I knew was The Man that the city revolved around. Flashing towers, intermittent plumes of sparks, and pulsing lines of light were set against what looked like the streetlights, house lights, and general night lights found in any city in the USA.
Trailing from the city like the arm of a galaxy was a line of cars stretching for miles, a necklace of idling cars’ headlights thrown across the land winding to the city. A very, very long necklace. A line? We turned and joined it and pulled to a stop. I was antsy, and so got out of my car and chatted with people. Everyone was tingling with excitement. We would inch forward a few feet, get out of our cars, chat, get in, inch forward again. I drank a beer and shared some bread, some fresh produce, and whatnot with Tom and some frattish boys behind me. I learned that Tom, who used to be a truck driver but was now retired, was hooking up with some nurses, did a lot of coke, had some powerful stories about being completely loaded and escaping the cops due to some orange rind, and had a certain paranoia about the cops and how one should conceal their drugs and open containers of alcohol. He was quite grateful for my help; he told me so time and time again, and offered to hook me up with anything of his I liked, such as coke, and then gave his Burning Man address, should I decide to take him up on it. I looked at the city lights, simply amazed at their existence, as I grew ever closer. The night was cool, but not cold, and the air was crisp and dry. It was a beautiful night.
Eventually we got close to the greeters—happy volunteers who greet arriving folks and give them important information and also set the tone of the experience—and I watched them swarming over the cars ahead of me. Then a man is yelling, “roll down the window, slow down, let me talk to you,” and then there is a flashlight in my face and then the man says, “Luke Weisman?” in a voice of complete astonishment and I am going “what the fuck?” and I see that I know this guy from Reed, but who? And he is saying “get out, pull over, get out get out get out!” and I get out and he gives me a enthusiastic hug and tells me about all these people I know who are here, and it is totally fucking out of control amazing. Nic (his name having come to me, more-or-less) then says time is short, and sends me on my way, and I never meet up with the troupe of Reedies—those Darius Rajali disciples, and Darius himself, who would of course go to Burning Man, and play a large role there—again. But so what? I know they are out there in the fifth largest city in Nevada.
The greeters hand me some stuff, a sticker for my mom’s car (they were impressed that I had taken it—they thought it was a fine story) and I drive to the edge of the city and park in the complete pitch darkness. I get out of the car and look around. There is distant noise, people wandering around, tents everywhere, and I have no idea where to go or what to do. I make friends with a nearby camp, promise them a length of ree-bar for their tent, and wander across Burning Man, looking to find Totem, this camp I was apparently a part of. I took only my bag of tomatoes and my map, leaving everything behind me.
The initial trip across the Playa, first to Center Camp to find Totem’s address, across the empty and huge center plaza of the city, and then along the esplanade to find Totem itself, was tremendous. The playa is flat, reeks of the pulse of life, and is covered with myriad tents and buildings set up like toys on a tabletop. Everywhere you look are precarious structures, lit in various ways, looming in the night like fragments of a million dreams. I was stunned, wandering around, mouth agape, brimming with energy and wonder at the fantasy world surrounding me. I ended up cutting across the Playa’s center area—the city is a horseshoe shape with a huge, mostly deserted and vacant, core with the Man in the very center—where I ran across perhaps on the most beautiful sculptures in the City. It was made of driftwood—a sketch of a shack with a large rope knotted hammock and a fully working organ, dusty and battered, nestled inside of it. Some people were quietly looking at it, one was sacked out in the hammock, and it was peaceful and quiet. As I worked my way to Totem, each site I came across took my entire attention, and I would look at it, and be unable to really believe it could exist. What marvelous ingenuity, humans, to put an organ in the desert, to build a city out of nothing, to build a place where you could be free.
Floating across the dry, cool air from the ring of lights several hundred yards away was the pulse of many electric centers of music, the shouts and laughter of many parties, and the hum of generators. Burning Man is about contrast if it is about anything—heat and cool, night and day, quiet and sound—and this initial encounter with the incredibly beautiful mixed with the standard fare of parties, hedonists, and a blatant disregard for anything but pleasure and self, was what made the days following tremendously hard, and tremendously rewarding.
In the process of finding the camp, I ended up at a crash-tent, gave out some tomatoes, got a magnet which is on my refrigerator still, was lied to, kidded, and laughed at, but all in a good-natured way. The people I came across were always chatting or conversing, knowing each other somehow. When I would sit down somewhere to experience it, or approach a bar to see it, people would kindly part for me, and I would watch them turn and spin in their lives. Eventually I found the camp, a dark tent with no sign of life. I passed it several times before being brave enough to realize that they were the ones I was after. The entrance was sewn shut from the inside, and my stomach was unsettled with uncertainty. Can I just walk into some random camp? They don’t really know me. Eventually I went around the side, picked my way over some ropes, and ended up in a center square lit by lanterns and crowded with shadowy forms of people. I gulped, and stepped forward.
When I walked into the camp, my friends turned, shouted with happiness, and gave me big hugs. I had come home to a place I had never been, after traveling through a land that could not exist. I offered tomatoes, having nothing else on me, and they consumed them with relish. They asked me if I wanted to join several of them on a mushroom expedition, but I declined, opting instead to wander the esplanade with Molly and David, both outfitted with horns, and Jon, a new person of Totem who I should have known from Boston. We saw sights, including the Magic Glasses Tunnel, a corridor from the Playa to itself built of lights and hanging ornaments that one walks through while wearing Magic Glasses, party spectacles that turn each speck of light into a rainbow starburst. The energy of the night, my shock from having come from the wilderness, and the fatigue of the long drive made me spin, hunched, arms apart, mouth split in a grin, my classic stance while on E, (so much so that a stranger said, “this person needs a hug,” and pressed me against her fuzzy soft faux-fur jacket), and shudder in amazement. Eventually the group of us I ended up back at my car, and I dropped a piece of ree-bar at the camp where I had promised it, and had Jon go with me as I drove at 5 mph, music playing, back to Totem, where pulled out my tent, set it up, and went to sleep with the heavy sounds of base pulsing at me, telling me that every moment of stillness was somehow a moment lost.
The Wednesday I Was There
The next morning I was up early, short on sleep but well rested, and wandered to the courtyard. It was peaceful and quiet. A mustached, sensual man was spreading himself with oil to protect his skin, and a leathery Jesus in a sarong was playing a flute. I unpacked my car and brought my food into the kitchen tent (full of shelves with stuff loosely organized by type), greedily stashing some of the choice bits in my tent for my own use later but in general dumping all my hard-won delicacies and whimsical purchases on the shelves and forgetting all about them.
The sun was out, and I was struck by the quiet of the morning, the murmur of activity as people continued to construct the city, and the fragile, carnival fakery of the place that was so evident in the day. Everything was painted cloth draped over armatures, cobbled together plywood, cardboard tubes. At night they rang of the solid forms of fairy kingdoms, but in day the dust and grit and haste sprang forth. This made things even more impressive than before, underlining how fast and how crafty the folks who built this city were. The wonder of the night, illusion, was replaced by the awe of the landscape—the flat, cracked earth, the mountains in the distance, and the tiny, tiny nature of the vast, sprawling city.