WEEK 14
Burning Man is so many things: discovery, art, music, dancing, hilarity, challenge, dust, exhaustion, beauty, revelation, openness, energy, connection, creativity, love, friendship, smiles, hugs. Not a surprise that it’s my favorite place to be.
Irena and I came late to Burning Man, with our first burn in 2013. The original guard has of course been claiming the end of the real Burning Man for years. More room for the rest of us, I say. We are now seven years in, our campmates are family, and we count the days until we come home.
I am fascinated by the building of Black Rock City, where Burning Man takes place, and have played my own small part in its creation for several years.
Three weeks before the gates officially open, Burning Man is brought to life by a dedicated crew of workers. It’s a remarkable feat on any level.
Picture this: 100 miles northeast of Reno, Nevada is the Black Rock Desert, sparse and beautiful in its expansiveness. Our city – Black Rock City – is built from nothing on an arid, dusty lake bed 4,000 feet above sea level called the playa. It’s as flat as a book cover and stretches beyond sight, surrounded by jagged mountain peaks. Nothing grows on the playa. Nothing lives on the playa. Yet it is here that 75,000 citizens of Black Rock City make their home for eight days.
Each year, the building of BRC begins with the Spike Ceremony to mark the placement of The Man – the center of all things. I learned that the exact location of the spike shifts slightly each year so we Burners do not trample the playa in exactly the same position. This is protected land, and we are the largest Leave No Trace event on the planet.
Our city is built on a series of concentric and radial streets organized along clock coordinates (from 2:00 on the eastern edge to 10:00 on the western edge). The Man sits at 6:00 in the center of the open playa which houses the art. The innermost “street”, Esplanade, rings the interior of the city, and then approximately every 150-200 feet, the streets fan out – from A to L each named to match the year’s theme (Metamorphoses in 2019). To give a sense of scale, to bike from 2:00 and Esplanade to 10:00 and Esplanade is three miles, and to bike from the city to the outermost perimeter is nearly five miles.
Once the many crews set the event perimeter flags and cones for what will be Gate Road (on which will travel all Burners for arrival and exodus) and the city streets and thousands of little flags to mark Theme Camps in the city … then The Man is built and the big art crews arrive to install hundreds of pieces of art including the Temple. Finally, on Wednesday before the Gate opens, Theme Camps are given a supply of Work Access Passes to get a jump on set up.
Did I mention that all of this happens in a span of three weeks? And it’s hot and dusty, and a single wind storm can reduce visibility to the hand in front of you.
This is whole lot of context to get to my new thing for this week, and I haven’t even described our camp, Altitude Lounge.
For the past five years, Irena and I have had early arrival passes to help build the tower you see here and set up camp. This year I wanted to learn one new thing during “build” and contribute in a new way with our camp.
Most of our campmates are from Boise, Idaho, and are seriously badass. Our 50-foot scaffolding tower has couches on four levels, a DJ booth and plenty of room to dance and take in the view from one of the highest places in the city. We have the most adorable “art car” (registered by the Burning Man Department of Mutant Vehicles as all art cars are to drive on the playa and city streets) called the Playapus, with an articulated tail that seats 24 people. We have a diesel generator to run a distributed power grid. We have a double outdoor shower with an evaporation pond and water ladder to aerate the runoff (no grey water can hit the playa surface). We have a 40-foot shade structure. We have a make-shift kitchen and fully stocked bar in one of the shipping containers that hold all the tower supplies when we pack up camp. And we, Altitude Lounge, build all of this – including everyone’s own tents and living quarters – in a span of about three days.
When our campmates arrive on Wednesday night from Boise, they pull up to our street address (8:45 and Cupid in 2019) — marked with placement flags — and find the containers (stored near Reno in the off-season as I mentioned), which have been dropped to an exact GPS address. It looks like this:
When Irena and I arrive 36 hours later, camp looks like this, with a nearly fully functioning tower, tents and a shower. Still lots to do but wow.
She and I get to work on setting up the kitchen and then cooking dinner for 16 of our campmates, neither of which is a new experience for us, but in the moment feels entirely unfamiliar.
My first new thing on playa was this: I learned how to fill the camp generator with gasoline. This doesn’t sound like much but required three people, giant rubber gloves that came to my armpits, jumper cables connected to a battery to run the pump which was attached to the hose that I put into the fuel container which sat on the back of the flat bed that was hauled in from Boise, all while Irena held the other end of the hose in the generator gas tank and our third person watched the fuel gauge on the generator and made wild hand motions for me to turn off the pump because we couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of the generator. Oh and did I mention we were wearing costumes? And it was dusk so we needed headlamps? Job done and we didn’t blow the place up.
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The second new thing of build week was surprisingly satisfying. Our camp leader, Greg, is a phenomenal human with mad skills in so many areas, a huge heart and a love for shenanigans.
On Saturday evening, we were nearly done with camp set-up, yet we knew many, many art projects out on the open playa were struggling – as they do every year – to finish before the event started the next day. It was an especially hot and dusty day, with temps hitting 100 degrees.
Greg came up with an idea he dubbed 15 by 15: he’d rally 15 campmates, we’d all bike out together to find a group working on their art project and offer 15 minutes of help (that’s 225 minutes or roughly half a day of work) – doing anything they needed. (To be clear, I mean anything. In our camp we have electricians, welders, EMTs, contractors, firemen, sound engineers, DJs, among other I-didn’t-know-I-needed-it talents). Greg brings treats too, because sometimes the best gesture is a shot of whisky and salty snacks (this is called “fluffing” in Burner parlance).
Our merry group rolled out of our camp around 9:00 pm, and Greg was at the helm scanning for the right projects. They couldn’t be too big or famous (those crews were hand-picked and already staffed). He’d find a project and give his spiel, and sometimes people would erupt in a massive cheer of “f**k yeah!” Other times, the artists were so beleaguered they didn’t know how to respond.
We stopped at three art projects:
- OPUS which became a giant playable, multi-sensory instrument on the playa. When we arrived, the team was installing very delicate LED tubes and didn’t want us to touch anything. But they loved the whisky, and we did a giant MOOP line to help clean the build site. [Side note: MOOP stands for Matter Out of Place and is Burning Man-speak for trash which can be as small and seemingly innocuous as a sliver of wood, but alas must be plucked from the playa floor and thrown away.]
- Circus Fabulae which became a two-story swing set of brightly colored porch swings. Their team was thrilled to have our help: we hauled all the swings up to the second level in about 10 seconds, and then set up a giant human chain to load tons of extra lumber and supplies back into their truck for them to get off the playa.
- Still Alive which was created by a Chilean artist with a very small, mostly South American crew (many first-time Burners). When we arrived, it looked like a wooden cocoon in the early stages of development, but would eventually be covered with mirrored acrylic sheets. Half our camp helped hang large lantern-looking pieces inside the structure while the rest of us climbed the structure to duct-tape seams. I am quite sure we saved them hours of mundane labor that evening.
So…here we are, only 30 hours on playa, and this experience was an absolute highlight. It was a bonding moment with camp for sure, but even more, these short stops that very likely extended beyond 15 minutes embodied the ethos of Burning Man: showing up and participating in whatever way makes sense for you and the moment.
And best of all, it was a chance for us to meet a few artists who are playa gods in my mind. Their visions are beyond anything you can imagine in the default world. The mere act of bringing and installing art in this completely absurd desert environment is audacious … requiring ingenuity and patience and creativity and perseverance. It’s the best of humanity.