Burning Man '02

Back in 1986, a California guy named Larry Harvey and some of his pals got a great idea. Why not build a wooden man on the shoreline at Baker Beach? This was, after all, a time when people would assemble odd driftwood sculptures along the Oakland estuary by the Bay Bridge, just because. So Harvey & Company built their structure and then, for laughs, they torched it. Anyway, next year comes around and they invite more people to check it out and thus Burning Man was born.

In the years since, this thing has gotten totally out of hand—which is more or less the point. This last one drew a record 30,000 Deadheads, performance types, face painters, yippies, hippies, and zippies—the whole countercultural package all showing up at a desert location just outside of Reno called Black Rock, where there are no rules. Wanna run around naked with feathers in your hair flying on ecstasy? Go for it.

Because more than anything else there is a certain vibe, an extraordinary energy, a feel to the place that exists nowhere else on the planet. Think Tibet, only with more glitter and mild hallucinogens and giant fire-shooting neon whales on wheels, floating across the desert floor.

As you'd expect, the organizers have their hands full trying to keep the spirit of Burning Man alive in the face of all that crowd pressure. A Perrier concession sponsored by Cingular would generate a lot of cash, and most maturing events, no matter how humble their beginnings, succumb to that Faustian temptation. But so far, Burning Man is hanging tough and remains non-commercial—no vendors, no sales, except for the odd ice and coffee people who function as something akin to Medecins Sans Frontieres.

We need more Burning Men. There aren't enough places where you can go and get away from cops and guards, people who want to hassle you for breaking petty-ass rules of public order. What led us to be so afraid of mortality that we agreed to live in a sanitized Disneyland?

There was the Human Carcass Wash and the Interactive Steam Whistle and S&M 101 classes at the Temple of Atonement, to the return of Dr. Megavolt's adorably dangerous and possible illegal Tesla coil, shooting bolts of lightning as two men in protective suits danced around it, waving metal wands and gyrating like rabid monkeys on helium.

You survive something like this, you make it back home intact after being surrounded by every pierced, tatooed drug freak and "bastard Mad Max-style mechanized creation" imaginable all of whom are bartering and cavorting on a dusty, lawless expanse of alkali and your faith in humanity is restored. You realize that we don't need half of the parasitic organizational layers that enmesh us in a fuzzy cocoon of complacency.

This is the essence of Burning Man. It is extraordinary and dirty and dangerous and hilarious and annoying and raw and smelly and hot and spiritual and real in its deep, deep whimsicality.

That sounds like the ancient religious celebrations at Galilee, where tens of thousands of people would show up every year to engage in, well, pretty much the same thing—dancing and singing in the desert under constellations and torchlights, trying to get closer to a spiritual awareness of life and enduring the heat and goat smells and pickpockets. This should never have been written out of the script.