Feel the Burn

Burning Man now and in 1998

Probably because they’d rather report anything other than positive news about the economy, we’ve been hearing a lot about how a few inches of rain stranded the attendees of this year’s Burning Man for a few days. A friend of mine is there, and she’s fine. Burning Man has become sort of a joke; it changes you, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a bunch of privileged white people performing an excessive display of wealth that damages a pristine natural area, it’s a mockery of deprivation by people who’ve never known it, and it’s a goofy pseudo-spiritual ritual for people with too much money. It’s all of those things and more.

I attended Burning Man in 1998.

What Burning Man looked like 90% of the time

Back then, “only” fifteen thousand people attended, and MTV discovered it the year before. This year, over eighty thousand descended upon the tiny gypsum mining town of Gerlach to despoil the nearby playa. I do not think I went “in the good days.” It was already a joke then, just fewer people knew about it. That being said, I had a good time, but I never went again. Like many things affluent white nerds do, it was highly affected and depended on you not really questioning what you were doing.

I really dug this dude’s remote control couch.

I can’t remember where I got the idea. Probably from some furries I knew on the internet. Me and two coworkers who I no longer speak to rented the tiniest RV we could find, piled in with water containers, MREs, costumes, mountain bikes, booze, and drugs, and drove from Minneapolis to Reno. The thing couldn’t go over 55MPH with our load, so Nebraska took forever. We drove in shifts, never stopping, and got a blowout at one point. But we made it. We filled our water containers—all 42 gallons of them, plus what the RV held—at an RV park in Winnemucca, and rolled into Gerlach for a week of debauchery and delight.

Honestly, I don’t know how long I was there. Four days? I had serious sleep apnea at the time, which is like having a serious drug addiction. There are people who I barely remember from that era, who I really should. I can’t remember their names, even. Thankfully, I paid off my sleep debt, but the holes in my memory remain.

It probably does not help that there was alcohol involved.

We didn’t have much to offer visitors except shade and water, after we set up the awning and tied a tarp from it to our California friends’ RV. I remember their online handles: Tugrik, Frang, Revar. (Big names in the FurryMUCK community that I wrote about in “The Beast in Me.”) Frang made beer, before it was common, and passed around bottles of heavy stout. Someone had a laser they programmed to perform a light show against the mountains.

Some costumes

Christopher (the golden man in the above photo) and I rode our mountain bikes all over camp in the searing heat, following some land yachts powered by huge sails. They looked like fun. We grabbed onto the rear of one for a ride, and then watched them sail off into the distance, and crash. Someone fell off and broke their neck. We rode to the emergency tent to notify the EMTs. That was the only injury I remember. Someone had their car stolen, which sucked. We were lucky to be in a big camp (seen at the top of the page) so our shit wasn’t messed with.

We wandered the camp at night and hung with strangers, bartering Frang’s beer for Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters which led to the boa photo of me up there. I’m drunker than I look, if that’s possible. There were people who delivered the mail, and I can’t remember if they were random letters they’d written or not. I can’t imagine not asking for one, but if I did, it’s been lost.

I imagine Tugrik and Frang and Revar may find this if they have Google Alerts for their names, and as tech folk, they might. They were good people, and I regret losing touch with them. I’m pretty sure it was their idea to pull this off, and we all came home happy and alive.

The Burn is what gives the event its name. I think these photos are film, scanned. I had a one megapixel digital camera around this time, but these photos look better than that. We conga-lined around the burning neon god and threw in our sacrifices. Firefighters were on hand, in case anything got out of said hand.

It was exciting, but the burn took the air out of everything. After that, it was over. We had to get back to reality. I think what saddened me most about leaving was seeing all the bags of trash people tossed out of their vehicles onto the highway out of town. We were told not to leave the ashes of our fire, to dig it out, to not contaminate the playa. And we did. I don’t know what I was expecting, people are people. I pulled into a truck stop so we could shower, and I stuffed our garbage into their dumpsters.

If Burning Man calls to you, I recommend you go. Me, I’d rather explore wildish places on my feet or bike and not build a temporary cyberpunk zen garden there. But you do you. I did have an awesome time.

If you liked the Nudist Camp in the Pines essay, photographer extraordinaire Diane Arbus visited Sunshine Park. This photo, now at the Met, is of a waitress who worked there.