Burning Man is an "annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance." It takes place on the eight days and nights leading up to and including Labor Day weekend. This year, it was Monday Aug. 27 to Monday Sept. 3.
It's held in the Black Rock Desert, 120 miles north of Reno (which makes it approximately 570 miles from Las Vegas by road). The Black Rock is a million-acre expanse of playa (a dry ancient lake bed) that stands out as a geographical and geological desert among deserts. It's a landscape of unique barrenness and beauty, solitude, danger, and freedom. It's a vision so forbidding that as eminent an explorer as John C. Fremont was afraid to approach it. Yet thousands of emigrants crossed it in awe and agony on the Lassen-Applegate Cut-off from the main Emigrant Trail. It's the largest playa in the United States, a magnet for rockhounds and history buffs, hikers and pilgrims, landsailors and hotrodders and land-speed-record breakers, UFO nuts, and other nuts. It's been called the "world's largest stage, so pure and clean that anything you put on it becomes significant."
Indeed. When you drive down onto the playa (but only after you've checked on conditions -- never go if it's not desert dry, bone dry, death dry, because when the playa's wet, it's an impassible sump and people lose their lives out there every year from exposure), you can accelerate as fast as your car will go. (In October 1997, in fact, a rocket car achieved supersonic speeds of 760 and 764 miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier for the first time ever on land.)
You can drive at 80 mph for an hour without ever once bothering to steer. At some point mucking around on the playa, you enter a sort of hallucination zone. The edge of a shimmering lake you seem to be hurtling toward is always just ahead. But wait! What's that black thing out there? Looks like a motorcycle. Or maybe it's one of those jet cars on a collision course with you! Nah, it's too big and standing still -- a cow? But what's a cow doing on a silt bed, halfway between nothing and nowhere? The black thing keeps looming bigger and bigger until you pass it at 70 mph and oh.
A beer can.
Then the surface of the playa starts to look and feel like thin ice, which you're always just about to crack through and disappear forever into a dense mud bog. So you stop. But the playa seems to keep moving. Now the other cars' tracks are racing up to you, crossing under you in a flash, then disappearing behind you -- while you're standing still. Even the illusions on the Black Rock are on a grand scale.
Which makes it the perfect place -- the only place, in fact -- for an event like Burning Man. This is a festival from another planet, inhabited by complete aliens. It’s an asylum, organized by lunatics for lunatics. Black Rock City is the largest temporary community on Earth; nearly 50,000 people participated in the 2007 festival, held a couple weeks ago.
The rules are simple: There are no spectators, only participants, and nothing is for sale. One of the principles is that it's a "commerce-free event." Only two items are available for money, coffee and ice, sold by the Burning Man organizers to "sustain the onsite nutritional needs of the kick-ass staff."
The Bay Area-based Burning Man organizers, who build and tear down the infrastructure for Black Rock City every year (under strict supervision from the BLM), distribute 400 porta-potties for general public use and another 50 in special locations. The potties are serviced on a continuous and rotating basis, 24 hours a day. They do a pretty good job keeping them clean and stocked with toilet paper.
Other than that, attendees are entirely on their own. It’s a definite survival challenge in the middle of the playa for a week in summer and everything that’s needed to stay alive has to be brought in by everyone who shows up. (Most of them pass through Reno and it’s a gas to hang around Trader Joe’s, Wild Oats, and some of the bargain supermarkets to see the parade of Burnies stocking up, then to see them all return, sun-scorched, coated with playa dust, and severely hungover.)
In addition, the idea of "radical self-expression" means some of the weirdest vehicles, costumes, theme camps, art installations, and handiwork ever conceived by the twisted minds of freaks.
Igloos built out of eggshells. Clothing made of light sticks. A car decorated to simulate a single shark’s fin. Naked people sunburned in what look to be very sensitive places. Portable radio stations broadcasting everything from Mozart to Martian.
Perhaps the most clever creation seen recently was a school of neon fish attached to ten-foot poles rising from several bicycles. Illuminated by 12-volt transformers powered by the turning wheels, they came out at night, so what you saw were bright tropical fish swimming along serenely, 12 feet above the playa.
Much of the big art is constructed there at Black Rock City, then destroyed at the end by fire or demolition.
The Man himself is a 40-foot-tall 1,500-pound wood sculpture covered in neon lights. The Man stands bright and benevolent, watching over the community, till he’s burned, in a spectacular conflagration amidst fireworks and many smaller fires, as the climax of the festival on the Saturday night before Labor Day.
Why, you ask? What’s your guess?
The Man is supposed to symbolize "a mockery of the busyness of society." We consider this deliciously ironic, since an enormous amount of money, organization, energy, and effort are expended in transporting a temporary city to the wilds of northern Nevada, attracting tens of thousands of participants, erecting the city and statue, and celebrating (the busyness of) life. The symbolism continues in terms of construction and destruction, ambition and futility, a reminder to keep the fire burning in daily life, and just plain getting way wild on the playa.
Beyond that, the answer to your question can only be, why the hell not?
