101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [57]
Burning Man’s organizers provide emergency medical services and Port-O-Potties but that’s about it—visitors have to bring everything they need to survive in the desert for a week. This is known as “radical self-reliance.” To make things especially radical, no commerce is allowed in Black Rock City, and the only way to obtain things you don’t already have is through “gifting,” a Burning Man term for bartering with other partiers. This abhorrence of capitalism does not, however, apply to the entrance fee—tickets to Burning Man cost more than $350.
For most people, the best part of Burning Man is the art: burners, as attendees refer to themselves, sometimes spend the entire year building installations to bring to the festival, from refurbished steam locomotives and giant robots to full-size replicas of Victorian houses on wheels. But while it’s amazing to see, for example, a large-scale stroboscopic zoetrope sitting in the middle of the Nevada desert, the experience is a little less fun when you’re waiting in line for the communal toilet under the blistering midday sun.
That’s the other thing about Black Rock City: its weather. During the day, thermometers regularly reach one hundred degrees; dehydration and heat exhaustion are common problems. But when the sun sets, the temperature can plummet fifty degrees, and it’s not uncommon for predawn temperatures to approach freezing. Frequent wind storms send seventy-five-mile-per-hour gusts whipping across the desert, stirring up so much dust that festival organizers recommend packing masks and goggles to use during whiteouts. And then there’s the dust itself. Highly alkaline, it can give you what’s known as playa foot—a malady unique to the Black Rock Desert that is, in essence, a chemical burn.
Burning Man bills itself as being “radically inclusive,” meaning that anyone and everyone is encouraged to attend (it’s also “radically participatory,” which tends to lead to a lot of drug use). This worked well when the festival was small, but now that Black Rock City’s population is larger than most American towns, it’s begun to experience some of the same problems as a regular metropolitan area, like bike theft, litter, sexual harassment, and even arson—during a lunar eclipse in 2007, several people were nearly killed when someone set fire to the Man five days ahead of time. (The accused suspect was the same man who, several years earlier, admitted to outfitting the sculpture with a giant pair of balls.) The Web site suggests not accepting open drinks from people you don’t know, and warns that the area may be policed by undercover officers using night vision goggles to detect illegal drug trafficking, though the red eyes and vacant stares of many Burning Man participants suggest that this threat is not taken seriously.
There are also rules specific to Burning Man: “Do NOT burn other people’s property!” says one. “Do not bring large public swimming pools or public showers,” says another. And then there’s my favorite: “Defecation on the playa is in violation of the law”—a regulation, it’s worth noting, that wouldn’t exist without good cause.
The Man
Keith Pomakis/Wikipedia Commons
JENNIFER KAHN
Burning Man
The year I attended, there were a series of disasters, the most notable being when one of the Man’s giant, mechanically-controlled arms got stuck mid-rise during the finale, with the result that it shot fireworks into the crowd rather than into the sky. That was also the year that a woman, presumably high, fell out of and was then fatally run over by her own