Since I started working at home a few months ago, the down side of that particular American dream has hit me pretty hard: there is no such thing as time off. There are phones and computers just about anywhere I try to vacation, and that means telecommuting, baby. But last year my friends Douglas and Lisa, freelance writers living in New York, found just the place to really get their ya-yas out: Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis built annually on a dried-up prehistoric lake in the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada, hundreds of miles away from E-mail access, in the shadow of a 40-foot stick man on fire.
The two-lane snakes on and stretches out. Treeless, jagged mountains rise up all around us. We pass two bicyclists of a hippieish bent, with saddlebags bulging. We also pass a few people who are walking. Eventually we reach Empire, a tiny desert outpost of leaning wooden buildings. We stop at a roadside grocery for snacks, beer, medicine, and ice cream pops. What little parking lot it has is jammed with loaded beater cars, vans, Volkswagen minibuses, painted school buses, RVs, and pickup trucks. One van has “GOING HOME TO BLACK ROCK CITY” scrawled in soap on a window. Strolling through the shop are skaters, ravers, living tattoo galleries, and aging hippies.
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When our van pulls up, Douglas is already making friends with the neighbors, the residents of ScumbyLand, a sort of basement-dope-den theme camp. By the time July’s van pulls up, an hour and a half later, the sun has become brutal, but I put my faith in Neutrogena Sensitive Skin Sunblock Lotion and go out to watch the city build itself. I watch people going by, already naked, already on unicycles, already wearing fairy wings and two-foot platform shoes and liquid latex and body glitter. It turns out that Head Way is the inner ring of Black Rock City, the last street before the sculpture promenade–which includes a giant wood-and-fabric anus for assholes to be reborn through, giant metal faces that will weep tears of burning gasoline, and a 30-foot-tall clay phallus that will be set on fire and pushed up against a neon yoni of similar proportions–and the Man himself. We’re essentially located on Broadway, Peachtree, the Sunset Strip, and the Magnificent Mile. It’s lousy real estate for relaxation and sleep, but an excellent location for missing nothing.
What’s a snootful of sand when you can walk a quarter mile and place bets on the Friday night dragon fights? Two separate camps have produced mechanical dragons, one small and maneuverable, the other as long as a short city block, in four wheeled sections, with a bandstand in the tail. Since both have people inside, they can’t actually spar, but they can certainly menace each other, posing and snarling and breathing fire. (Once the huge one gets clear of the crowd, it can move terrifyingly fast.) Douglas and Lisa and I cut out to hang at the Foreplay Lounge, which features a miniature-golf course with balls painted like spermatozoa, to be putted through a giant papier-mache vagina, past a Today sponge, and into curved fallopian tubes toward an egg. After a long, clumsy assault that would get us code blued at the fertility clinic, we fake orgasms in exchange for drinks.
So is it possible to come to an experience looking for both an escape from mundane life and a model for how to make life less mundane? I think so. The magic of Burning Man isn’t so much in the spectacles–though they’re pretty spectacular–as it is in the ordinary hard work involved in achieving such an extraordinary end. An ordinary (albeit delicious) tuna steak is far less ordinary when it was trucked into the desert by some weathered Oregon hippie fishermen who take sincere delight in sitting by a fire pit all day cooking it in exchange for company and sheer gratitude. It’s not the symbolic catharsis of a 40-foot humanoid in flames–it’s the real firsthand energy of the crowd around it. I can’t remember the last time I was moved to hug a complete stranger. It happened at the burning of the Man, and I wish it happened more often–but not so often that I would come to take it for granted.
