nawl

Back (early) from Burning Man.

It really is pretty much what one would expect.

I was awed by the massive amount of creativity and energy that went into the art and camps and the general aura of generosity and insanity. It's difficult to convey. For the most part, the experience really is what you want to make of it.

I'm going to be non-linear and divide up the memories by theme instead of by time.

This is the view of Black Rock City from the plane on Monday afternoon. People arrive and build things throughout the week, it starts to disappear on Sunday, and a few days later it's gone completely. According to board in the Playa Info tent there were about 10,000 inhabitants already when this picture was taken. Depending on which source you believe, it becomes the seventh, fifth, or fourth largest city in Nevada at its peak.

The desert is wide and flat and the sky is very blue and the playa is very playa-colored.

Fresh playa is cracked in interesting patterns.

Over the course of the week the surface of the desert is cris-crossed by bicycle tracks and crushed into a fine dust.

When the wind kicks up the dust everything becomes playa-colored.

During the day it is very hot, and during the night it is very cold. This varied a little bit. Jaded burners told me the weather this year was mild. It is always very dry.

At night the stars come out. This far from civilization they are incredible, the Milky Way a great big band stretching across the sky. Later on in the week the light pollution and dust from the city obscured them somewhat.

Experiences wandering around the city sort of sound like dream sequences.

I was walking in the playa where the art is when a gigantic fish drove up to me and asked if I wanted a ride. So I said sure and climbed up the back of this fish, which was actually an enormous bamboo-and-canvas fish-shaped structure, and rode it around into the city. Passing by a party they yelled up to us to stop for a drink, so we did, and ended up picking up a pair of crazy Irish people (including a guy dressed in a bubble-wrap miniskirt) and a Hungarian girl who ended up coming back to my camp with me for cold tacos.

One of our camp members brought a wetsuit, flippers, and snorkel mask and seemed to derive immense pleasure from flipper-walking around the desert so that people would shout out "The beach is that way!" and so on. We were just passing the port-o-potties one evening when a boat on wheels painted like a shark rolled up and threatened to chase him.

At night: "What is that?" "It appears to be a field of eyeballs." "Oh, right, a field of eyeballs."

The day we arrived a random person in a minivan gave us a ride from the airport to our camp. We cruised around at 5 mph, commenting on how nice the view of the city was. Just then a topless woman in neon pink hot pants bent over away from the street. "Indeed."

I wandered. During the day there were hammocks to lie in, trampolines to bounce on, swingy things to swing on. Art pieces included life-size Mousetrap, croquet with person-sized balls, a large-scale chess set. There was a roller disco. In the morning the shady area of center camp was filled with people doing yoga on their own, doing what I'm guessing was contact improvisation, practicing dance, even a guy juggling, to the sounds of the first drum circle that I've ever heard that actually seemed to be populated by people who could drum. Adults at play.

At night the city glows with a certain energy that is composed of thumpy music, blinky neon lights, fire, and shadowy glowing figures bicycling in and out of the dust and headlights. The correct playa-art navigation algorithm at night is: 1. Proceed to playa. 2. Move in direction of interesting blinky stuff. 3. See fire. 4. Big fire. 5. Move in direction of big fire to investigate.

This works well because the art-creation algorithm that many people seemed to use was: 1. Think of random object. 2. Attach fire, blinky lights.

I saw: a wagon spurting fire controlled by people drumming, a flaming tuba, a pendulum that spurted fire to control where it went, a truck populated by five people shooting flamethrowers, a metal statue of a woman and child dripping fire from their hands. At dusk the first few days some people had a machine that produced enormous fireballs that would rise up into the air as a ring of fire and black soot that spilled soot as it vortexed around and rose into the air as an expanding black smoke ring that floated gently away into the horizon. Another evening what I'm told was an enormous jet engine produced fireballs so big you could feel the heat and shock wave a mile away.

This art piece was flaming pillars (someone told me they're the wings of a bird, you can see its head on the left) that would periodically spurt gigantic fire. The artist said it went through hundreds of gallons of propane a night.

Blinky stuff included the cubic array of ping-pong balls about eight feet on a side that lit up in three-dimensional patterns, the enormous LED screen composed (if I remember correctly) of 20 x 24 squares of 11x11 LEDs. A couple of enormous green laser beams shot out over the desert. I'm told that in 2000 someone newly rich off the dot-com boom brought a $200,000 laser that used a truckful of coolant to run for eight hours and would make patterns in the entire sky.

They burned the man on Saturday night. The ceremony consisted of lots of firedancers (poi, staves, dancers with flaming fingers and flaming toes, a flaming chinese dragon, a girl with a flaming hula hoop, a girl with a flaming hoop skirt, a lone guy juggling fire) and then big fire and fireworks shooting out from the man. They all erupted at once with a big boom.

The fire spun off enormous fire tornadoes towards the audience.

I didn't actually get any other good pictures of the mass of firedancers, so here's a picture of Eric from our camp firedancing.

The back of the ticket informs the buyer that they assume the risk of serious injury or death. Given the nature of many projects (multi-story structures built by people of unknown engineering expertise) I'm surprised that there weren't more accidents. This is a ladder into the sky. That speck is a person climbing it. No safety measures to prevent falls or jumps.

One of the funniest projects was Dance Dance Immolation, where players donned a flame-proof suit, played DDR, and were shot with flame-throwers when they screwed up.

This is a play-fight with firy swords in the Thunderdome. Normally people strap themselves to bungees and launch themselves at each other. A sign outside proudly announced "0 days since last injury".

There was also a fight club held on two nights.

The flights up and down were beautiful and full of "Earth from Above" moments. It only takes about two hours from Palo Alto, which is long on the way up and entirely too short for the re-adjustment of coming home.

A river winds through the desert coming back from Winnemucca.

Algae colors the salt ponds in the bay.

Bay marshes in Palo Alto.

Coming home feels like a shock. Real showers. Flushing toilets. Electricity abstracted away from the machinery generating it. Air with moisture in it. People not dressed in fake fur and dust goggles.