1994

Heat waves shimmer off the hardpan alkali flat, and a fine white dust swirls on the wind. Thunderheads gather over the distant mountains that ring the plain, but the sky above you is a deep cloudless blue.

Behind you is your camp, a Rube Goldberg mix of vans, tents, and RVs arrayed in a great circle. Scattered across the plain you see other artifacts less easily explained: a giant fiberglass dog head, an enormous, vaguely phallic mud tower. One of your friends has a radio tuned to a local pirate station; like the daily newspaper folded in your pocket, it will exist only for a few short days and then disappear, like some exotic desert mushroom. You press an icy bottle to your forehead, savoring the cold, and look up. There above you, tall as a four story building, stands the strangely graceful figure known as the Burning Man.

One by one, the slim neon tubes illuminating its huge limbs wink out, and carefully concealed explosives add their staccato thunder to the wild rhythm of many drums. Finally, consumed by fire, it collapses to the desert floor, where the wreckage burns long into the night, a bonfire out of some wild primordial dream.

Burning Man is one of the last places on earth where people from all walks of life, all social strata, and all points of the compass can come together and share a common and primal experience, surviving as a group in a challenging environment, creating a temporary culture of their own design, and sharing one of the most elemental experiences of our species, the awesome mystery of fire. And, on top of that, it’s also one hell of a party.

Stuart Mangrum – Burning Man Newsletter from Burning Man Project, P.O. Box 420572, San Francisco, CA 94142-0052