Burning Man
Posted: September 7th, 2007, 5:39 am
It can't possibly be thirty miles off, that naked ridge across the playa, the expanding part, dancing at its base. Hell, I could walk there and back in an afternoon. There's nothing in the way except thin-skinned powder sky, set to explode. I can't say just how or why I'm here, aside from crude instinct. I roll out of Delta, Utah, past a dust farm or two, westward into mystic overflow, on such a straightaway as you've never seen, and like a demon, a Utah state trooper materializes out of the arid sea and poetic mist with a radar gun, shot across my bow-- 72 miles per hour. He spins a heated U turn in my rear-view on that fine stretch of two lane portal. I've been issued a warning.
Naturally I vow never to set foot in Utah again. In Nevada the law is the law, though tempered by greater laws-- such as proportionality. One cannot pin down and warn the expanding playa. The law shall exhale in its presence. It's impossible to miss its morning gift-- joyous, elevated light and divergence, moved and removed-- the stuff of religion. It might be in the parched, rare air that never paces itself-- dead silent pockets and erratic puffs and bursts across miles of salt bush and shadscale mounds and swales, run aground on shores of ragged tuff, in the midst of all that blown span. And visible on the fringe-- more sculpture and unexplained gravity.
On the Black Rock playa last night the stars rioted, and I rise up now amidst volcanic ruin and new light of a humbly spectacular sort, projecting me onto and into the dry slopes and soothing misperceptions of their depth and pull, onto wondrous ramps and mounds and scarred chocolate complexes in every possible shade. I creep along the playa, absorbed in its fringe; it must be coded into the scarred strata. Passage foretold and assured. Sculpture is everywhere, wrought, bathed and backlit. Some prefer canyons and others a crest. A little elevation goes a long way, and crests multiply. I stop to feast on a soggy wing from the cooler, as sunlight cracks open a craggy rhyolite field.
I can't say which rise exactly, but I spy a distant co-mingling of sorts, deep on the playa ocean. I could be mistaken. That's the beauty of open sculpture-- make the next crest and test what you saw from the last. Atop the next rise I see a distant flotilla, spread out and sailing as to war. On with it! I've heard of urban refugees-- scientific types-- who assemble here to launch homemade rockets on the vast flat. Maybe that's it. No matter. I should cross over the volumes of cracked clay to the end of pavement somewhere on the western shore. I recognize Trego Mountain on the horizon, though I almost missed it from this angle.
On the playa nothing much is amiss, except that scattered flotilla of rocket scientists I spied from the hills is larger than it seemed. No matter. I cross the stunning flat to the western shore and its bright rumors of distant asphalt and pancakes. Halfway across I notice a tiny subcompact car speeding toward me, with stick-on cop light atop its roof just like Buford T. Justice in that Burt Reynolds flick, charging across the playa for miles, it seems. Dammit. What day is this?.... Oh no.... no, it can't be... oh God no... Burning Man?!.... Shit. I'm intercepted by a young deputy wearing plastic Elvis Costello glasses, who tells me I'm too close. Probably. I can just make out a low thump thump of high watt techno music.
Naturally I vow never to set foot in Utah again. In Nevada the law is the law, though tempered by greater laws-- such as proportionality. One cannot pin down and warn the expanding playa. The law shall exhale in its presence. It's impossible to miss its morning gift-- joyous, elevated light and divergence, moved and removed-- the stuff of religion. It might be in the parched, rare air that never paces itself-- dead silent pockets and erratic puffs and bursts across miles of salt bush and shadscale mounds and swales, run aground on shores of ragged tuff, in the midst of all that blown span. And visible on the fringe-- more sculpture and unexplained gravity.
On the Black Rock playa last night the stars rioted, and I rise up now amidst volcanic ruin and new light of a humbly spectacular sort, projecting me onto and into the dry slopes and soothing misperceptions of their depth and pull, onto wondrous ramps and mounds and scarred chocolate complexes in every possible shade. I creep along the playa, absorbed in its fringe; it must be coded into the scarred strata. Passage foretold and assured. Sculpture is everywhere, wrought, bathed and backlit. Some prefer canyons and others a crest. A little elevation goes a long way, and crests multiply. I stop to feast on a soggy wing from the cooler, as sunlight cracks open a craggy rhyolite field.
I can't say which rise exactly, but I spy a distant co-mingling of sorts, deep on the playa ocean. I could be mistaken. That's the beauty of open sculpture-- make the next crest and test what you saw from the last. Atop the next rise I see a distant flotilla, spread out and sailing as to war. On with it! I've heard of urban refugees-- scientific types-- who assemble here to launch homemade rockets on the vast flat. Maybe that's it. No matter. I should cross over the volumes of cracked clay to the end of pavement somewhere on the western shore. I recognize Trego Mountain on the horizon, though I almost missed it from this angle.
On the playa nothing much is amiss, except that scattered flotilla of rocket scientists I spied from the hills is larger than it seemed. No matter. I cross the stunning flat to the western shore and its bright rumors of distant asphalt and pancakes. Halfway across I notice a tiny subcompact car speeding toward me, with stick-on cop light atop its roof just like Buford T. Justice in that Burt Reynolds flick, charging across the playa for miles, it seems. Dammit. What day is this?.... Oh no.... no, it can't be... oh God no... Burning Man?!.... Shit. I'm intercepted by a young deputy wearing plastic Elvis Costello glasses, who tells me I'm too close. Probably. I can just make out a low thump thump of high watt techno music.
