Burning Man Interrupted my Road

[dune]

I see something peculiar. Atop a rise I spot a distant gathering on the desert playa . . . But that can't be right. Yet from the next rise the vision persists. And who could these people be? Well they might be the rocket geeks I heard about, who come here to launch home-built projectiles into the great beyond. Yeah maybe that's it, but no matter. I will cross the brilliant flat to the far shore.

I drop down onto the playa, and that rocket geek gathering is larger than it first appeared, but no matter. I will cross the brilliant flat, and . . . what the hell? . . . I spot a little car ripping toward me with a flashing cop light stuck to its roof, like Buford T. Justice in that Burt Reynolds flick, and I'm intercepted by a guy wearing big blue Elvis Costello glasses, who says: “You’re too close" . . . And then it hits me. No, it can't be. Oh God no! What day is this? Shit, it's Burning Man! I can barely make out its thump-thump-thump of techno music from down the playa . . . I was warned by the law, so I took to the fringe, and now warned by the fringe . . . I might run out of desert.

The freak kingdom lives-- in the quiet, open, rugged west of all places! It runs naked in the middle of naked. Fifty thousand pilgrims camp on the playa, in a place called "Black Rock City," the fifth largest city in Nevada each summer for four days, and traffic swamps sleepy Gerlach ten miles south.

It's a magic city that sprouts from the playa like a "strange and beautiful mushroom" and climaxes each year with the giant, splayed effigy himself sent up in flames; a sort of ceremonial wicker Druid hippie prison break pyro purge, the likes of which this dimensionless realm has never seen. It began twenty years ago in San Francisco with twenty people, and hundreds more showed up the year after, until the city booted this thing over the Sierras into empty infinitude, onto the energized plane, as it should be.

And now fifty thousand visionaries seek the desert, out to break reality's tyranny; a much better option than Vegas. But can the event stay in its way-out metaphysical groove under such a crush? I'm not sure, but it has the playa's spatial bust to fuel the excursion, the mad art storm on a mind-blowing canvas, the expanding plane from which Dali's Apparatus and Hand arose. You'll see things out there, like five cast-iron pipes in yellow haz-mat suits kneeling in a semicircle around a larger pipe. It makes no sense and seems about right. And then the mushroom withers, and windswept silence returns. Only spatial bust remains.

[dune]

Never been there. I just happened to stray a little "too close" one time early in September a few years ago. True story.