My Brush With Burning Man

[mnaz]

I made a lot of trips into Nevada. One time I drifted east across the Utah line and discovered a peculiar little mountain named Crystal Peak, made of white volcanic tuff flecked with sparkling quartz, a singular gem set amid myriad mahogany ridges. I camped in ghostly moonlight and rode a trail in the morning into Delta to get supplies. I found food, but the state liquor store was boarded up and I retreated west, back toward Nevada.
...... I rolled on a long two-lane straightaway, not a single car nor cloud for miles, beside a bright dry lake playa, dazzled by its radiance . . . until a Utah State Trooper came at me from out of the light and aimed a radar gun at my grille. He screeched a U-turn, pulled me over and said he'd caught me doing 71 miles an hour, six over the limit, and I took his word for it. He walked to his car to run a check and came back to issue a warning for speeding, then he went speeding off. But why was any of it necessary? . . . You can't pin down a radiant playa scene like that; you exhale in its presence.
...... I headed back across Nevada's mystical vistas toward the great Black Rock playa, and this time I'd come from the east, the same distant nebulae hills I'd seen from the west, but would I recognize anything? Was that Black Rock point I saw on the far side? It seemed in the wrong place; my inner compass was off. I camped under a riot of stars and woke to buff bluffs on the playa shore, and hard silence spread across boundless space. A sense of sacred, moved and removed. Even the slightest movement was jarring until the desert drew a breath. I should've stayed longer, but the far side pulled again and I rolled along the playa as sun rays cracked open side canyons.
...... Many miles later I spotted a distant crowd . . . or was it an illusion? No, this strange vision persisted over the next rise and around the next bluff, but how was that possible? Who were these people? Maybe they were the rocket geeks I heard about, who came to the playa to launch their homemade rockets into the great beyond. But no matter; I would cross the great playa to the far side, toward pancakes at Giovanni's place when the time was right.
...... The trail ducked behind a large bluff and the distant crowd vanished. Was it ever real? Yet there it was again, around the next point. But no matter. I would cross the great playa toward Giovanni's place and . . . what the hell? A tiny car zipped toward me with a detachable cop light stuck to its roof, like the one Karl Malden used to stick on his brown Ford sedan when he wanted to go fast in that old cop show. The tiny car pulled beside me and a skinny guy wearing big red glasses said I was "getting too close" . . . Too close? Seriously? Too close to what? Then it hit me: Burning Man! I'd been warned by the Utah law and sent to the fringe, and now warned by the fringe itself. I might run out of desert.


...... I'd stumbled onto the outskirts of Burning Man, and now that I wasn't moving, I could hear a faint thump-thump of techno music from down the flat, from fifty thousand pilgrims camped on the playa. The freak kingdom was still alive and running naked in the middle of naked, as it did every year, just ten miles from sleepy little Gerlach, Nevada, where Giovanni made money and bemoaned a parade of "dopeheads" passing through his town on the way to their strange city that suddenly sprouted and vanished from the playa each summer.
...... I'd seen pictures of this fantastical city, which I'd heard described as a kind of hippie-like prison break Druid pyro purge that climaxed each year with a giant effigy of the Man himself set ablaze. Which made no sense but seemed about right. Thousands camped on the energized playa plane every year, out to break oppressions of reality-- a much better option than Las Vegas, so it seemed. And what better place than the playa's blank canvas, out of which Dali's Apparatus and Hand might arise at any moment? Out on the dimensionless plane and its silent ridges thirty miles distant that seemed just an afternoon's walk away.
...... I headed into hills that once buzzed with hell-bent miners, now so quiet that I heard a raven's wings at fifty yards. I set up camp and wondered if Burning Man could stay in his groove under his growing crush of revelers. Would his power begin to fade? Back in town the next day, a painted bus had broken down by the motel, and no tow truck within a hundred miles big enough to tow it. Motel staff rousted a guy from a couch by vending machines, and he insisted that Giovanni said he could sleep there.
...... Later on, at the bar, an odd mix of conversation. The woman beside me wore flowers, and suddenly she started defending sexual indiscretions of the latest big sports star on TV. Jesus, was there no refuge? Anywhere? Then a bearded burly miner said the gypsum mine was in trouble and might close. He said he once did time in Folsom Prison, and Johnny Cash was a liar because "there ain't no train tracks near that prison." He said he'd seen strange curling tracks on the playa. "I thought maybe a snake made them, but no, it was a naked guy riding a unicycle. I saw him out there."