The weirdness that is Burning Man

BLACK ROCK CITY - It's 9 a.m., and I'm sitting on a purple couch under an awning equipped with water misters. We're drinking mojitos, watching the world pass before us in the desert.

I hate deserts. I wasn't exactly thrilled about the chance to go to Burning Man. I sort of understood the concept, but I wish it were someplace cooler, with more shade and less dust. Dry lake beds are nice to drive by, and sometimes to drive on, but camping on one with 40,000-plus other people did not sound attractive.

It's been 24 hours since my mission began, and it's clear that the mission is totally screwed. My purpose here was two-fold. One, to help our writer and photographer get their material to the Web site. And two, I was to sum up what I've seen here in 750 words.

Both tasks went south about as soon as I arrived. Trying to find my colleagues while towing a travel trailer in the chaos that is Burning Man soon proved impossible.

I met up with a guy named Cliff who found me a spot to park and camp. Cliff said his father was a retired state supreme court justice, and that he loved to come out here, too.

My other mission, to capture this event and do it justice, quickly faded away. There is no way to capture an event like this in 750 words, or 7 million. It's far beyond the weirdest event anyone could ever imagine. If you could dream up the strangest things you could ever think of doing, multiply it by a thousand, and then put it into a blender, you might scratch the surface.

There's a writers' trick for getting a grasp of large stories. You follow one person around and tell the story through their eyes. The problem here was the people attending are so diverse that finding a typical Burner is harder than keeping the playa dust off of you in a windstorm.

So here I sit with my new friends, enjoying some manmade comforts, wondering what to do next. Lance is from Reno, a veteran desert camper, but a Burning Man virgin. His air-conditioned shade structure is a bit of heaven in this hellhole of a desert. From here we can watch the parade of characters pass by. I think I saw every possible combination of clothing style in the first hour, from people in three-piece suits and formal dresses, to nothing but body paint. And of course, some didn't even have that.

Burning Man is the wildest exotic, erotic costume party you can think of, that goes on continuously for a week, amid this awful desert heat, wind and dust. It would seem here that going naked is not just a form of self-expression, but a way to avoid collecting too much dust.

And that's just the clothing. There's also the "art cars" that prowl the playa. Some are small vehicles with outrageous decorations. Others are rolling party barges bigger than the largest motor home, complete with booming sound systems, kind of like a bunch of Rose Parade floats for adults. At Burning Man, if you don't find a party, one will find you.

In front of the camp area is a huge expanse of desert that is the canvas for the most unusual art show in all the world. When one wonders why they have to hold this event in such a harsh, remote place, this is why. No other place in the world could contain Burning Man.

These pieces are huge. Burning Man itself seems the size of a shopping mall. Out further is a wooden oil derrick with giant sculptures worshiping it, representing the six major religions in the world. Another sculpture is two semi trucks twisted into the letter S and hoisted into the sky.

Pretty soon, I started to forget about the harsh conditions. Even the whiteouts caused by dust storms didn't seem that bad.

Burning Man is what happens when you take 40,000 of the most creative people you know, and let them be free to do anything they want for a week, with the only restrictions being for public safety. For most, this is the one week a year they can go crazy before returning to the outside world with all of its restrictions and conventions.

Hopefully they can take a little part of Burning Man back to that world, along with all that dust.



• Kirk Caraway is editor of http://nevadapolitics.com and also writes a blog on national issues at http://kirkcaraway.com.