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The annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert invents a hyper-real space, a republic of drugs, nudity and spectacle.

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By Michelle Goldberg

Sept. 8, 1999 | On the West Coast, Burning Man is a religion, almost a reason for living for thousands of freaks, pyromaniacs, artists, hedonists, survivalists and would-be modern primitives. The weeklong bacchanal in the Nevada desert has also, for the three years that I've lived in San Francisco, been a black cloud hanging over my life. Each year after Labor Day, I would hear dazzled reports of mind-blowing technological marvels and ecstatic 4 a.m. communion. Whenever I went to a party, it seemed, some zealot would gasp condescendingly, "You haven't been to Burning Man? Well then, honey, you've never really lived."

Still, a week -- or even a weekend -- on a scorching salt flat with no shower and no bathroom seemed like more than I could bear. I'm a neurotic princess, an urban girl who's never been camping and has never wanted to. I've traveled all over the world, but from city to city, always landing in places where I wouldn't have to face the world until I'd been showered and powdered and plucked. West Coast living has never erased my sense of my body as oozing, out of control and repulsive unless properly tamed. It's been at least a dozen years since I've gone a day without a shower, and I've always been sure that if my friends or my boyfriend saw what I was really like without all my ablutions they'd quickly spot me for a skank.

None of that has ever really interfered with my social life, as I've never had much of a desire to visit a world without plumbing. But as Burning Man's influence mushroomed in California, for the first time I felt that the cultural center of the world was way out of my reach.

During Burning Man last year, I went to every party in San Francisco in a sad attempt to convince myself that I wasn't missing anything. I danced to soulful hyper house at my favorite disco and I chilled at a glam lesbian club where people hung from the ceiling by flesh hooks piercing the skin of their shoulders. I even went to a party on the beach held by old-school Burning Man devotees who've grown disillusioned with the event's exponential growth. In between, I sobbed my eyes out. My shrink, I think, has heard more about Burning Man than about my unhappy childhood. So this year, determined to purge myself of uptightness once and for all, I hopped into a rental van with five friends, 50 gallons of water, canned food and a bag of illicit substances and made the pilgrimage to the millennial Brigadoon.

See, Burning Man is more than just a colossal party. It began 13 years ago on San Francisco's Baker Beach when a guy named Larry Harvey torched an 8-foot wooden man with 20 of his friends. The fire soon turned into an annual Labor Day ritual, and in 1990 Harvey and friends moved it to the Black Rock desert, 120 miles northeast of Reno. For one week every year since, that vast, lunar land, where the white clay floor is cracked into trippy fractals and rung by parched, forbidding mountains, becomes Black Rock City. Looming above it is the Man, a 40-foot effigy glowing with neon and stuffed with fireworks.

The name Black Rock City isn't just a conceit. The place is a (sur)real temporary metropolis founded on utopian principles, replete with neighborhoods, street signs, an airport, over a dozen radio stations, movie theaters and a daily newspaper, all built by participants and run on generators, batteries and stunning ingenuity. After the $100 ticket, there's no buying or selling at Burning Man save for coffee and ice. Thus the reigning ethos is circus, not commerce. An intricate, generous barter culture develops, one that forces you to meet your neighbors. People trade pancakes for guitar picks, cigarettes for beer, back rubs for body paint, drugs for other drugs. At one point, my boyfriend Matt and I were wandering far from our tent and we finished all the water in our canteen. We offered someone a joint in exchange for a refill from the tank in back of their truck, but he said, "At this point, we've got much more pot than water." He gave us some anyway.

With capitalism on hiatus, the dominant motive is to delight each other. It's the exact opposite of the alienating top-down culture that produced the Woodstock conflagrations. Groups build theme camps arranged in concentric semi-circles around a massive expanse of flat, bleached earth dotted with huge art installations. Pasha palaces and dance floors, vaudeville shows and homemade rides vie with each other for the attendees' awe. Xara, for instance, was an enclosed synthetic jungle the size of a large diner with a floor made of real grass carefully tended with massive amounts of water. Two huge flaming torches marked the entrance, and fluorescent flowers and vines twisted throughout.

There was a hair-washing camp where grateful, dusty revelers got massaged and shampooed in salon-style basins. A pubic-hair shaving station offered to etch designs in your bush. A circus tent was turned into a porn theater showing golden-age classics like "The Devil in Miss Jones." One camp built a gigantic seesaw that took you 20 feet in the air. Another constructed an enormous bi-level swing set in front of a sideshow, so that if you pumped hard enough you could watch a man put a needle through his cheeks from high above the surrounding crowds.

The most marvelous spectacles were electric, the actualized fantasies of tinkering, fire-happy grown boys. A man called Megavolt stood atop a 30-foot moving Tesla coil in an astronaut suit, touching it with a metal pole that caused bolts of Frankenstein electricity to shoot across the sky. A roving, towering rose-lit tree made entirely of animal bones traced paths to each night's most stunning sights. Mechanized couches darted through the landscape, as did a stocked mobile bar complete with stools. Bicycles were adorned with leaping neon animals, so that from far away you could see a school of glowing clown loaches swim through the night. As with a real city, it takes hours to walk the perimeter of Black Rock. When you're in the center, the outskirts blink and buzz against the skyline like a world capital, a subcultural Las Vegas. The sensation of the outside world is condensed into one hyper-real space surrounded by nothing, a blank slate built on fantasy, unconstrained by tradition or industry -- a republic of pleasure.

Next page | The MDMA bathed my brain and my superego went to sleep