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Before I left S.F., some acquaintances had suggested that being in the desert, away from showers, gyms, scales and mirrors, would help me get over my paralyzing appearance anxiety. It turned out quite the opposite -- at Burning Man, I felt greasy and ugly when everyone around me seemed plumed and fabulous. The creativity there extends to costumes and make-up. Stilt walkers are everywhere, including one who jumped a flaming rope that kept tripping him, threatening to set his wooden legs ablaze. People wore evening gowns and carried parasols. During a topless female bike ride called Critical Tit (after the bike protest movement Critical Mass), women painted their breasts to look like daisies or adorned them with flames and spirals. Some were pink or silver from their hair to their toes, and a few naked girls were drawn about in a bike-powered chariot. I tried to feel elated by this celebration of female beauty, but instead I felt completely inadequate. Others said how wonderful it was that there were nudists of all shapes and sizes, but all I saw were the girls who were skinnier, perkier and lovelier than me.

As the event wore on, my distress at my failure to relish everything mounted. I kept wincing at the pot-bellied middle-agers strutting joyfully about with their penises waving and wiggling, and then I winced again at my own prudery. The flamboyance rebuked my quietness. At one camp, the Jyna Tree, women were invited to step into a lavender booth, take a beaver-shot Polaroid and hang it on a mesh wall. Dozens had already done it. Meanwhile, I tried to summon the courage to put on a bikini and wash myself with the solar shower we had brought, a plastic thing that looks like an oversized colostomy bag.

At Burning Man, there's a freedom in the air that comes, I think, from not knowing anyone's clique or creed, from the erasure of normal social hierarchies. For some who feel constrained by their quotidian lives, this is undoubtedly liberating. "The flame we carry away from this playa is perhaps our greatest treasure," someone called zman wrote in the Black Rock Gazette, the Burning Man newspaper. "We must cherish and protect it from the sterile unreality we are about to endure." But without my carefully constructed armature of civilized cool, I felt flayed and vulnerable. At Burning Man, what matters is your body and your charm. All my accomplishments in my world meant nothing there.

And then, somehow, on Saturday, the day of the burn, things started to change for me. I grew used to the filth in the bathrooms and on my skin. My boyfriend was an angel, and he built me a shower stall out of a tent pole, cardboard, blankets and a van door. We took our bikes and rode far out into the desert, escaping the lunatic hordes for a majestic emptiness. We visited the landing strip and wandered among the tiny private planes and bizarre homemade flying contraptions and truly felt we'd landed on the moon.

Back at our tents, we heard that a friend of a friend who was staying in a deluxe camp with a tricked-up piano bar needed a hit of ecstasy. We had an extra and traded it for some pot and slices of the best vegetarian pizza I've ever had, loaded with broccoli and mushrooms and feta cheese. He was thankful, and it thrilled me that I had something to give, even if it was only drugs.

And it was drugs, finally, that opened Burning Man up to me. My whole group dropped E for the culminating ritual. After sundown on Saturday night, everyone made their way across the playa to the Man, and it was marvelous to see freaks for miles -- somewhere around 22,000 of them -- stop whatever they were doing and move like pilgrims toward a single point. The MDMA bathed my brain and my superego went to sleep. The banging drums that had seemed so hippie-pagan cheesy in the days before were suddenly deep and resonant and heart-quickening. The build-up tingled. A guy came around playing a honeyed, plaintive melody on a saxophone and it sounded so beautiful I wanted to give him anything I had, but he just wanted a cigarette and before I could get my pack dozens were being held out to him.

Then the Man started to burn and I screamed without knowing it. Everyone was dancing and I was too, my body feeling like liquid, moving unconsciously. My friends were hugging me and saying how much they really, really love each other and not caring that such behavior is an E cliché. Lasers shot across the sky, leading the way to a huge stage where psychedelic images swirled on giant screens and drum 'n' bass throbbed from enormous speakers. A woman climbed onstage and asked everyone to make an ommm noise and I did it without sneering.

When it was time to leave, I asked everyone I'd come with -- all of whom had dived into the event without my hangups and reservations -- whether they would have loved Burning Man if they hadn't been on drugs. No one said anything for a moment, and then Bjorn, one of only two Burning Man veterans among us, said yes, but not nearly as much. Despite what the organizers say -- that you don't need drugs because the festival is already an altered reality -- many of the attractions would have been incomprehensible sober: light tunnels that made the world look like a giant kaleidoscope, a sensory excitement chamber filled with feathers and brushes and beads.

But I've been on better ecstasy than the pill I took in the desert, without feeling nearly as exhilarated. Drugs made me receptive, but the place did the rest. We had planned to stay until Monday, but after the burn everything felt anti-climactic, and we packed up for the seven-hour drive home. I was tired, burned out and cranky, but I also felt a kind of post-orgasmic calm. I never, ever want to go camping again. Next year, I'm taking an RV.
salon.com | Sept. 8, 1999

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