A Week at Burning Man
By: Niina Pollari
Tags: Art, Sculpture, Burning Man

At Burning Man, you might see a giant mechanical octopus light up the night with its fire-spitting tentacles. You might be invited to climb up a ladder into a hammock above a dance floor. You might come across a meadow made of bright green plastic grass, lay down in it, and hear the chirping of crickets and songbirds. You might come across a car wash for humans (a “carcass wash”), or exchange your clothes for someone else’s at the free shop. These are the experiences that draw people to the Black Rock Desert, year after year. Everything here invites you to interact with it, to understand it by climbing on it or listening closely to it or feeling the warmth of the fire that it spouts — or even by feeling normal at it for a while. Everything here has been fabricated with care by craftspeople and visionaries who want to make you feel things.

And everything here — this is the part you’re supposed to forget — has taken a tremendous amount of resources, planning, and logistics to get to this point: the point where you experience it for a fleeting moment, and then leave it behind.

In the world outside of Black Rock, what Burners call the “default” world, experiences like this seem harder to come by. Part of that might have to do with money. As Larry Harvey, one of Burning Man’s founders, put it in a 2000 lecture, “All that’s required of you when you buy something in a marketplace is a sum of money, and your inner resources are beside the point, have nothing to do with it. It’s non-connective.” Here in the desert, only two things are bought and sold: ice and coffee. Everything else must be given or traded — must be “connective.”

It’s not that money is nonexistent at Burning Man. Money is everywhere, when you think about it. The desert is blank before the event begins, and it’s blank again soon after it’s over; a cleanup crew trawls the area for weeks, restoring the pristine surface of the playa. It takes resources to transport, set up, and break down the hundreds and hundreds of sculptures, mutant vehicles, makeshift kitchens, gigantic sound systems, and pop-up tea houses that populate Black Rock City in between. But because the gift economy is the norm, and no “default” value is assigned to anything, you’re never asked to think about money; it can remain invisible. You can run around with your pockets empty, with nothing but a titanium drinking cup strapped to your belt, trading in light-up rings or physical labor or strawberry lemonade, reveling with everyone else in the weird economy of giving one another no-strings-attached presents. Removing the monetary values from things makes every transaction a human endeavor: when something has no defined value, you can’t get away with ignoring the person giving it to you. Over the course of the week, I find myself looking people in the eye, asking questions and having conversations in place of making simple transactions.

When you are in the desert, you are in a hostile environment. You have to take care of certain physical needs in order to be safe and comfortable. Water is the obvious one — a gallon per person, per day. Sunscreen. A headlamp is extremely useful for midnight bathroom jaunts. Then there are the luxuries that make you a lot less cranky: baby wipes (to de-dust yourself before you get into your sleeping bag), multiple tubes of chapstick, and a change of clothes (kept separately, in a plastic bag, for the Exodus, when everyone attempts to vacate a 70,000-person city via a two-lane road). And something (a tarp, or even a sheet) to keep your bed covered during the day and protect it from the dust that will invariably blow through your tent’s many, many security breaches. The dust — that peculiar, fine, alkaline powder from the dry lake beds of the Southwest — gets in everything. There are occasional funnel clouds, soft beige tornadoes that rise up from the earth and then dissipate again minutes later. Sometimes there are white-outs where you can’t see more than two feet in front of you. There’s the dearth of moisture and the constant, adamant wind. For the whole week, your mouth is dry.

And the sun. By 9:30 in the morning, the sun is so high and unobstructed that it’s impossible to sleep if you’re in its path. Each morning, after your tent turns boiling, you clamber out with sweat beads mapping your face. Drink some water and have a moment to yourself before you head out into the awake city, because all day long, the sun will continue to exhaust you and steal your moisture. Nighttime at Burning Man feels surreal, detached, like a fantasy world, but daytime at Burning Man is strenuous: your shoulder blades slowly cook on your rides across the playa, and you remember your status as a visitor to an inhospitable climate. It’s almost impossible to be a citizen of both day and night.