Me and the Man (Burning Man, that is)

In which I develop a bit of narrative creative non-fiction based around my experiences with Burning Man. (First Draft)

In 1987 I graduated from High School in Mill Valley, California. A week prior to graduating I had gotten a job at a small startup tech company riding the leading edge of the big computer boom. I was making a great salary, had no expenses, and was ready to start drinking deeply from everything the world offered a good-looking egotistical rocker kid from the upper-middle class.

I quickly moved into San Francisco proper, into a 3-storey beach-front house with two of my co-workers. The house was full of high-end audio gear, remote controlled cars, laser toys, etc. We had money and were working in highly desirable jobs in a booming industry that was redefining the way people would work for ever. We jacked the system. No college, no experience. Just quick, flexible thinking, and a willingness to ignore the accepted norms.

Through some of my older co-workers I got introduced to the Cacaphony Society. This loose group of loonies came up with all kinds of oddball things to spend their time on. Some of them I enjoyed (the tour of the San Francisco sewer system was a blast!), and others I just didn’t understand. Why go into the center of the business district dressed in silly outfits? What were they trying to accomplish? Confuse a few Yuppies on their lunch hour? At the time I didn’t get some of it.

What I did “get” was the beach. I was an avid skimboarder, and a terrible surfer. My roommates and I invested in some bright lights, so we could go skimboarding at night. Rob would hold up these million candlepower lights in the fog, so Bob, Mark and I could go skimboarding even in the dark and fog.

An essential part of this whole beach scene in San Francisco was The Mermen. A surf band that Neptune himself would be proud to have at his wedding! Every year, The Mermen had a big outdoor concert on Baker Beach, with a giant bonfire in front of the stage. A tent off to the side would serve drinks and barbecued goodies. Kids would play in the sand, while people danced to the groovy tunes and got baked out of their skulls. As the sun set, The Mermen would get into longer and longer jams, as people huddled closer and closer to the fire.

It was a beautiful hedonistic love fest, and seemed to exist outside of the law. The cops never showed up, and we never gave them a real reason to. They turned a blind eye, we kept our hedonism within certain physical boundaries, packed up before it got too late, left nothing but ashes and footprints, and apparently the neighbors never complained.

One day, I saw a bonfire on Baker Beach, so I rushed over to see what was going on. Was I missing The Mermen’s beach party?!? I hadn’t heard anything about it?!? Was I missing it?!?

When I got there, I found a group of people standing around the crumpled pile of some sort of wooden statue. They seemed to be entranced by the fire. I was too late. Something had happened here, and I was too late to have any reference for what happened.

So I went home.

Later I was talking with a co-worker, Mike, and mentioned the bonfire. He said these people had been doing it for a year or two, and I should go next year. So I did. It was cool. Kinda a weird arty group of people, but the wooden man they were burning was a really interesting structure and it made a great fire! As a licensed pyrotechnician – from a family of actual professional pyros – I was always drawn to fires!

It was probably two years later when I heard the organizers were going to have to move the event, because there were too many people, and it was too obviously contravening the Parks Service laws. (Both the Mermen gigs and the Burning Man events contravened a lot of beach laws, but as long as you were respectful and not too disobedient, the cops let you be…)

As Labor Day approached, there was a lot of panic among my Cacaphony Society friends. They couldn’t find a place to burn the man!

Finally, I heard that they had gotten approval to use some property that was out in the farming valley near Sacramento, or something. It was going to be a lot farther away, so it was going to be a campout instead of a one-night event.

I was really busy, and wasn’t sure I was so excited about camping out with all these weirdos for a whole weekend. But getting out of town, and seeing some countryside sounded good, so I pounded on some coworkers until they decided to go, too.

Then something happened… This was before the Internet. Cell phones were exotic toys for rich businessmen. Information passed by answering machine and word of mouth. (There were a couple of BBS systems I ran, and a few others I checked in with from work, but I didn’t have a computer or modem at home… and I was a seriously high-tech guy!)

People said the property owner backed out at the last minute. I heard that he’d panicked when he heard how many hippies were gonna come invade his land. He didn’t want Woodstock in his back forty!

I got the feeling that the organizers were totally scrambling. Visions of them sitting up all night making calls to everyone they knew… driving around and meeting with people… talking logistics… it seemed really crazy. I heard new stories several times a day for about a week.

Then it was settled: The Black Rock Desert in Gerlach, Nevada.

WHERE?!?

Well hell… NOW I was totally committed to going! It’s gonna be in a DESERT in NEVADA out in the middle of NO-FRICKIN-WHERE? Excellent! That is a trip I can get behind!

So Mark, Bob and I packed into Bob’s new Subaru Legacy wagon, and trekked out to the Black Rock Desert, with some sleeping bags, cases of beer, road food (chips, beef jerky, etc), a Nevada state map, and some general directions.

“Drive through Gerlach, Nevada. On the east side of town, there will be a fence on the right. There will be a hole in the fence with a flag tied to it. Drive through the hole in the fence onto the open desert. It is super dusty, so KEEP YOUR SPEED DOWN! Drive for 1.5 miles. You will see a sign. Follow the directions on that sign when you get to it.”

And that was it.

So we headed out to Nevada.

When we got to Gerlach, there was a building that looked like a WWII supply shack, and it said it was a Casino in big letters over the front. We thought this was HILARIOUS! Remember, this is 1990… Vegas was still Sin City. Sleazy, sexy, fleshy, and flashy. This building had plywood siding, no lights on the outside, and it called itself a CASINO?!? This we gotta see.

So we stopped in. Got some lunch. It was deserted. The people were nice enough, but it was like walking into the middle of the movie “Paris, Texas”…. quiet, dusty, and stagnant.

Back on the road after a quick lunch, we left Gerlach, followed the directions, and were a bit puzzled….

We drove out into the desert, but there was NOBODY out there! Just a horizon and mountains.

So, we trusted the directions, and set the odometer. We drove too fast and raised a lot of dust. We slowed down. Still dust. We slowed down more. Still had dust coming in every crack and pore of the car. So we slowed to like 10 MPH, and finally got the dust down.

About then we saw one of those a-frame signs construction crews use. There were a couple of rags hanging off this sign too, and hand-written on it was an arrow, and it said “.5 miles that way”.

We looked in that direction…

Nothing. Desert. Horizon. Heat waves. Mountains.

Where was everybody?

We followed the tire tracks, and up from the heat waves a bright yellow Ryder rental truck grew. Ah ha! The truck is over there!

So we drove toward the truck, and eventually the rest of the random collection of 50 cars or so became visible.

We drove around this clutch of cars and stuff, and parked on the far side.

“I guess this is it!”

We popped a few beers and went to look around.

People were building the Man on the ground. His feet were staked to big metal hinges, and a steel A-frame with a rope over it stood above the Man.

We pitched in where we could, but these guys obviously knew what they were doing, so we backed off.

The rest of the day was spent idling around, drinking far too much beer, marveling at the desolate landscape, and doing pointless things. The three of us were sitting on the Playa behind the Subaru, getting some shade from the hatchback, and marveling at how many beers we had drunk already (we had a half-circle of empties arrayed around the car like a fence), when I got boggled by the size of things.

For some reason I fixated on the number 1,000.

“So what IS one thousand?” I asked.

“What?” They responded.

“What is a thousand? What is a thousand of anything? How many is a thousand?” I was getting worked up.

“I dunno” said Mark.

“Well I’m going to find out!” I said. “I’m going to walk one thousand steps in that direction”, and I pointed off in a vaguely southwesterly direction. To fortify myself I brought a six pack of bottled Moosehead with me. I had no idea how far I was going, how long I was going to be gone, or anything! This was REAL adventure!

So I started walking.

When I would finish a beer, I’d set it down wherever I finished it. Little green glass mile markers in my trek of a thousand steps.

I stopped a short way into my fourth beer. I turned around and looked back at the car. I waved to the guys. They waved back at me. I sat down. I finished my beer. I took a look around. I breathed a few deep breaths, got up, and traced my steps back to the car, picking up the bottles on my way.

As I got back to the car, Bob asked, “So that was a thousand steps?”

“Yup.”

“Oh.”

Around early afternoon, we were really bored. We’d seen several people out doing crazy shit in their cars (putting their automatic transmission in gear, letting the car drive away, and then running after it, etc), so we decided to go for a drive.

Mark had heard from someone that there were hot springs in the south east end of the desert we were in, so he decided we should go find them. They warned us that it would be VERY hard to find the rest of the encampment, because the horizon came up so fast. If you were a mile away from camp, you’d never see the big yellow truck.

So, with some trepidation, we headed out.

Eventually we came near the foothills of the eastern range of mountains, and the terrain changed from flat dust, to little mini-mesas a foot or two tall, covered in razor-sharp lava rocks. We picked a path through it for bit, but decided to stop when it was clear we were going to slash a tire or three. We also saw something we wanted to investigate. Some sort of man-made thing.

So we got out and walked over to the remains of a covered wagon.

A genuine, right out of the fucking 1850’s, covered wagon!!

The wheels had broken long ago, and the buckboard was sitting on the ground, but three of the four hoops over the top were still in place. Standing on it, it was still solid. Built to drive across the country.

This is where I had a vivid, visceral, transformative experience. I felt like I was standing in that settler’s shoes. Here I am as the settler: My wife and daughter are inside the broken down wagon, son, dog and horses standing around waiting for my wisdom. I looked west. Scorched black hills. A long ways away. Across a dead expanse of dusty, waterless, foodless desert.

I looked east. The foothills “I” had just come over. Nothing but desert and hardship for 3 or 4 days in that direction, too.

I felt the desperation those settlers must have felt. They must have been in hell. And to think, I had just come from the west… from the ocean… through verdant green valleys full of food and water. But all of that was beyond an essentially insurmountable mountain, and I had a wagon with a broken wheel…

The three of us guys stood there for quite a while. Very quiet. We were each having a very deep, very personal experience.

A few minutes later we gravitated back to the car. Bob drove, while Mark and I walked just in front of the car, and pointed out especially sharp rocks or steep ledges Bob needed to avoid.

We lucked out and drove back to camp pretty directly. We took a weaving path, like a skier going down a hill of fresh powder, so we wouldn’t miss camp, and we only missed it by about a half mile or so. So we saw the Ryder truck, and homed in on it.

We arrived just in time to be a part of the man-raising-crew. Everyone took up positions along the rope. I think Mike was working on the head of the Man, and getting the lights installed, and I showed him my secret stash: a bunch of fireworks! We surreptitiously filled the Man’s head with these illegal fireworks I had gotten from my job as a pro pyrotechnician, and I took my place on the rope.

Over the next 10 minutes or so, the long line of volunteers on the rope delicately lifted the Man into his standing position. It was like tug-of-war, with 100 people on one side, and a huge wooden man on the other.

I was very surprised, actually. I had never seen an A-frame like that, and hadn’t figured out how it was supposed to work. But, as we all gently pulled, the Man slowly rose up. It was clear that there were a lot of force on him (he is NOT light weight!), and I was amazed that he held together as we raised him. He was built hell-for-stout!

Once the Man was up and secured into position, people started personalizing him. They wrote messages on him. One woman had some X-rays – I assumed of a tumor, or something – that she placed into the framework of the Man’s legs with care and deep intent. She rested her right hand on the Man’s leg, and her left hand on the X-rays, lowered her head, breathed a few quiet words to herself, and then moved away.

It was there that I realized the deeper meaning of the Man, and why we had all come together to this insane place to do something so essentially silly, and yet so powerful.

To this day, almost 20 years later, I still remember the feelings and experiences I had there. I grew up that day. I grew out that day. My mind expanded that day.

That night there was a lot of craziness. I remember a lot of stupidity with cars. People going out and driving around with their lights off. Us chasing one car, with our headlights out. We pulled up next to the unsuspecting driver, who was probably blasting along at 40 MPH or so, and suddenly we flipped on our lights.

It must have been like a UFO was flying next to him! Here he is driving alone in the desert, when all of a sudden there is this blaze of lights not 10 feet away from him!!! He swerved away insanely to the right, and we laughed our asses off.

The next day was more wasting time during the day, waiting for the night to start. I don’t remember much of it, except that Mark went out for a drive, found the hotsprings, got stuck in the mud, and had to be rescued by the local air patrol. He came back 12 hours later, caked in mud to his waist, with an amazing story of dehydration and near-death experiences in the desert.

That night we burned the Man. One guy had brought out a drum set, and set it up a reasonable distance away from the Man. A fire-breather walked up to the Man, blew fire on his left leg (right where the woman had placed her X-rays the day before), and the Man went up in flames. The drummer began playing, and continued to play while the Man burned.

Most people stood quietly in deep thought while he burned. A few women here and there danced like wisps of smoke. I heard some people quietly singing to themselves. But for the most part, it felt like we were connecting with something much deeper within ourselves… very much the way the Temple Burn is at Burning Man today.

The next day was Monday. Everyone packed up their camps, cleaned up, and headed out.

We were some of the last people to leave, and were helping with the final cleanup and loading of the Ryder truck, when someone came over and asked for help with their VW Bug. Apparently it wouldn’t start.

People worked on it for a while, but it just wasn’t going to run. Almost everyone was gone at this point, and we were all getting concerned about what we were going to do with the Bug. The driver we could get home. We could get her stuff home. But we couldn’t just leave the car, and we had no way to tow it.

Then I measured the width of the car with my arms.

Then I walked to the back of the Ryder truck and measured it.

People understood what I was getting at, so about 8 of us got together, picked up the Bug, and put it in back of the truck!

When I saw Mike later that week at work, he said that it had been REALLY hard to get the car back out of the truck! They apparently drove the truck all over San Francisco looking for a loading dock that was the same height as the bed of the truck, so they could back up to the loading dock and roll the car out!

The next year I went back to Burning Man again. I remember that several of the guys from Survival Research Labs, including Dezso the rocket expert, were out there. I’d been spending more of my time in the SRL crowd over the last year, and was mostly interested in what they had brought to the desert that they couldn’t do in San Francisco. (Years later, in an odd twist of fate, I wound up relocating to Budapest, Hungary, which was where Dezso was from!)

I did not make it to Burning Man after that. My new wife and I were involved in other things, like the burgeoning swing music revival that was happening in San Francisco, and I fell out of touch with the Cacaphony Society gang.

As I said, I moved overseas for many years. Then moved back to Seattle in 2003.

In 2004 a friend gifted me a Burning Man ticket. He was a rabid fan of the event, and I had written it off in my head as a big commercial rave. “Hell, we didn’t need TICKETS and porta-potties back in the Good Ole Days!” I ranted. We went back and forth, me praising the old days, and him praising the current event. Finally he challenged me to overcome my prejudices and join him and his camp on the Playa. So I did.

He was right. And I have not missed Burning Man since my return in 2004.

Burning Man today is important in a much deeper and more meaningful way than in was when I was originally involved. The way I describe it is that Burning Man back in the day was “a buncha loonies doing illegal shit in the desert”. Whereas the event today is the most wonderful art gallery, community experiment, and pure unadulterated wild fun you can have in this country any more.

This last year – 2007 – I was riding my bicycle on the Esplanade, and I ran into my old co-worker, Mike. The guy that got me to my first Burning Man experience on the beach in San Francisco. He’s a bit of a legend in the Burner community nowadays, and it was nice to catch up with him. His influence at that important time in my life has had a fundamental effect on who I have become today.

Hello. My playa name is Bucky. And I am proud to call myself a Burner.

By Christian Jacobsen. All rights reserved.