Letter from Burning Man
Attributions for some of the photos in this article are unknown. I would give them if I knew them.
Of course I’m aware that the popular media loves to skewer Burning Man and its attendees. Bashing Burning Man is the ultimate virtue signal; it’s cheaply bought superiority. The media (and many of us) relish every rainstorm and sandstorm — it’s Schadenfreude turned up to 11. They gloat over people stuck in mud or whose tents blew down. They mock the wealthy who stay in luxury motor homes while only posing as Burners during the day. It’s fashionable to make fun of the massive dollar amounts behind this nominally anti-capitalist utopia. I’m well aware, and I’ve done plenty of that bashing myself.
I won’t anymore.
For a decade, my friend Ryan has been trying to get me to go. His camp Playa Penthouse (7:30 & B)1 has some 40-odd people every year. They have a pole dance floor, a DJ booth, a laser show, a geodesic dome, and all kinds of stuff. I had always politely declined his invitations, because it’s just “not my thing.” I get it, and I’m all for people who are into it going and knocking themselves out, but it just wasn’t for me. So I never went.
This year he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He sported me one of the tickets his camp received; he gave me half of his comfortable RV to stay in; and he hooked me up with the Burner Bus to/from Reno so I skipped the long line of vehicles coming and going from the playa. “And you just got divorced,” Ryan reminded me, “this year you have no excuse.”
He was right. He was very, very right.
Setting the Scene…
You’ve probably seen the aerial photos. Black Rock City is laid out around a great big circular central plaza, one mile across. The “Man” — the famous gigantic wooden sculpture burned on Saturday night — is at the center. The circumference road is called the Esplanade, and the roads going out from there are lettered A, B, C, all the way out to about K or so. The roads bisecting those — the “spokes of the wheel” if you will — are named for what time they’d be if the whole thing was a clock. The first is 2:00 and it’s solid humanity all the way around to 10:00.
But where it’s most interesting is outside of that circular area. Scattered everywhere are public art exhibitions. Approved artists can erect their pieces, and if needed, can receive grants for heavy equipment and personnel needed to assemble them. If power is needed, they can receive grants to cover the cost of generators or trailers loaded with batteries and solar panels. I rode my bike way the hell out there, and I never found the extent of how far out the art goes. You could probably spend the entire week and not see all of the art pieces out there — and many of them are astounding. Once each year, the world’s greatest museum of modern art is in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.
The utter size and scale and scope of the place is what blew my mind the most. Of course I’d seen pictures, but the experience of being there in person was a whole new world.
Perhaps the event’s most iconic features are the so-called “mutant vehicles.” The smallest are the size of a school bus; the largest are the size of Jabba’s sail barge. Most of them have DJs aboard and festival-scale audio systems (I quite enjoyed standing in front of the subwoofer racks and having my skeleton shaken to dust).
In 2024, some 700 mutant vehicles were licensed by the event (2025 numbers are not yet available). Ponder that number, and multiply it by the number of hours of labor by artists, technicians, and engineers — to say nothing of the cost. None of this work is easy. There is a level of passion here that most of us never imagine. There is something special happening here; something that converts professional, intelligent, functional adults into obsessed madmen who spend every spare moment and spare dollar on welding, cutting, wiring, and piping.
Burning Man is doing something to these people.
The Cost
Yet to those on the outside, including me until this week, we marvel and mock at how much people pay for what the media shows us is just a bad campsite in the mud. Learning more about the economics of this massive event was a point of genuine curiosity for me.
My ticket (thank you, Ryan) showed a price of $650. For that, you get 9 days, or $72 dollars a day. Free food and drink are everywhere; you could easily get by bringing nothing at all for yourself (except water). Feeding people is what a lot of camps do; get to know the right people and you can get genuine gourmet meals and the world’s most expensive scotch and cigars. I only had a bit of food here and there, as Playa Penthouse provided three squares a day from our big kitchen with two chefs. I never touched the food I brought.
So for $72 a day you get your campsite with whatever you bring; 24-hour entertainment unlike anything else on Earth; and the right to all the free food and drink you can find. You don’t have to try hard; walk any street and barkers will come out with megaphones inviting you to come in for whatever they’re serving. And everything is strictly free, and nobody is turned away.
Everyone at Playa Penthouse had to take some job shifts. I worked some in our kitchen and also tended our bar. To do that, we were given Zoom meetings with all the needed training. We had to learn not only our bar procedures, but also 50-state ID recognition, and how to not serve people who are over the limit. Burning Man is not anarchy; safety is always top priority.
That extends to the physical contact. Many camps offer exotic experiences; you can dance naked, get sprayed with foam, nude wrestle in maple syrup, get publicly spanked, even have group (or private) sex. Safety and ensuring that all contact is consensual is paramount. The mantra If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no is everywhere.
Police and emergency services are also everywhere, but discreet. They really just provide safety; they never intrude into Burning Man experiences. If you don’t need them, you’ll probably never see them. We had two medical emergencies at Playa Penthouse while I was there. Every camp is provided an emergency radio. I called in once, a dude answered instantly, and within two minutes a vehicle was onsite with a doctor and an EMT, and our patient was transported to the medical center.
And that medical center, named Rampart (an homage to the 1970s show Emergency!) is a fully equipped urgent care clinic; if more help is needed, helicopters are onsite ready to transport anyone to the hospital in Reno. Most of the patients are there for dehydration, which is what both of ours were. (Drink water, people, you’re in the freaking desert.)
Black Rock City even has an FAA-compliant airport (88NV), completely built and disassembled annually for this event. It requires 400 people!!!!
Porta potties are everywhere and are serviced. Trucks are available to provide water, fuel, and to haul away black waste.
Although everyone is required to remove every bit of MOOP (matter out of place) from their camp, hundreds of people remain onsite for three weeks combing, metal detecting, and magnetic raking to remove every speck of evidence that anything happened. Wherever a piece of art burns, decomposed granite is laid down under it first, and every single grain and ember are removed.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized $72/day is not expensive for what you get. So let’s please put that criticism to bed.
The Burn
Any discussion of “what you get for the money” is incomplete without understanding “the Burn.” This is the Man Burn, Saturday night, the “official” (but not real) end of the event. This is when they burn the great big wooden man sculpture in the center of the playa — what the whole event is named after.
Hours before the Burn, a hundred or so of the biggest and best mutant vehicles circle the Man, and all the DJs go mad. Imagine the speaker systems of a hundred nightclubs all aimed straight at you, all bumping different house music at the same time. The audio impact probably cannot even be simulated any other way. You exist in a zero-gravity firmament of discordant vibration, a thunderstorm in an echo chamber; every bone convulses, and the ground shudders to make standing upright hard. That’s OK, because inside the circle of mutant vehicles, everyone is required to remain seated, and that’s what we did.
Fire dancers come out — many of them. There were a score or more troupes making their way around. I learned they were all volunteers who spent much of the week learning to fire dance, just for this performance! What a week that must have been.
And then the fireworks begin. Soon the Man himself is hidden behind all the smoke and phosphorous. We see the structure itself has begun to catch fire here and there.
(For those concerned about safety, we all remember 2017 when a person — motives unknown — ran into the burning structure, and despite firefighters’ best efforts to stop him, died. That can’t happen anymore. There is detailed perimeter control and all kinds of emergency, safety, and law enforcement crews standing by, but the three layers of human security are the ultimate stoppage:
Outermost are Black Rock Rangers every 15 feet around a 300-foot radius surrounding the Man, scanning the crowd for anyone standing or approaching, and hitting anyone with a spotlight who appears to be approaching.
Next are the Sandmen. This is an undisclosed number of big-ass dudes, specially trained to physically intercept anyone who makes it as far as the Rangers.
The innermost ring are Rapid Intervention Teams of professional firefighters, trained in both rescue and interdiction.)
It is a show that gives any 4th of July display a run for its money. As it begins to wind down and the smoke is at its densest, a massive pop drowns out even the club music. It is a legit incendiary bomb that engulfs the structure in a billow of orange flame. The cheers match the volume of the subwoofers.
There is no other spectacle like it. And just as you’re thinking that, pop pop pop go more incendiary bombs, and the Burning Man is now a raging firestorm. Fire tornados appear:
The next morning, I rolled out there on my bike. A group had a food cart and was giving out bacon cooked in the embers. A family was making Jiffy Pop. A number of people were roasting marshmallows.
The playa continued to give. 😁
The Temple
This will be, by far, my most lasting memory.
At the 12:00 position, half a mile up from the Man, is the Temple. I had never heard of it before. One day on my own I thought I’d go see what it was, so I parked my bike and walked inside a dramatic wooden building — into one of the most profound experiences of my life — which I won’t ever forget.
There were hundreds of people in there, but not a sound — except for muffled sobbing. Most were seated in a central amphitheater. The rest were scattered about various halls and rooms. Every surface was plastered over with photos, letters, posters, and writing on the walls; all tributes to friends and family who have been lost. Individuals, families, couples, all posted their remembrances through tears. I wandered the hallways, overcome, wiping my eyes, reading as many as I could.
The best way to describe the mood in the Temple is radical reverence.
Once I came upon a man curled into a ball against the wall, head down, hand on a letter tacked to the wall, crying wholeheartedly. Sunburned and tattooed from head to toe, leather vest and kilt, he had the look of a classic Burner. I knelt beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder, and sat in silence with him for a minute or two, as he grieved.
Writing implements had been left everywhere. I took a Sharpie and wrote something deeply personal for my late sister, lost in 2007, on the side of a wall stud — the act brought everything back, as if her loss had happened yesterday. I cried out loud, unashamed — in this place, nobody is ashamed, and everyone is supported.
As I made my way out, I came across another man, also on the ground, panting and wheezing as if recovering from a powerful crying session. His head was down. I did the same thing and placed my hand on his shoulder, only this time he reached up and squeezed my hand hard — some kind of a painful death grip, and as soon as he did, he began shaking hard — he was crying anew. I was stuck there for a few minutes, and I’m glad because he seems to have needed that connection. Not a word was said. Who was he? I have no idea. I hope he is doing well today, wherever he is. He looked like someone I may have had very little in common with; but here, in the Burning Man Temple, in the depths of human grieving and human love and human mutual support, we had everything in common.
I thought about that more as I wandered the halls and looked at the faces. Who were any of these people? Maybe one was a millionaire CEO. Maybe one was behind on his bills and unemployed. Maybe one was a doctor, a garbage collector, an accountant, a food server. Maybe one was in love. Maybe one was lonely and had no love. But at Burning Man, and especially in the Temple, we were all just Burners. Who you are in the “real world” is irrelevant. But more to that point, I learned that to many who make this pilgrimage every year, Burning Man is the real world — and the rest of the year is just waiting.
The Temple burns on the very last night, the Sunday. The scene is exactly like the Man Burn, with an important exception: it’s dead silent. All the mutant vehicles encircle it just like the night before, but there is no music, no belching flames, no lasers into the sky. The Temple burns without fireworks, without ceremony. All the keepsakes we placed inside are consumed and we let go. It is a personal moment for each of us, deeply meaningful for some, beautiful for others, anguish for a few.
Mocking the people to whom Burning Man is important? Smugly laughing at them when they get rain? Yeah, you’re off-base. You’re way the fuck off-base.
So what did I think of my first Burn?
That’s the question everyone asked as soon as they heard it was my first. It’s obligatory. The first time, I thought for a moment, trying to find a good answer. I didn’t bother after that.
“It can’t be described,” was all I said, “so I won’t try.” If you asked me now, I’d say the same thing. I would add that everyone should do it once, just to see something you’ll never see anywhere else in the world, any other time in your life:
Maybe you just want to see incendiary bombs destroy a structure.
Maybe you want to see a bunch of naked people.
Maybe you want to see uncounted person-hours of labor and welding and fabrication and artisanship stretching horizon to horizon — literally horizon to horizon; something you’re not likely to see at any other point in your life.
Maybe you want free booze and drugs.
Maybe you like art museums and want to see the world’s biggest.
Maybe you just like people-watching.
Maybe you want to forget everything else in the world for a whole week.
Or, maybe you’re someone of limited curiosity and adventure, and have no interest — I was — or at least, I was starting to lean too heavily in that direction. My first Burn cured me of that. At this point, later in life (I’m 59), I don’t think there’s an invitation to anything that I would decline. Life is too fucking short. Ryan knew that, and he made sure I learned it. I did.
In conclusion, I don’t care if you ever go to Burning Man or not. But I hope you do something to step outside your box. To see that your comfort zone is a tiny doghouse. To see that you’re an important part of something, somewhere, even if you don’t feel important here and now and wherever you are. To see that you are unlimited. To learn that what others think of you is laughably meaningless. To see that the horizon goes on and on, to infinity, and that you are welcome there — in fact, invited… and needed.
To see that you are already everything you wish you could ever be.
And that’s what I thought of my first Burn.
That’s its address: it’s on the B ring counting out from the middle, and at the 7:30 line, like the spoke of a wheel on a clock.
I'm so glad to have been able to share our dusty home with you. It was so great to see the burn anew, through your eyes and experiences. Love you brother. -Ryan (Lazer)
Beautiful