From The Big Story: Greetings From Burning Man!

Listen to more of The Big Story here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop Dispatches from the New American Holiday: Writer Bruce Sterling takes the kids to the Temporary Autonomous Zone, where survival is a personal choice. Written by Bruce Sterling. Originally published in WIRED on November 1st, 1996. For more of the most ambitious, future-defining stories from our favorite human writers, subscribe to The Big Story newsletter: https://www.wired.com/newsletter/the-big-story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:07Speaker 00

  This is the big story from Wired. You're listening to Greetings from Burning Man, written by Bruce Sterling, originally published on November 1, 1996. Dispatches from the New American Holiday. Writer Bruce Sterling takes the kids to the temporary autonomous zone, where survival is a personal choice.

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  Thursday, August 29. Stopped at the gas station for directions to the Burning Man festival. Grizzled, portly, Nevadan local growls: "If you have to ask, you don't belong there." As if anybody was gonna drive all the way to Gerlach, Nevada, population 340, for some other reason. The gas station was packed with mobile homes and junker slacker mobiles. The guy relented and gave us directions. Seems like a multiple-pierced and tattooed "Lovely" in a clingy peach taffeta costume had melted his heart. Drove 16 miles, then drove another 12 miles across the bottom of a very dead lake.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Driving across the Playa is like space travel. You point the front of the vehicle into emptiness and launch. Gaseous trails of flying white dust spurred up like jet exhaust. Cars and trucks leave huge wakes on the horizon, like white prairie fires. If the wind kicks up, the world becomes a twilight zone of milky haze. Driving fast in a white-out dust fog is an excellent way to get killed. We're in a 22-foot Ford recreational vehicle, in which I've brought the family to Burning Man: Nancy Sterling, wife, mom; Amy Sterling, nine years; and the littlest desert fox, Laura of Arabia,

• 3:33Speaker 00

  a hardened travel veteran at four months. We've never lived in an RV before. It's a mutant cross between an aircraft and a small chunk of suburbia. It's brand-new, but it shudders, moans, vibrates, rattles, squeaks, and emits foul generator exhaust. Reached the camp, found a place to park, got out to walk around. Maybe 500 vehicles here already? People are setting up tents, parachutes, awnings, tiki torches, tribal flags. The lakebed is a Euclidean plane with zillions of dry fractal cracks. The parched Nevada mountains of the Black Rock Desert rise on three sides.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Weary, treeless hills full of sullen majesty. Friday, August 30. A guy got killed last night. He rear-ended a truck while zooming along the darkened Playa on a blacked-out motorcycle. The place feels like the afterlife. When you walk across it, you just drift over endless, cracked whiteness, lifting your feet maybe a quarter inch from the surface. It's all mobile. It's all temporary. Twist the ignition key and drift with the wind. Burning Man is an art gig by tradition. Over the longer term, it's evolved into something else. Maybe something like a physical version of the internet. The art here is like fan art.

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  It's very throwaway, very appropriative, very cut and paste. The camp is like a giant swap meet where no one sells stuff, but people trade postures, clip art, and attitude. People come here in clumps: performance people, drumming enthusiasts, site-specific sculptors, sailplane people, ravers, journalists, cops. I'm a journalist and a newbie, but even I can tell the pros from my fellow newbies. The veterans have brought their own penance: bicycles, flashlights, and tiki torches, plus enough water for anything. The alkali dust is like a fine and bitter talcum. It gets into everything, so why fight it? Just throw off your clothes.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Keep maybe a straw hat, shades, and boots. Throwing off all your clothes is the cheapest, quickest way that was ever invented to cop an attitude. It's also a cool youth culture solidarity move. Young people look great without clothes. Young people don't need them. Vehicles have scattered all over the Playa. It's as if a giant bowl of mixed nuts had dropped off a kitchen counter onto white linoleum. The parachute-covered central camp does duty as the broken bowl. All around it are cashews, peanuts, and sunflower seeds. Dinky pop tents, some bigger pop tents. RVs, pickups, trailers. There's even an honest-to-goodness geodome,

• 6:32Speaker 00

  erected by some ambitious guys who have brought a crane. Their towering construction crane arouses much envy, and they get to boast of having the biggest tech on the Playa. The streets are vaporous formalities. They're pre-marked with tiny, colored, plastic flags. The flags get bent, they get stepped on, they even get run over. But once the idea of a street is established, the community standard holds. You're not supposed to throw anything away on the Playa. You're supposed to leave nothing at all. The idea of leaving no visible trace is a central part of the Burning Man zeitgeist, a performance art process move. The organizers are very specifically eco-correct, maybe because they're so lighthearted

• 7:17Speaker 00

  about tolerating most anything else. We're new here, and as a married couple with kids, we are very adult and polite. So we dutifully follow orders, and we don't dump anything. It's a quick and brutal lesson in the gross inconvenience of modern convenience. Everything we own or want to get rid of becomes a burden: toilet paper, snack bags, beer cartons, dirty diapers, or unwashed clothes. Nancy and I take to wolfing down Amy's food so that we won't have to store it in malodorous twist-tie bags. There's some good art here. When you see the good art,

• 8:00Speaker 00

  even though it is very temporary, it's like finding a pearl in a bag of salted peanuts. The Burning Man is good art. Flat on his back, he looks like a giant, abandoned packing crate. But when he's catapulted into standing position, he becomes a striking neon symbol of pretty much everything that matters. You can sit on a hay bale at the foot of the Burning Man, and the whole world passes by. It's like hanging out on the Venetian Rialto. Had a long chat with a guy about Moscow. I'd never met this guy except through email, but he recognized me, and we immediately struck up a conversation. We talked about Russians and their literature for an hour

• 8:44Speaker 00

  as we sat in a desert, bathing blue neon glow from the 40-foot Burning Man. We ruminated thoughtfully on the fate of Eastern Europe as people drove past on motorcycles that looked like aardvarks and bananas. Witchy pagan chicks stocked by in coats of body paint. Crypto-Arab hippies sauntered by arm-in-arm with bearded punks wearing devil horns. It felt very soothing and cosmopolitan.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  The stupa is also real art. It's constructed of books, mud, water, and wood. It's about fifteen feet high. It's very majestic and spiritual. To the east, there's a forest of meditation that is also real art. It's made of black rocks and twisted pieces of plumbing pipe, and it's about a mile across. People keep trying to camp inside that art. It's beautiful. Add a few words with the justly legendary Larry Harvey today. Ten years ago, Larry went out and set fire to a big wooden statue on a beach. Kind of a private act of purgation and cleansing, by all accounts. But his idea caught on big time.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Larry is a heavy hipster dude. He's beyond mere trendiness. Guys of his ilk can create social trends at will, out of straw, hot air, and attitude. Larry is an artist, but under these circumstances, he looks just like you would expect the mayor of an impromptu city of ten thousand people to look. Larry looks real busy. He's wearing his trademark fedora, and he hasn't shaved, and his eyes are red-rimmed with dust. He's biting his lips a lot. Larry's puttering around on his battered motorcycle, putting out impromptu social fires, diverting ego trips and freakouts, coordinating the uncoordinated.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Larry appears to have a couple dozen city councilor-running buddies, who he can trust to mortar over the cracks. They all have this certain look, these tribal elder hippie guru characters. Time has given them the faces they deserve. They all end up with this spacey Crowleyan smirk. Not seamy, exactly, but some kind of terrible wisdom, like a cross between Gandalf and Nietzsche. It's truly a very interesting way to live, but you get to where you can smell it after a while. You don't want to clutch your wallet when you're around these guys.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  It's not like they're as degraded as, say, car salesmen or members of Congress, but when you're in their company, you feel a distinct witch doctor vibe. I kind of suspect that Larry Harvey could do interesting and terrible things to the soul of 90s America, if he really put his mind to it. And if 90s America had more soul for Larry and his friends to work with. Burning Man is a standard hippie tribal thing, except for the highly non-standard fact that it is not kitschy 60s nostalgia. This event is very 90s, very big, and very much alive.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  It's a Tim Leary, wavy-gravy, deadhead caravan, grab-the-mic-at-woodstock kind of event. Feels lovely and enormously persuasive, non-bureaucratic, participative, solidarity-driven, non-commercial arty. With all those manifest virtues, you have to wonder why a setup like this can't seem to last any longer than a Labor Day weekend. Maybe it's because real tribes aren't tattooed postmodern termite artists like the Burning Man people are. Actual, no kidding, tribes were tattooed hunter-gatherers, who lived in a world where nothing ever, ever changed. A world where witch doctors made all the important decisions.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  There's another thing really different and novel about Burning Man. It's a hippie gig, but it's swarming with cops. The Nevada cops have been in from the get-go. There are plenty of concert-security-type Danger Rangers, too. Security people are all over the place, and they could give two pins that people are running around naked, setting fires and blowing things up. I think this proves that temporary autonomous zones really can work in real life, as long as the cops help create them.

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  Saturday, the last day of August. Fiends in human guise greeted the dawn by wailing for half an hour on didgeridoos. This should be a capital offense. Woke up, had breakfast, looked out my RV window and saw a guy sitting on a toilet. He was skidding by at about forty-five miles per hour in a massive trail of dust. He had his toilet mounted on a wooden sled, and he was being towed by a pickup. His pants were around his ankles, and he was reading a magazine as he skidded along. It was the magazine reading that made this truly a memorable gesture. Left town for a while to fetch more water.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Can't take risks, we've got a baby on board. Came across a spectacular highway casualty. Bunch of Nevada sheriffs and paramedics were pounding the ribcage of a guy sprawled right in the middle of the highway. He was lying there in a sea of shattered glass amid his violently scattered possessions: a mattress, assorted camping gear. The cab of his little Toyota truck was crushed like a bug. I can't say for certain that this dead or dying kid was headed out to Burning Man, but a hell of a lot of the traffic stacked up behind him certainly was. People think it's good that Burning Man is difficult and rather dangerous to reach.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  This keeps the gawking frat boys and the sodden alcoholics at bay. To get this far out here, you've got to pay some dues and take some risks. Got to live on the edge, at least a little. Survival is a matter of personal choice, as the Burning Man official tabloid puts it, but when there are ten thousand people making risky choices, cold statistics dictate that some will surely croak. Ran into Danny Hillis, the supercomputer designer, today. Hillis was standing in the coffee line. He's here with his wife and their three little kids. His two twin toddler sons are real chips off the block. They have a real engineer's mindset.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  With absolute desolation around and nothing much to play with, they ingeniously began pelting each other with dust. Not a lot of little kids in this burg, scarcely any old people. With a babe in arms, you're an instant public attraction. Got two shots of tequila from a crew of friendly Australians, merely for allowing a young woman to dandle my infant. My baby's wearing a red tie-dyed onesie for the sake of local color, and she's coming across like the littlest deadhead. I'm wearing a nuclear power plant worker's jumpsuit, shades, sandals, and a cowboy hat with a bandana.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Nancy and Amy have flowing tie-dyed Sorelio robes with veils and canteens. We're passing for normal. Visited the iStorm trailer, where the World Wide Web contingent is putting together the live Burning Man website. W W W dot iStorm dot com front slash Burning Man. I enjoy hanging with these happening Gen X web entrepreneurs. They're nice guys, just fizzing with creativity. It's like meeting Walt Disney when he was still drawing on a tabletop in Kansas City, Missouri, before Walt Disney became the scary, litigious, freeze-dried media titan. Okay, maybe I shouldn't give Disney any lip.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Danny Hillis works for Disney these days. Walking around the playa with my family at night, this is the time to tour the site because Burning Man is truly weird, then. Black rock city has no power system, so at night, it's all lanterns and chugging generators and tiki torches and lots of chemglow. Colored strings of chemglow, out in the desert, woven through the spokes of bicycles and mysteriously revolving. Looming figures in costume, huge dramatic bowl of desert stars overhead, fireworks and flying flares casting a lurid trench warfare glow above the massive camp.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Drum pounding maniacs with guys dancing in the grip of hallucinogens. Nerdy guys, capering with out of it clumsiness, as if they had never danced in their lives. Daughter Amy starts grumbling and complaining. It dawns on us that she's getting scared. Something to do with the evil Helco Pavilion with its saw edged performance machines and the gruesome cutout movie stars from the L.A. Cockophony Society. Amy is a sensitive and imaginative child. She bursts out suddenly. This is awful. It's like a living nightmare. It is too, which is pretty much why we jaded adults are really living it up.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  But Amy won't be comforted and has to go back to the RV with mom. It's getting late. I hitch a ride on the aggravator, a monstrous steampunk contraption with a flamethrower and four sets of bicycle pedals. I then sit on the aggravator's iron tractor seat and watch an astounding presentation over by the sinister temple towers of the city of Dis. A formal procession begins with honks, rattles and electronic squeaks. Pagan hierophants in tall headdresses and silver lemay march in slow step, toting flaming standards of arcane device.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Swarms of nude dancers, male and female, caper up in bizarre sword and sorcery bondage gear. The soundtrack switches to repeated insane bestial screaming. An awe inspiring insect goddess, a hunchbacked bug on red stilts, comes towering and tipping and tottering into the firelight like a mad Kafkaesque advent. It's like a cross between Vatican ceremony, Cirque du Soleil and a necroerotic cannibal mantis mating ritual. The performers seem ready to burst into a flagellant orgy at any instant in front of a solid milling crowd of at least 3,000.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  This sure isn't the sort of thing one sees every day. It's something that a desperately horny sci-fi fan might see on acid and cough syrup. Then the performers set fire to the set. The tall rebar towers turned to instant chimneys, glow white hot and vent livid five-story flames. I'm really enjoying this. Okay, so they're not professional exotic dancers. They're eager amateurs. They dance the way 50s B-movie starlets danced in some cheesy Lost Race epic. Okay, Jim, Cindy, you guys are pagan babes at the palace orgy, so just go out there and lose it. Get really lusty.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  They caper and dance very lustily for more than an hour and then they get pretty tired and out of breath, and then they have to sit down. But it's a lot of fun watching these tattooed San Franciscans flinging the dour garments of repentance. It's sweet to watch them lose themselves in the moment. After the towers buckle and collapse, the screaming and chanting Greek chorus takes a well deserved rest. The dancers hug each other, all bright eyed and happy, and the crowd dissipates into the desert. Then a bunch of drummers wander in and take over by the smoldering bonfire. There are swarms of drummers here. Most can't beat a steady rhythm worth a dang.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  But we've got a cadre of guys who really can drum, accompanied by some crazy dancers who are not half bad either. They go at it hot and heavy, booming, banging, boogying. The drummers are really savoring the joy of life. It's worth coming a long way to see this.

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  Sunday, September 1. Our noses are parched and crusty. Our lips are chapped. Our lungs are lined with a fine layer of alkali dust. We haven't slept much. We decide to go out to the hot springs. Fabulous place. It's got a geyser, eerie maroon towers of hot mineral concretion. The water's hot enough to hard boil eggs, but it flows out into a broad series of weedy muddy pools, so you can pick your temperature. There are about 200 hippies here, naked and covered with mud. A nude woman covered with mud is an interesting sight, but mostly she looks like she's undergoing a spa treatment.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  But take some nude muscular young guy and armor him face to foot in black and gray sulfurous muck, and he looks genuinely impressive, like a New Guinea headhunting mud warrior. Hey, Nancy and I are with this. It works for us. We strip the dusty clothes from our middle aged married couple carcasses and we cover ourselves with mud. The baby skips the mud bath and my nine year old's not real thrilled at this prospect either. But Nancy and I are getting seriously hot, down and slimy. The sky is blue and the water is poaching our desert parched hides with deeply gratifying effect.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  And for the first time, we really feel like we're on vacation. A lot of air stuff today. Hot air balloon, paragliders, a skywriter plane. At night, someone constructs a fake constellation. It's a glowing mass, like the Little Dipper, and it looks just like stars, except they're moving across the night sky without visible means of support. Faking the stars, cutting and pasting the desert sky? Now that's a good trick. It's good art. I truly can't believe what I'm seeing. Then night falls and it's time to finally burn the man.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  I've got Amy up on my shoulders videotaping this in the midst of an enormous boisterous cheering crowd. A procession marches up, solemn, freakish and deeply hilarious. Then they fire up the guy and he explodes in sheets of colored fireworks and giant livid gouts of flames. The spectacle seriously lights my fourth grader's circuits. Burn him, Amy is screaming, wriggling like an eel. It's without doubt the most exciting thing she's ever witnessed. Look at him burn. This is amazing. I can't believe it. Wow.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  When the man's about to collapse from sheer conflagration, some brave and hefty folks grab a pair of dangling steel cables from the burning man's shoulders. They tug and yank. The giant wooden man goes into a weird spastic dance, pointy arms upraised and shedding massive showers of fire. A 40 foot high wooden doll dancing in flames is a sight that really hits the nine year old demographic. My kid is in ecstasy. She's loudly swearing that she'll remember this for the rest of her life. I'm sure this is true.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Baby's asleep in mother's arms. It's okay. She can see it when she's older. We've got it all on tape. Monday, September 2. Back to Reno. There are places in Reno that are seriously weird. There are lessons here. Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, if you want to get high and be a naked hippie, you're under suspicion of engaging in the moral equivalent of terrorism. You've got to haul out into the middle of some godforsaken desert and hope that not too many people find out about it. It's all exactly backward. If you want to have a naked pagan art fair, you ought to have it in the padded comfort of a sealed, air-conditioned casino. It would be perfect for this kind of activity. If you want to divorce somebody, or feed the gambling bug, or lick your chops over paid nudity, then you ought to have to creep off to do that in some remote boondocks where the rest of us don't have to witness your gross behavior.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  I wonder how our culture got into this oxymoronic situation. It can't be good for us. I went to Burning Man. I took my kids. It's not scary. It's not pagan. It's not devilish or satanic. There's no public orgies. Nobody gets branded or hit with whips. Hell, it's less pagan than the Shriners. It's just big, happy crowds of harmless arty people expressing themselves and breaking a few pointless shibboleths that only serve to ulcerate young people anyway. There ought to be Burning Man festivals held downtown once a year in every major city in America. It would be good for us. We need it.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  In fact, until we can just relax every once in a while and learn how to do this properly, we're probably never gonna get well.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to The Big Story from Wired. For more of our journalism, visit wired.com or subscribe to the magazine. We'll be back every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday with new stories for you to listen to. This story was narrated by me, Christian Titus. The producer was Rose Kirchner. Mike Kutschman was our mixing and mastering engineer, and our senior features editor is Jason Kay. Special thanks to Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond, executive director of features and special projects, Rayhan Harmansi, and executive director of global audio, Niko Steele. This series was developed by Michelle O'Brien.

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