Oh Yeah, the Burn

It’s the origin of it all. What the event is named. The icon. What 47,097 people came to witness this year. The highly anticipated event of the week…the Burning of the Man.

After 6 days of experiencing the heat, the dirt, the windstorms, the playa, the techno music, the camps and the community…the time had come. It was the pinnacle of the adventure – the approving signature of all the connections we made, the lessons we learned, the reflections about ourselves we discovered, the fun we had.

How can I capture the spirit? The feeling? What it felt like to participate in this ritual that started as a beach party in San Francisco during the summer solstice of 1986? Let’s see if I have it. Okay…I think this will do it.

Saturday evening came.
We headed to the middle of the playa.
Got a seat. The crowd grew.
We waited. And waited.
Fire dancers performed.
We waited some more.
Some fireworks were lit.
People cheered.
The man was lit.
People cheered.
The man burned.
People cheered.
We waited.
The man toppled over.
People cheered.
We left.

In short, it was really quite unexciting and uneventful. And it had nothing to do with the fact that The Man was already set fire once early in the week by an arsonist. It was simply not that amazing to see the man burn – so much so that I would have been entirely happy to not talk about it at all. But this being my first year and all, it felt like I should at least mention it. Sure, the fireworks were pretty. There was a moment when a big explosion blasted a blanket of heat throughout the crowd and the warmth that spread out was comforting but otherwise….it was just eh.

Thinking about it now, what I really remembered enjoying about that evening was a ritual we had done a couple times that week. It was the time our group took to get ready for the night’s festivities. Each day, each of us would return to camp from whatever we had been doing. As the sun started to set, we’d sit in our camp chairs, nap a little, refresh with catch-up conversation and then prepare our separate dinners together. I use the term “prepare” loosely. Firing up the grill to boil water or heat hot dogs, opening the cooler to get at the pasta salad or revving up the generator to power the microwave were the general cooking things we did.

Satiated, we would head into our respective abodes and dig through our bins and bags and piles to find the outfit of the night. I brought a full length mirror to share (would you expect less of me?) which became the focal point while we were getting ready. From each our tents to the mirror, each of us would beeline with one outfit to the next to decide which persona we would be expressing that evening. There would be a slight detour time and again to another person’s tent when indecision would plague. But overall, this was our time to connect. Though it wasn’t with intense conversation or emotional outburst, the simplicity of these moments were comforting and got us ready for whatever the nights had in store for us.

I raise my glass, not to The Burning Man, but to my camp mates. Salut.