The Burning Question at Black Rock
Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 1996
This fall, 10,000 people were sucked into the Nevada desert for a Woodstock at the stake -- five days without inhibitions where, on the final day, a huge structure of a man is burned in effigy. Now people are wondering…
It was the damnedest thing anybody here had ever seen: the Burning Man Festival, a village of maybe 10,000 people, drawn by nature, sex and the Internet, plopped down in the middle of a trackless desert for five days in the baking heat of Labor Day weekend.
The Burning Man this year was the biggest performance art festival in the West. There was poetry around the clock, there was music, drugs, mass nudity, hot springs, dust storms, a daily newspaper, five radio stations, hundreds of portable toilets, motorcycles, dune buggies, Jeeps and all the Jeep pretenders, airplanes, anarchy, fun, madness. There was one death.
"The Burning Man is Disneyland in reverse . . . Woodstock turned inside out," said Larry Harvey, the principal organizer behind the event. Everyone, he said, is an actor in the pageant. "It is anything you want it to be."
It was not anarchy," said Phil Thomas, the local justice of the peace. "It was more of organized mayhem."
This year's festival was the 11th running of the Burning Man, an event that began in San Francisco and moved to the desert in 1990. The Burning Man is named for a big wooden figure of a man, set afire as the finale. What does it mean? Anything you like.
It has doubled in size every year, from a couple of hundred participants in 1990 to perhaps 1,000 or so a year later, to 5,000 last year, to 10,000 or so this year. There are no exact numbers, only guesses.
The Burning Man was perfect for the Internet. It made the cover of the November issue of Wired magazine, which called it "The New American Holiday."
The Burning Man is on the Web, of course: Black Rock City Online billed as "part of the smoking hole in reality." There were 100,000 hits in two days.
This year, the Burning Man was bigger even than the immense and brooding Black Rock Desert, 100 miles north of Reno.
It was so big, so popular, that nearly everyone agrees on one thing -- never again. Not the same way. Some people question whether the Burning Man is an appropriate use for the Black Rock Desert, where the chief attraction is a sense of space, and solitude. It was a basic contradiction -- a huge crowd in an empty land, an event that hailed anarchy that had too much anarchy for its own good.
The desert is also used for other events, including speed trials. This October, car racer Craig Breedlove tried -- and failed -- to set a world land speed record on the desert. His jet-powered car reached 675 miles per hour, then nearly tipped over.
The stage for all this is more than 900 square miles that once were the bottom of the ancient Lake Lahontan. The surface of the desert is playa -- the floor of the vanished lake, cracked and dry in summer and damp and impassable in winter.
It is surrounded by sere brown mountains. To Glenn Miller, a professor at the University of Nevada, it is a place "of mystery and majesty," where one can see the curvature of the earth. It is possible to be absolutely alone in the desert; there are no animals, and almost no plant life on the playa. "You have to learn how to look at it," said Bernie Schopen, a Reno novelist and teacher. "You have to get past green." One of his books, a detective story called "The Big Silence," is set in the Black Rock.
The nearest town is Gerlach, set between the Black Rock and the adjacent Smoke Creek desert. To get there, one turns off Interstate 80 at Fernley and heads north through the Indian reservation town of Nixon and the company town of Empire. On the highway between Nixon and Empire, 50 or so miles, there are two houses.
Gerlach likes to brag it is the place where the pavement ends and the West begins. It is hot as the hinges of hell in summer and bitter cold in winter.
To get to the Burning Man, one heads out of Gerlach, out a dirt road, taking one of two unmarked tracks into the desert and heading easterly. The playa is like the ocean, you don't drive on it, you navigate. The playa is flat, and most cars can handle it fairly easily, if it is dry. However, this is desert, miles from anywhere and desolate, a bad place to be in trouble. After some miles, for five days late last summer, one came upon the fantastic Black Rock City, home of the Burning Man. Admission was $40 on site, $35 for tickets in advance. The money buys sanitary facilities, some security, and admission into a kind of organized anarchy, where anything goes.
The theme this year was hell. There was a McSatan burger stand, a Hell Oil gas station and a Motel 666. It was as hot as hell, nearly -- 105 in the shade. At the hot springs, steam came out of the very ground.
There were camps all over the desert, tents, domes, motor homes, clouds of dust so thick no one could see.
"The vehicles and structures are organized into affinity tribes," Bruce Sterling wrote in Wired, "pyromaniac camp, windsurfer camp, piano-fire camp, rave camp, industrial grunge camp, radio camp, art camp, gun and ammo camp, and so on. Beyond this, nothing is certain."
"The weirdest stuff you could see in San Francisco is out there," said John Law, one of the organizers, "but some of the most imaginative as well."
It is very much a San Francisco event. "This thing," said Harvey, "could never come out of any place but San Francisco, the world center of eccentricity."
The central premise, he said, is "to create your own world. You don't go there to be entertained. You are the entertainment. Indeed, it is your duty to create. It is the idea -- isn't it? -- behind every great party. It is like a carnival."
"A republic of the creative," he called it, "a powerful force."
There is a tradition in Nevada -- you can do anything you like as long as nobody gets hurt and you don't frighten the horses. And in Gerlach, most people seem to like the Burning Man and the people who come with it.
Gerlach has a population of 350. There are five saloons and no churches. There is a cinder-block courthouse with an eight-seat courtroom, Judge Thomas presiding. "I am the clerk, the judge, the department head, the budget analyst and the bouncer," he said. His jurisdiction is larger than New Jersey, 7,500 square miles, with a population of perhaps 1,000. He is the law between the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation and Oregon.
Gerlach has a high school and its sports teams travel hundreds of miles for road games, sometimes as far as Tule Lake on the California-Oregon border. Gerlach High graduated 14 students last year.
It is 79 miles from downtown Gerlach to the nearest ATM machine and 100 to the dentist. "We live in the slow lane of life," said Bev Osborn, who owns one of the bars. She came to Gerlach in 1943, when the town was a little bigger and the train still stopped there.
The Union Pacific railroad runs on the edge of the desert and through Gerlach, but the trains are all freight and seldom even slow down.
If there is a leading citizen in Gerlach, it is Bruno Selmi. He and his wife, Frances, own Bruno's Country Club and Casino. Bruno is a self-made man, who came to town 50 years ago from Italy with nothing. Now his empire includes the town's only motel, only gas station and leading restaurant, famous for its raviolis. Everybody knows Bruno, and Bruno knows everybody, including former presidents of the United States, and the people behind the Burning Man.
The Burning Man folks, he says, "are the nicest people I ever saw in my life."
What they do in the desert is their business, and when they come to town they fill up on Bruno's gas, put dimes in Bruno's slot machines, eat his raviolis and drink his beer.
"If they don't bother me, I don't give a s--." That's his philosophy.
Osborn feels the same way. "They just go out there and have a big party," she said. "It is one time in life when people come out here to go crazy. And everybody in town gets a piece of the action. Even the Girl Scouts went out there to sell ice and raised $900 this year."
John Law, who has been Harvey's right hand man, feels the desert is like "a blank slate" that is empty when the Burning Man begins, and is cleaned up afterward so that when it is over, it is empty again, as if it never happened.
The federal Bureau of Land Management, which administers the desert, came out some days after the event to inspect the cleanup effort. The Burning Man volunteers had done such a good job that Lynn Clemons, the BLM's officer in charge, could not even find the site of the Burning Man.
You can't hurt the desert, some people say. Once it is gone over by the cleaning crews, it is the same as it ever was. But there are those who say it was the desert wind that took care of the trash. Two days after the end of the Burning Man, a windstorm came up and blew the dust from the playa, churned up by thousands of vehicles, and the trash together into the immensity of the Great Basin. Bob Ellis, a member of a group called Desert Survivors, called it "the mother of all dust storms."
Everyone agrees about a few things: Some of the Burning Man was shocking. There was public sex, there were drugs, and drinking and people driving drunk and stoned. There were too many vehicles, and they made too much dust, which was dangerous, because people drove very fast in zero visibility.
One person died in a head-on motorcycle crash, and three others were injured when a car ran over their tent. One of them is still in a coma with head injuries, two months later.
These accidents might have happened at a rodeo or a rock concert, or some other big event. When there are crowds, things happen, and some are tragic. "It is a community," said Harvey. "There are marriages, and divorces, and births and deaths."
On the whole, the Burning Man was interesting and fun. It reminded the BLM's Clemons of Mardi Gras in his native New Orleans. Karen Keesee, her husband and family, all went out from Gerlach and liked the festival.
"I went to Burning Man and enjoyed it a lot. I had a great time," said Ellis, who is a leader of the Desert Survivors. "I am not one to say it is not appropriate to be on the playa, but it is not appropriate to have that many people on the playa. It just got too large.
"It's a great time and a lot of people learned a lot about the desert, but it can't go on the way it is. It's gotten too big."
"We are coming to the point now where we are thinking it is inappropriate for the desert," said Steve Tabor, another member of Desert Survivors.
Black Rock City is in a far corner of Pershing County, 6,000 square miles, with a population of 6,200 people, and Burning Man has strained the county's resources. Sheriff Ron Skinner was able to borrow officers from other jurisdictions, but he had only six officers to handle 10,000 people this year, a clearly impossible assignment. If there was trouble, he had to get help from Lovelock, the county seat, which is 150 miles away by paved road.
"It's just gotten out of hand," he said.
Some people hate the whole idea of Burning Man. "In the '40s, they were going to use the Black Rock as a place to dump the garbage from San Francisco," said John Bogard. "And now they have." Bogard and his wife, Rachel, operate a pottery business called Planet X, eight miles outside Gerlach. Like a lot of Nevadans, they came from California years ago, drawn by the beauty of the desert. "This place has a certain soul," John Bogard says.
The Burning Man, Rachel Bogard says, "is basic hedonism. The thought is, 'Where can we go to do something we are not allowed to do somewhere else?' "
"If they are doing stuff that is not OK in San Francisco, why is it OK here?" said John Bogard. "I say get rid of 'em. There's too many of them."
Too many seems to be the heart of the problem. "Every time you advertise on the Internet that you have the biggest party going, you get people from all over," said Thomas, the justice of the peace. "You don't know who the hell's coming in.
"You have a million acres of playa. You can't contain it, you can't control it."
He likes the Burning Man, with certain personal reservations, mostly moral. But the Gerlach court's workload -- 400 citations this year compared to 165 in 1995 -- just buried him. "As a pain in the ass, it was a 10," said the judge.
Even Larry Harvey, the main organizer, feels something has to change. He is adamant in defending his operation; his record, he says, speaks for itself. "With all the wild, passionate things going on, there was not a single fist fight. You can talk about criminality all you want, but we are upstanding citizens, exemplars of civic virtue."
But there is another side: the Burning Man has too many vehicles, too many people who don't understand. Though it is supposed to be art, even the organizers realize that some of the people don't get it. The Burning Man was played up in the Reno media as a huge weekend party, and many kinds of people came. Some, Harvey said a bit ruefully, came out "to grab a couple of six-packs, and drive around and look at tits."
There is a debate about the future inside the collective that provides the leadership and the volunteers for Burning Man. "I personally am not going to do it again," said John Law, who has been with Burning Man since it started as a party on a San Francisco beach. "I have mixed feelings about bringing that many people out there (to the desert)."
Baker Beach in San Francisco had the problems that have followed and caught up with Burning Man in the Black Rock, Harvey said. In its last year there, the crowd -- about a thousand -- were more spectators than participants. It was all wrong, Harvey said, and there was a riot. The U.S. Park Police were not amused.
In a single conversation, Harvey swings between defending the festival to saying it has to change. "We are going to reinvent ourselves," he said. "Maybe move to private property. It is a movable feast. Hell, the Mormons moved, didn't they?"
Would it move from the Black Rock? "Yeah," said Harvey, "I think so.
"We will do it again," he said, "but it will be different."
The Burning Man event requires a permit from the BLM, routinely granted last year after the organizers posted a $5,000 bond and obtained $1 million in insurance. This time, however, public hearings would probably be necessary -- and there is opposition.
The Pershing County Commission, the legislative body of the county, voted to oppose granting another permit for the Burning Man for security reasons, and as Sheriff Skinner says, "because of the nature of some of the performances. A lot of them are sexual in nature. I don't feel they are appropriate for public display."
Susan Lynn, of Public Resource Associates, a Reno firm, has serious doubts about using the desert for Burning Man. She first saw the desert in the '70s. "I fell in love with it," she said. "The Black Rock, frankly, is as good as Death Valley or Yosemite."
"What I object to is the enormous number of people that come. The hot springs, for example, were overwhelmed. There were hordes of motorcycles, there were people hiking, walking, motorcycling, trampling."
Her group has appealed the BLM's decision to allow the 1996 Burning Man and would probably oppose a 1997 event.
Anyone who missed Burning Man missed something that probably won't ever happen again in the same way. "The Black Rock Desert is big," wrote Jon Cristensend in Great Basin News, "but not big enough for Hell on Earth. We hope the organizers get the message without having to be banned. The Burning Man is dead. Long live the Black Rock Desert."
Harvey gets the last word. "Let's see what happens," he said. "It's a mystery for now."