Ross Robertson

Bio & resources

Pulling up to Nevada's legendary Burning Man festival was like landing a time machine. As it came to a hissing, smoking stop, a lump rose in my throat—is this the right year? “Welcome to Black Rock City,” said a man in a cowboy hat. “Welcome home.” My sister-in-law Catherine and I got out of the car, as instructed. Grabbing a two-foot length of rebar, we each struck the Virgin Bell, a once-only privilege for first-timers. Thud. Through plumes of dust, I made out the edges of a circular encampment stretching for a mile in either direction; beyond that, the mountains.

We got back in the car and drove in. Though I had no idea yet what to expect, I knew I wasn't home. For one thing, people at home wear clothes. I used to hang out naked plenty myself, in my Frisbee-wielding, mushroom-munching hippie days, but I'd never seen anything like this. Naked with parasols, naked with saxophones, naked on stilts with glitter and a duck mask. A guy scooted by on a home-built scooter with seven-foot handlebars. Before I could register whether or not he was wearing anything, he vanished behind a Dodge van fitted out as a sheet-metal fish with electric eyes. I skirted left around a line of cars whose drivers had stopped to have their genitals “inspected” at a roadside station. Whatever you've heard about Burning Man, it's probably true.

Way out in the featureless boondocks 120 miles north of Reno, somewhere between spiritual pilgrimage and spring break, thirty thousand people were gathering to participate in a sort of do-it-yourself municipal art project. Together, on an ancient dry lake bed known as the “playa,” they would build an entirely functional city from the ground up, only to tear it (or burn it) all down again seven days later. Everything they needed to survive—food, water, shelter, glo-sticks—they were bringing with them. All their waste, they'd carry out. Radical self-reliance, they called it. Radical self-expression. In layman's terms, that means Mad Max was about to kick Woodstock into high gear.

Arriving at our camp, I couldn't help wondering what I was doing there. You might be asking yourself the same question: What does a week-long summer hoedown have to do with enlightenment for the twenty-first century? Well, that's what I went to learn. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't uneasy about the whole thing, not least because I spent too many years myself as a Deadhead with delusions of grandeur. But everyone said Burning Man was different. It didn't give to you; it asked from you. It was the anti-rock concert, the anti-consumptive experience. You couldn't buy or sell anything. You weren't even supposed to barter with people. If you had something, you gave it away: your time, your ideas, your spiffy hat. Black Rock City was built on one simple principle—participation—and its entire infrastructure was designed to serve that purpose alone, to foster spontaneous involvement between its temporary citizens.

By all accounts, this kind of coming together is a rare thing. In spite of inhospitable conditions, thousands of people give countless hours and dollars to the realization of a collective vision. As I learned when I got there and had the chance to interview founder Larry Harvey, that vision has everything to do with the future. What was once simply a yearly event, oriented around the traditional burning of a wooden effigy, is rapidly becoming a cultural movement. And its sights are set on nothing less than an ethical revitalization of modern life. “Every society must have at its core a sphere that is noncommodified, that is spiritual,” Harvey said. As he told it, the seeds of that new social core are already in the wind.

Daytime in the Black Rock Desert was blistering hot; afternoon brought curtains of fine white powder riffling through the air—the notorious alkali dust blown from the playa floor. As advertised, the sheer energy of involvement was extraordinary. Hundreds of theme camps lined the central esplanade, presenting a cornucopia of opportunities to all—contact improv to rope bondage, speed dating to body painting, Advaita Kabbalah Evangelism to Sacred Monkey Tickle Healing. Each day, the frenzy of activity amplified as the week marched toward its Saturday night zenith, when everyone would gather for the customary burning of the Man. Art installations popped up, parades and processions crisscrossed the playa, herds of bathers chased after water trucks spraying down the roads.

“People come out here and they just enlist,” Burning Man's art curator, LadyBee told me. “We get people who just drop in and say, 'Can I help?' And they do shifts every day, and they own it, and they become devoted. It's interesting, because you'd think, 'Who wants to work here? We just want to run around and have a good time.' But people do want to work, because by working here they become more embedded in the event and more connected to everything.” Plainly, she felt the same way herself. “Who would have known?” she said, starting to cry. “Who would have known ten years ago that I would be here doing this, and that it would be so gratifying?”

Larry Harvey and LadyBee conveyed both a genuinely infectious enthusiasm for Burning Man and a wide perspective on its significance. But what about the people on the street? I wondered. I wanted to find out why they had come, what it meant in their lives. So, notebooks and recording gear in tow—along with the requisite dust mask and ski goggles—I set out on my bike to interview as many as I could. Everyone seemed to have at least one project going; this was mine. As I cruised the streets, camps, and crowds for people to talk to, I also explored the open desert surrounding the Great Temple, atop which stood the eighty-foot-tall figure of the Man himself. It was pregnant with art and strangeness. The theme this year was “Beyond Belief,” invoking the Ground of Being beneath all rational ideas. But more of the art tended toward the hard-to-believe: a breathtaking replica of a Spanish galleon built around a school bus; five 13,000-pound granite slabs hanging from the Temple of Gravity.

“So, I decided to come out, and, like, this is, I love the desert, and, like, this is the best thing in the world,” my first subject told me. “This is the best thing in the fuckin' world. Whatever. I enjoy it, that's all. I enjoy like, when things are not qualified, and they just become completely . . . quantified, that's when I like it. I like, enjoy it, it's perfect, whatever.” The girl beside him commented under her breath, “He's a freak.” “Yeah,” he said, “Freak, freak, FREAK.” They sat on the stairs of the Great Temple; some women in saris and snow boots walked the labyrinth at its base. “It's the whole city,” the girl concluded, watching it all go by. “The whole temporary city of just being.”

I went to Sanctuary Camp—where “just being” could mean guided meditation or group hula hoops—to get the spiritual perspective. Walking past a line of people jumping into glitter-filled bathtubs, I ducked under a large parachute where a bunch more lounged, away from the heat of the sun. “This is a place of peacefulness and rejuvenation, and chilling out from surviving the desert,” one of them explained. “It's about enlightenment. The stripping away of all the good and the bad that you're used to so you can look at it from a better perspective. It's about self-expression without in any way being self-conscious, because everything is accepted and applauded here, no matter what you do or how far out it is. The only judgment that's allowed is, 'That's really cool.'”

Hmm. That reminded me of a notice I'd seen about the Tower of Enlightenment—“We'll incinerate self-help books provided by the citizens of Black Rock City, who will be able to rid themselves of various junk psychology texts, diet books, and spiritual quick-fix programs.” Now this I had to see. Visions of a grand New Age Alexandria danced in my head as I pedaled hard toward what looked like a standard tower for high-tension wires. Expecting heaps and piles of books—enough for a real bonfire—I was disappointed to find only a single measly strand of yellowed trade paperbacks strung around the tower's skeletal girth.

Nightfall brought Burning Man's true colors to light. Literally. Like a miniature (but very awesome) Las Vegas, Black Rock City lit up with neon, lasers, videos and projections, mirrors and discos, and more fire than rightly belongs outside a volcano. Everywhere I turned, fire-breathing art-cars, backpack- and bicycle-mounted flamethrowers, and industrial-strength propane cannons shot off erratically. During the day, many people had sheltered in their camps; now, as the temperature dropped, they donned their costumes, got high, and filled the streets. The zones and contours of a citywide mesh of parties were defined as much by the flow and friction of competing sound systems as they were by the bright beacons of the theme camps. An old-timer took it all in stride. His reason for coming: “Well, I'm off work right now, so I have the time. I have a knee injury I'm recovering from. Plus, the costumes are cool.”

My campmates put together an art installation called High on God. It was topped by a golden guitar with golden angel wings, with a quote from the Bible: “It is not the amount of faith we have, it is who we have faith in.” Three pedestals held televisions with painted screens, lit from within. The third word of the neon title, “God,” switched periodically to a fourth, “You.” High on God. High on You. I found myself drawn to the weird, echoing music it emitted, as though a pair of distant jet engines were hidden inside. High on God. High on You. Two bright-eyed twenty-somethings wandered over. We launched into a concentrated conversation on anarchism and spiritual liberation; before we knew it, two hours had passed. “Did you take anything this week?” one of them asked as we walked together back to their camp. “You should have. It makes it so much better.”

As if all that had come before was merely a prelude, Saturday night brought the Man's final detonation. Three hundred fire-jugglers performed for the crowd; rockets went up to rival any Fourth of July. Then, the explosions began, subsonic. Catherine turned to me and said, “I have a word for your story: Overstimulation.” My cheekbones were rattling so loud I had a hard time hearing her. “Overstimulation,” she said again. While the 2,500-square-foot Great Temple was nuked to the ground, the crowd closed slowly in. For the first time, everyone at Burning Man was together in one place. Some people ran in a circle around the pyre; a few jumped in the coals. Most just milled around.

I remembered a conversation I'd had earlier in the week with an artist, Mark Grieve, who built a beautifully detailed scale model of a traditional Japanese temple. He called it the House of Godzilla, because, of course, it housed a shrine to the famous dinosaur at its center. “I believe in the profound nature of the ridiculous,” he'd said. “And I tried to present something that was ridiculous, like a big rubber monster with a jewel-like quality. So you wouldn't come to this thing and think, 'Oh wow, somewhere to pray.' You'd come to it going, 'Oh, wow, that's made with some love and some care, but it's dedicated to something ridiculous.”

I got up early Sunday to beat the traffic back to the Bay area. “It's easy to let go of something you just slapped together, but it's even easier to let go of something you really put a lot of time into,” Grieve had commented, reporting his plans to burn the House of Godzilla. Driving through the camps on the way out, it struck me: All of this would disappear in a matter of days. Teams of volunteers were going to scour the playa for every last vestige of Burning Man. Then they too would vanish, leaving the desert empty.