Burning Man!

My picture for this week is a gigapan (a high-resolution panorama photo). It may take a minute or two to load, but it's worth the wait! Click here to view it.

As I said in class today, I attended Burning Man this summer. It will take too long to explain here, but I invite you to click on the link above and explore!

The important thing to keep in mind for this post is this: nothing and no one lives there except for this one week out of the year, when roughly 40,000 crazed hippies descend upon it with a vengeance.

Therefore, there is no infrastructure. There's one dinky cellphone tower which went down before the festival even began because it can't handle the volume of calls. There are no roads except the ones we build for that week. There is no electricity besides the generators we bring. Most importantly, there is no light but the light we make.

The picture I'm discussing in this post was taken the night of the Burn, which is the night a massive wooden effigy of a man is burned. It is perhaps the most well-lit night of the festival, when Black Rock City's population peaks. At the center, you can see the Man burning. The brightly lit shapes clustered around it are not buildings, but art cars, which can be as small as a golf cart, or as large as a Victorian house on a truck bed.

People, too, are lit. On the playa, the environment can go from very bright to very dark very quickly. Though art cars and bikers are encouraged to travel below 5 mph, it still hurts to get hit by either. Therefore, people are encouraged not to be "darkwads" and carry "glow" with them at all times. Every person has a blinkie, glowstick, flashlight, or Elwire on them at all times.

Over the course of the week and a half that I was there, I managed to go through 4 "glow", all of which pooped out on me (except, ironically, for a cheap, seizure-inducing blinkie necklace). I started out with flashlights, and when those died on me, I panicked.

I was completely in the dark, and a safety hazard to myself and those around me. It was still early in the week, so the city was still very dark. I couldn't even get to the bathroom by myself without tripping over every pebble my boots came across.

It was the first time I was completely in the dark-- there was no light switch, no cellphone, nothing. I sat with the feeling of being lost for a while, and actually wound up enjoying it a little. When my eyes adjusted enough, I noticed there was moonlight, and enough to see by to guide me back to my camp. Luckily, I was rescued by generous burners more prepared than I along the way.

I will never forget how small I felt in the dark, and what a true blessing having light on command is.