What it Was Really Like at Burning Man

Veteran Burner Chris Weitz Reflects on Mud, Poop, and Love

Before the Rain: The author with his wife Mercedes at their wedding with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey, who died in 2018.

The Sunday Long Read reminds us that being snarky about somebody else’s misfortune is never attractive. Last week’s coverage of the Burning Man Mudpocalypse spun it as Tech Bro Waterloo. Wag Chris Weitz, filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, veteran Burner, and all-around smarty, saw it differently in the Black Rock Desert. Enjoy his dispatch from a memorable Labor Day Weekend. Oh, he’ll be going back. — JDH

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As the rain kept falling on Black Rock City, Nevada, I could feel a second storm in the distance. I knew that a tornado of schadenfreude was brewing, as a high-pressure scorn-front met lows of accurate information.

My first response was to make some trousers. We had come up with the design for our kid [1] in 2014 when a shower hit during build week [2]. What you do is, you take a garbage bag and split it from the bottom, duct-taping the newly open center into legs. This gives you a pair of waders, resembling post-apocalyptic bass fisherman’s gear, which can be secured with the built-in plastic cinch, or a set of suspenders manufactured from bungee cords or looped zip-ties.

My second thought was that it would be fun to fake the ultimate news wire photo, the Burning Man 2023 version of “Stock Broker Holding His Head in Dismay.” I figured there would be a hot market for pictures of sparkle ponies [3] and other cultural pariahs literally stuck in the mud. All we had to do was convince one of our campmates to sport Day-Glo hair extensions and platform boots and then mime falling into pooled slurry worthy of a World War I trench. I could have found willing crisis actors, but everything is much harder to arrange in the mud.

Let’s talk about the mud. It sucked.

I mean, it actually sucked. It pulled off shoes. It clung to feet in big, doughy clumps. It slowed every step and turned any thought of traveling more than 10 yards into a calculation involving time, effort, and balance.

It was kind of awesome.

Yes, it shut the city down. There was no way you were going to get to this or that DJ’s set, or the piece of art you wanted to see, or God forbid, venture deeper in the desert to behold the Man or the Temple [4]. But it prompted people to innovate. By the second day of the rains, cutting-edge streetwear was a three-layer ensemble of socks over Ziploc bags over socks. Most importantly, it gave us the chance to help one another.

This is what I want you to understand about the Burn this year, and Burning Man in general: Everybody was fine.

Nobody was in danger. Or at least, in any more danger than usual. As for the mud, at Burning Man the difficulty is the point. The Black Rock High Desert is a stupid place to have a big gathering. As King Faisal says in Lawrence of Arabia, “There is nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing.” There is no water, except, obviously, when there’s too much fucking water. The alkaline dust wants to peel off your skin. The only vehicular route in and out is a two-lane blacktop job that leads to nightmarish delays getting there and back. The sun is merciless and the air is so dry that for years the local, one-week-only paper was titled Piss Clear, turning the necessity of a masthead into a useful piece of advice: Remember to stay hydrated enough that your urine is properly translucent. Less chance of heat stroke.

The usual obstacles give festival-goers a chance to embrace the suck [5]. The extra difficulties this year took us out of everyday inconvenience into a new, more uncomfortable place. A deeper suck.

Certain caveats must be inserted here. There are easy(ish) ways to get to Burning Man. The rich can fly in (as can aviation hobbyists, including skydivers). They can also prearrange lodgings, meals, and luxuries provided by hired help. This is known as Plug and Play, or Convenience Camping. It is under the radar, very much frowned upon, technically verboten, and rarely admitted to. (Patrick O’Brian’s character Stephen Maturin observed that nobody admits to being asleep or being rich. Likewise, no one ever admits to being in a Plug and Play.) It must make for odd power dynamics. This year, I imagine they were further warped by the realization that catered food and contracted services can run out, which may lead paid subservience to evaporate.

Crusty Burners of my vintage saw these disruptions as a good thing. We hoped it would turn back the clock to a time when life was harder. As the rigors of legionary service fostered republican virtues in early Rome, sudden hardship might school those who thought they could romp in the desert without paying their dues. Nobody was more delighted by nature’s tricks than ultra-orthodox Burners. This catastrophe could purify the event, perhaps Make Burning Man Great Again.

Yes, there are rich assholes at Burning Man, sucking up the experience while giving nothing back, using the hard work of volunteer artists as props for their Instas, and generally not getting it. There’s a bad element in any city. And that’s the thing about Black Rock — it is a city. It contains multitudes. It’s populous enough and varied enough that everything you can say about it is true. Critics who say that Burning Man has lost its way, that it is stupid, self-indulgent, and over, are right. Those who say that there has never been any place like it—and that next year is going to be even better— are also right.

Burning Man is a playground for VCs and tech bros and bucket-list-crosser-offers. It is also a blank canvas for artists building dream structures. It boasts experimental architecture you won’t see anywhere else in the world. These creations are memory palaces made real, and giant, stinging visual jokes. Contrary to popular belief, the event attracts working class people and those who live on society’s margins. There are salt-of-the-earth mechanics who can fix anything, self-taught technical savants, and saintly weirdos. There are many unbeautiful, unrich, unheralded folks who bring good ideas, good vibes, and just plain goodness. There are misfits and foreigners and libertines and libertarians and people of all sexual orientations and identities. There are squares like me. And there are growing numbers of people of color, though still far too few [6].

My camp was a hundred and fifty strong this year. Many of its denizens were old friends that I only see at Burning Man, which made it feel like a sort of high school reunion. I would be hard-pressed to tell you what most of them do for a living. It’s considered to be in poor taste to ask or care. But over the years, our ranks have included academics, nurses, and software designers. There’s been an air steward, a professional horse groomer, and an Australian oil rig safety inspector. A US Marine, a grip, a bar manager, and members of a Sierra Leonean rap collective have all camped with us. Some of these people have been involved in this curious endeavor with me for 18 years. Our camp is now old enough to legally drink in the UK.

When the shit, or the rain, came down, I had zero concern for my safety, health or nutrition. For one, thing, my fellow campmate Gigi and her squad of volunteers on the meal team were busy churning out dishes in the converted cargo container we truck out every year. Tyler, another campmate, who looks like the hot guy villain in an ’80s Snobs-vs-Slobs movie, kept the generator online. Electrical fetishists raised the junction boxes out of the mud. Our spectacular MVP, Bodhi, took it upon himself to shovel the ordure from overflowing porta-potties and into sealable buckets for us to cart out. (Bodhi, we did not ask you to do this, we do not necessarily understand why you did this, but we honor you). Let me stress: We paid to do this. When tent campers’ tents flooded, we moved them into other Burners’ RVs. Anybody who ran out of food or water got it from someone else who had supplies. Then we all broke down the camp we built and packed it away for next year. We loved it.

People in our temporary city, especially longtime citizens who understood the place, weren’t miserable. We knew that there was enough. As Burners say, the Playa will provide. We didn’t want FEMA to show up. We knew that FEMA had better things to do, for people in much more dire situations. Had there been a real humanitarian crisis, we had the expertise of Burners Without Borders to fall back on. BWB is a disaster relief organization within Burning Man (both are nonprofits). The group provides volunteer assistance during natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina. The difficult conditions of the Black Rock Desert— temporary housing, lack of running water, and remoteness from food sources —are a great training ground for such work. We all knew this was only a rhetorical crisis. One of the silliest things I saw posted online was from a relative newbie who skedaddled as fast as she could, even though a no-drive rule was in effect for safety reasons. She wrote: “Send thoughts and prayers for those still there.” What Those Still There definitely did not need was Instagram argle-bargle. But, to be fair, they didn’t need much.

If I sound like I drank the Kool-Aid, it’s because I owe the Man everything. I owe it my marriage, having met my wife there in 2003, and so, I owe it my children. Not in a pagan sacrifice sort of way, but in a Grace of God, they-wouldn’t-be-here-but-for-you sort of way. When I go back these days, it’s like returning to an old family vacation place. It’s a little rickety, maybe threatened by rising real estate prices, and sometimes too noisy because of the younger generation and their loud music. I sit on the equivalent of the porch, chew the fat with my neighbors, and go to bed early.

Driving home down the 5 freeway, two days late on my promised return, I called my mom. She said she had been worried about me. What if there had been a riot over food or water? What if violence broke out when everyone tried to leave at the same time? I thought of the hideously slow exodus we’d been part of, out of the desert to State Route 34, and how, in the 11-hour crawl, I heard not a harsh word, nothing but gallows humor and kindness. It was so slow that I could turn off the engine of the RV, get out, and walk along the lines distributing coffee from a little battery-powered Nespresso machine to waiting drivers. I wasn’t alone.

Black Rock City is one of the more anarchic, culturally riotous places I’ve ever seen. But it is, bar none, the very last city in which I could imagine a riot taking place.

Look, you can say Burning Man is over. Or, that if you ever had interest, you now have zero desire to check it out now. Or, that you’re never coming back. Or, that nothing on earth would ever drag you to the Black Rock Desert in the first place. You can point to it as the nadir of late-period capitalism or see last week’s events as the crashing of a libertarian techno-utopia [7]. I will say, in the collective voice of Burners I have known over the last twenty years:

Good.

Stay home. The mud and exaggerated reporting, the late-night talk show jokes, and the received wisdom did us a favor. Stay home! You don’t understand and we don’t care. Go online. Go on Instagram. Go to a club. Go to Coachella. Go ahead and tweet. Your schadenfreude is a cleansing rain. The mud of your contempt is the suck we embrace. In short, go fuck yourself.

But if you do come to Black Rock, drop by the Ashram Galactica at 8.45 and J. We’ll welcome you with open arms. As our camp slogan says, we are your Home Away from Home Away from Home, and we love you.

We want a pair of Weitz Waders.

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1. Yes, we brought our kids to Burning Man. Lots of people do, There is even a “village” called Kidsville, with noise ordinances (no generators, no amplified music) and its own scout troop.

2. I’ve been going to the Burn since 2003. At the event, this sort of info is a way of pulling rank. You’ll meet someone and they’ll talk about it being their “tenth Burn,” and then you’ll figure out a way to say that you’ve been there longer. Etiquette demands the other person respond with: “Ohhhhh. Wow.” For all my experience, I am often bested. The ne plus ultra is to have been at one of the original events on Baker Beach in San Francisco. Some camps receive passes to get in early and start building, and a true Burner snob will say that they prefer build week, when it’s quieter, and you get to see the city rising from the blank canvas of the desert. Then it’s still a small town of Amish-barn-raising-type shared shenanigans. The true royalty of Burning Man are not celebrities and billionaires. It’s the members of the DPW or Department of Public Works, many of them volunteers, all of them hard-working and dogged, who set up and maintain the infrastructure of the city. They have the right to say scabrous things about how useless the rest of us are.

3. Loosely defined as someone who is dolled up and there just to consume— all of the partying and the photos and none of the work.

4. Everyone sort of knows about the Man. But the Temple is in some ways more relevant. Burning the Man is about euphoria and ecstatic release. The Temple is a structure deeper in the desert designated for grieving lost loved ones. It stands (and, in burning, falls) for sadness, loss, and what they used to call the numinous. Its walls are inscribed by the participants with heart-rending testimonials to the most un-Burning-Man people. I’ve seen tributes to vets killed in Afghanistan, and the Challenger astronauts. One of the ones that really got me this year read simply, Look, Dad, I got married!

5. Military slang verging on the zen. The idea is that certain situations are inherently and unavoidably difficult, and best faced by throwing oneself wholeheartedly into them. You would be surprised by how many ex-military folks are at the Burn. They understand hard work, camaraderie, and wasted energy. One of my newest campmates is an ex-Marine. In the middle of the Mudpocalypse, he showed me a military-style organizational chart he was applying to tasks required by our predicament. It was brilliant.

6. This is a great sadness and a missed opportunity. I know this. The Org (that’s the Burning Man Organization) knows this. The Black Burner Project definitely knows this. While on this subject, let me address the escape of Chris Rock, which I learned about when I got a little burst of Wi-Fi access. My strong suspicion is that he was living in a Plug and Play situation, not surprising for a first-timer with money and little notion of the culture. Regarding his reported fears of looming chaos and criminality, it’s understandable that a Black man finding himself stuck in one of the whitest, weirdest places on earth might want to get out. If he had been with us (hi Chris), he would’ve known that he’d be okay. In any case, winging it in the desert wearing a Knicks jacket and winding up in the back of somebody’s pickup truck is about the most Burner thing you could do.

7. For interesting insights into these matters, read what Lee Fang and Cory Doctorow have to offer. Daniel Pinchbeck is of the everything-has-gone-to-hell school. But it was his book Breaking Open the Head that got me to the Burn in the first place, and his critique is much more informed than the sliming on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

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