Back in 2009, I wrote some annotations to the Burning Man Survival Guide to help out some friends who were going for the first time. They thought it was a worthwhile resource, so I decided to give it an update and post it over on Transformed.
You can find it here:
Advice for First-Time Burners
It's easy to forget this now, but back in 2005 it wasn't quite as easy to see photos and videos of everything under the sun. The infrastructure for sharing them was far less developed than it is now. We couldn't see all of our friends' photos on Facebook because Facebook was barely even a thing and most of us weren't on it. Back then, we didn't all carry Internet-connected digital cameras with us everywhere we went. Only ten years ago, but a different world.
Thus I was privileged to go to my first Burning Man with no clear idea of what I'd be experiencing. I had only two friends who'd been there, and one of them was the reason I was going. I had some vague sense of the place, picked up as rumors and hearsay, but I'd never seen pictures, never had an in-depth conversation about it. It was terra incognita.
I sat in the back seat on the drive up while Amanda and Jordan talked about Burning Man in the front. They had a sort of been-there-done-that cool about them in their conversation about it, but it wasn't hard to tell that they were very excited to get there.
It's not a long drive from the Bay Area to the Black Rock Desert--up and over the Sierras on I-80 and down into Reno, another 40 or so to miles east to Fernley, then pretty much due north on NV-447 for about 80 miles to the twin towns of Empire and Gerlach and then a little bit beyond. We did most of this in the dark. I wouldn't see the landscape until the next morning.
It was around midnight, maybe just before or just after, when we came around the big curve outside Gerlach and I caught my first glimpse of Black Rock City. I had imagined Burning Man as a bunch of hippies camping in the desert, but that first glimpse spoke of something far more wondrous. I was truly seeing a city. A cloud of dust hovered low in the sky above it, and the lights--lights, as of a carnival midway--lit the cloud into a glow.
I had a feeling of: "What have I gotten myself into?"
We picked up my ticket at will call, passed the Greeters' Station, and drove into the city. Whatever I'd been expecting, Burning Man instantly defied it. People in outlandish costumes walked or biked the streets, lit up in electro-luminescent wire. Cars made over into rolling, glowing sculptures prowled the streets as well. Streets. There were streets! We passed a glowing Cheshire Cat, built atop some hidden vehicle underneath. Its eyes were spinning. So were mine.
I had expected hippies camping in the desert, and instead I found myself in a city with an energy unlike anything I'd ever experienced before.
Words came to me: "The Carnival at the End of the World."
We pulled into camp, where a raucous EDM party was well underway. Amanda and Jordan practically leapt from the car and immediately disappeared into the crowd. I stepped down onto the playa. The moment my feet touched the ground, I felt a buzz, as of an electric current, radiate up through the ground and into my body. I'd never experienced the energy of a place as a physical sensation before, and it freaked me the hell out. I was totally overwhelmed. Dropping right into the party was way, way more than I could imagine dealing with right then. I needed some time to get my bearings. I picked a direction and started walking, to see what I would see.
I had only decided to go a week before. I had been debating it back and forth until late one night I quite clearly heard a voice in my head say, "You'll regret it if you don't go." So I told myself, "If I can still get a cheap enough plane ticket, I'll go." I could, and I did.
I packed a single duffle bag full of clothes and camping gear and flew on Monday, August 29th, from Connecticut to San Francisco. I would be camping with False Profit, a camp with extensive communal infrastructure, so I didn't need to worry about food and water.
Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Amanda and a guy named Jordan picked me up from my friend Angela's house in Berkeley. They became the second and third people I would know at Burning Man, the other being my friend Ken, my connection to all of this and already on the playa.
We stopped at Ken's mom's house on the way out of town to pick something up for him. On the TV in her living room were confusing images out of New Orleans. They didn't make sense to me. They looked third-world, foreign. "BREAKING NEWS," said the caption on CNN. The city appeared to be underwater.
Tuesday, August 30th 2005, was the day the levees breached after Hurricane Katrina. Those were the images I carried with me that hot August afternoon as we got back in the car and began the drive to Nevada, to my first Burning Man.