Burning Man, the Hard Way

Burners like to laugh at Coachella dust complaints. We shouldn’t.

Burning Man now has its own luxury tier, its own buffered and catered ways of keeping the desert at a polite distance. There are air-conditioned compounds, private chefs, generators humming all night so no one has to feel too much of where they are.

But the desert is still the desert.

Watching this week’s Coachella coverage, I kept thinking of the Burn that nearly undid us last year. Adrian’s first. My second. The one in which nearly everything went wrong.

We did it the way I still believe in: no generator, no RV, nothing between us and the desert but a thin layer of canvas.

I have written about Burning Man’s art and idealism. This piece is more about exposure. About what happens when the desert strips a life down to the frame.

The dust came so fast it erased the world.

One minute we were on the Burner Bus, approaching the gate, tired and alert with that final stretch of anticipation. The next, the windows had gone pale with dust. No landscape anymore, only a chalky brightness, as if the world had been rubbed out.

The driver shut off the air-conditioning to keep the dust from blowing in. The bus became a kiln: fifty people exhaling the same air.

In Reno it had been all motion. Final negotiations with bikes and gear. The illusion that if we prepared meticulously, we could control what was coming.

On the bus, that illusion ended.

There was nothing to do. Just sit with the heat, stillness, and the tunnel of breath narrowing.

My heart began to pound. The air felt used up. I could feel the sides of the bus moving inward.

An hour passed. Then more. No one told us when we would be let off, or if we would. I remember thinking: I might actually pass out here, at the edge of the thing we came for.

What saved me was a tiny Japanese USB fan, barely larger than a deck of cards, that I had tossed into my bag at the last minute. I found it and held it to my face.

Then I began bargaining with my body through breath. In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight. Again. Again. Again.

I was trying to make my body believe what my mind could not.

Outside, the dust kept raging. Inside, all I could do was breathe and wait.

The desert does not ask for patience. It extracts it.

A gentler whiteout, my first Burn. The singing bowl man kept going almost until the sculpture collapsed.

When we were finally let off the bus, about two hours later, the storm had not relented. We stepped directly into it. The dust took your sight first, then your sense of direction. The air had weight to it, and grit, and a kind of biblical thickness. Adrian would later describe the scene as Mad Max.

All the luggage lay in one great heap: duffels, crates, backpacks, survival gear, everyone clawing through it for their own life. Bikes had to be unearthed from dirt. Nothing was where it ought to be.

Then it began to rain.

The kind that turns the dust into a thick, gluey mud that cakes onto everything, including bike tires, until it feels like you’re dragging small concrete sculptures instead of wheels.

We loaded what we could onto a pickup shuttle that would take bags part of the way to camp. Then came the next instruction: the bikes could not go on the shuttle. Which meant we had to follow it riding them.

In the rain. Through that mud.

Afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up, I tried to get ahead of the shuttle before it started. This was a terrible idea. The vehicle immediately headed in a direction I had not anticipated, and by the time I corrected course, other riders were pressing close around me in the storm. One woman came so near that I turned and asked, with a level of intensity the situation did not justify, “What, exactly, is your intention?”

She stared at me.

“To get to the burn?”

We both started laughing. I sounded like a traffic officer in the middle of an existential breakdown.

Then we reached the transfer point and had to get everything the rest of the way on foot. Adrian was hauling bags down from the shuttle before I had fully dismounted. Then, after the shuttle departed, I realized one was missing.

He took off after the shuttle, running through the rain, shoes already caked in playa cement, no hesitation. I watched him vanish into the storm and felt two things at once: fear, and a complete lack of surprise. It was Adrian exactly.

When he returned, we set out for camp soaked, one bag short, with no idea whether our camp was still standing.

It had flooded. The storm had carried off several shade structures.

We stood there in the rain, looking at it.

Playa dust is so fine it behaves like air, working its way into your hair, clothes, seams, food, lungs. It’s alkaline, which means it dries you out, burns your eyes, cracks your skin. It amplified every side effect I was already carrying.

My eyes burned. My mouth sores inflamed. The nails that treatment had lifted from their beds throbbed against the grit. My head pulsed.

At first, I did not tell Adrian how bad it was.

I kept looking at him instead. During the arrival chaos. In the rain. In the mud. Reading his face. He never once hesitated. But I could see, now and then, the widening in his eyes that said, plainly, “what in the actual hell have we gotten ourselves into?”.

I needed that week to turn. Not for me. I already knew the playa could be indifferent.

I needed it to turn for him. Then for us.

Note: The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers. It touches on my son and parts of our lives I’m keeping close.