Stuck in the mud, but the party hasn’t stopped: a dispatch from Burning Man
On Sunday, a group of four “burners” shout to each other in Mandarin while attempting to navigate their rental RV out of the wet muck that Black Rock desert has become after heavy rain cut off access to the annual Burning Man festival and stranded about 70,000 attendees.
They manage to pull their RV on to the nearest road, leaving two bicycles on the ground and their RV slides extended, while cutting huge berms in the mud and sideswiping another attendee’s truck. Thirty feet later, they are stuck.
Another attendee begins instructing them to leave their vehicle where it is. “No one is leaving right now,” I hear him say. “We have orders to stay in place, no one on the roads. Everyone trying to leave is being pulled over and ticketed.”
After attending Burning Man in 2016 and ‘17, I thought perhaps I was done with the festival. The extreme heat and dust, the cost and the time investment all kept me watching from the side. But an opportunity to return with a dear friend, who lives across the country, called me back. Now we’re waiting for the roads to dry out, with a plan to drive my tiny Mazda hatchback out when we get the all-clear. When that will come is being speculated about by nearly everyone I’ve stopped to talk to.
Mia Mickey, a Santa Barbara, California resident who was at the event for eight days before leaving on Sunday during a break in the rain, said: “As we got to the perimeter [of Black Rock City], there were lots of different tire tracks in every direction.”
The normally dry lakebed that is home to Burning Man – an annual festival dedicated to art, counterculture and self-survival in the desert – had turned into an expanse of muck that clung to boots and tires, making moving almost impossible. According to organizers, the festival site received more than a half inch of rain overnight.
“There were cars driving towards the main exit from all across the playa, RVs blasting through huge patches of water, cars trying to drive all the way to Gerlach [the nearest town, 12 miles away],” Mickey said. “The exit was a huge choke point; it felt like a total free for all.”
Back at the festival, things are decidedly less frenetic. Camps have been stripped back to barebones: piles of conduit and 4x4s lying in the mud, but still the vast majority of vehicles, and campers, are on site. They sit in circles, blanketed against the growing cold, playing cards and drinking, laughing, telling stories, checking on the wellbeing of passersby.
Every few blocks are a bank of portable toilets in various states of abuse: 80% full or worse, with various trash thrown in them – a juice box here, a plastic grocery bag there. Two empty hospital urine collection jars are littered around a unit overflowing with mud, as a woman walks over with two more full jars.
Still, the party hasn’t stopped, and down the street several people are dancing to electronic music outside a camp. Nearby, a spray-painted wooden sign reads “drive dry you selfish fuck”, an allusion to the attendees who have elected to leave despite the prevailing driving ban.
“The people clogging up gate road that are going to make it hard for us to get out are the problem, not the conditions,” said Cameron, a 34-year-old veteran participant from Portland, Oregon.
When I ask Cameron and his camp mates if they’ve packed up already, they smile wryly. “Our camp throws a Sunday night ‘Burning-Man’s-Not-Over-Yet’ party,” replies Lara, a 35-year old-veteran burner also from Portland. “We’re definitely still doing it.”
Smoke from wood and trash burning lace the air as I pass Popoville, a camp named after the Polynesian god who punished Easter Islanders for their hubris. The name is a reminder to fellow burners, they say, to take serious climate action before we destroy what we’ve been given.
For now, they’re serving tequila and beer to a few amblers in neon backpacks while a cornhole set designed to look like hairy anuses with legs askew sits idle on their front porch that the heavy rain has reduced to a mud pit.