Labor Day Weekend. For most of us, it’s the end of summer. It‚Äôs the last time we get to have a great party before school starts again. It‚Äôs the last time we get a 3 day weekend, before we roll back into winter. It‚Äôs the last BBQ, the last pool party, the last beach excursion. For me, Labor Day Weekend reminds me of only one thing: The Burning Man Festival.

In case you don’t know what this is, Burning Man is a big post-modern pagan festival/ritual that happens every year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which is several hours north and east of Reno in the middle of a forgotten nowhere that still has a few cattle ranchers and gold diggers scratching about. It was once a huge lake, almost a sea, 35 miles across in places and bounded by mountains on either side, but is now a very dry, very desolate desert with not a single living thing on it, since the bottom of what was once an ancient lake, technically called a “playa”, is very salty. My mother tells me that not to long ago, however, perhaps thirty years or so, you could still see the old wagon trail the settlers used to cross the desert a hundred and some years prior, and it was pretty easy to find back then too - the trail was littered from one end to the other with stoves, coffee pots, trunks, clothes, and all manner of other household items, plus broken wagons, and skeletons of dead animals, mostly oxen and horses - the detritus of the parched and dying settlers who sometimes never made it across. The Black Rock desert is probably one of the most brutal and inhospitable places on Earth.

Anyway, as I said, the festival is this big po-mo pagan “ritual” that starts during the week before Labor Day weekend, and ends on the Saturday or Sunday night before Labor Day, culminating in the burning of a big 3-4 story wooden “man” lined with neon and filled with fireworks. Basically it’s like Mardi Gras meets the pagan revelry of the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, when Aaron made the Golden Calf. Lots of drugs, rock and roll, nakedness, art, performance art, raves, and other bizarre things too numerous to mention. Did I mention nakedness? Here is a link to the Google News search on it. There’s so much on it out there, to cull it would be beyond my capacity this late at night.

I actually attended Burning Man in 1995, a year or two before the “cool” people started to know about it, but long after my mother had already discovered it. Yes, my mother. Most people are floored when I tell them this, because if you know anything about Burning Man, you know it’s not exactly the thing your mother would choose to go to, nor recommend you go to either. My mother is a little “different” though. She is an archaeologist, and has worked for many years on various projects in the Black Rock Desert, and when Larry Harvey first brought his Burning Man to this vast playa near Gerlach, NV, my mother was one of the first “outsiders” to stumble on it, because she and her archaeology crew just happened to have to go regularly to Gerlach (or Winnemucca) for gasoline and a hot shower.

When she first went to the Festival, there were about 500 people in attendance. The year I went, there were about 5,000. This year, there were 35,000. My mother isn’t a Christian, and so to her, Burning Man was a very interesting cultural event/freak show. She had gone for 5 or 6 years before she could finally convice me to go. She had kept trying to tell me how cool it was, and as a Christian, I just had no desire to go way out to the desert and see a bunch of naked people doing things that God, at various times, slew piles of Israelites for doing, and which Christians in any case aren’t supposed to see other people doing, whatever those things may or may not be. But, after 5 or 6 years of telling me about this, I relented, after realizing that God probably wouldn‚Äôt kill me, and that I probably would get a very unique insight into post-modern culture. Besides, I‚Äôm not much of a ‚Äúfollower‚Äù anyway, so I didn‚Äôt think I was going to get caught up in something I shouldn‚Äôt. So, a buddy of mine from church decided to tag along, and we met my mother and some of her colleagues, who are all crazy Berkeley anthropologists that studied with Dr. Robert Heizer, who himself was student of the father of cultural anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber. Talking to them had great bearing on my decision to re-enter the university in 1998 when my business died, but that’s another story.

Here are some of my not-so-literary journal entries from Labor Day weekend 1995:

‚Äî “Our arrival in camp was definitely a prelude of things to come. Driving around, looking for my mother’s camp, Marc and I see some guy [probably of Native American descent, as he had long, straight black hair] dancing to rhythmic drumming by his car, totally nude, his penis flopping all over the place. This would, we soon found out, be entirely commonplace…”

‚Äî “I missed the following event, but it was told to me that there was a fire-breathing couple (man & woman) who performed the following trick: After their act was pretty much over, they closed with the man doing a headstand, bringing his knees to his elbows (making himself fully exposed). The woman took some gel, spread it all over his anal area, and taking a long, thin “torch”, snuffed it out in his anus. I’ve never heard of something so funny!”

‚Äî “Last night, the night of the Grand Ceremony, was beyond written description, even though I’m going to attempt it anyway. I have never seen something so bizarre/interesting/disturbing/exciting in my entire life. There were so many things going on at once, that not only was it impossible to see it all, it is equally impossible to describe it all. Part of the experience is being there, being visually and viscerally overwhelmed, hearing the things people say, being in the midst of spontaneous eruptions of rhythmic musics, and so forth. Marc and I awoke around 9:30 or 10:00am, our sleep frequently interrupted by people talking very loudly in our camp, a midnight rainstorm (from which we were most effectively protected because of our ingenious lean-to), and the exchange of words of love by some young trailer trash couple who decided to use my car as a venue to discuss how much they love one another, saying such precious gems as, “God I love you! I’ve never gone out w/a guy who knows how to pick out clothes for himself!” or “I love you so much! You’ve got the coolest attitude! I mean, your attitude is like ‘Hey, fuck it!’ God I love you!” and the like. Needless to say, they were well beyond simple drunkeness.”

‚Äî “Then, the procession came. Led by banners waving high, there were dancers, fire-breathers, naked people (doing all sorts of gyrating things) and groupees who just wanted to be in the line. It was quite a spectacle. This went on for about 15-20 minutes and the people started getting restless…And then, finally, two naked men approached The Man w/ large torches and set him on fire…They had put more fireworks in the Man himself so it blew offf all sorts of pyrotechnics while burning. All in all, the [burning of the Man] took several minutes before it came down. When the “Man-Handlers” began pulling on the cables holding him up so he would fall, the crowd really started to get very agitated and anxious….as soon as he fell, [the crowd] went wild! Dancing, drumming, watching, partying, it was crazy!”

‚Äî “I walked back to the camp, where I found Marc again, and we decided to take one more look around…We walked towards a crowd where we heard some noise. It turned out to be some crazy performance art piece featuring a woman sexily dressed in short-shorts yelling various obscenities through a megaphone, straddling a modified “Bobcat” loader that had a dinosaur head (with teeth!) mounted in place of the bucket, with fire coming out. There were also a pair of dueling hydraulic skeletons, and some guy walking around with a flame thrower, burning everything including pictures of Reagan, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. It would take several pages to recount the things we saw, but needless to say, we were laughing hysterically!”

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ve got a ton of photos from those days. Maybe I’ll do a little photoblog of them.