Burning Land

dustdevils
Photo by Kate Shay

Alberta is a vast cold pine forest in central Canada. The largest city, Calgary, is so perfectly snow-covered that it once hosted the Winter Olympics, and the regional Burn there is held on an elk farm in the summer. The elk wander around, gazing at the otherworldly lights from the darkness of the forest and probably wondering what’s going on. The regional is called Freezerburn, and it is so far north that the sun comes up at 4 a.m.

I met a sound engineer from Alberta at the Global Leadership Conference this year. He belongs to a camp called Space Gnomes, and is asked by fellow campers to “fix the sound,” meaning to redirect sound waves.

Most of the time, flat speakers broadcast, sending sound waves in all 180 degrees; he focused the waves on certain areas, on a dancefloor, in one direction. That works for high frequencies, but “bass is more omnidirectional,” he said.

“So bass waves spill more,” I said.
“Basically,” he said.

Bass is so spilly that bass speakers have a second hole to let the extra waves out. A bass speaker with a back port has to be shoved against a wall so that all the sound is forced out the front; if it stands apart from the wall, the extra waves will run out the back, hit the wall, and bounce back, producing an echo.

Burning Man is spilly. It is what happens when waves hit land and adapts. It tells some truth. It makes something emerge. The waves find their way out, irrepressible, charming to the molecule. Love is omnidirectional.

Las Vegas

There are probably about a thousand Burners in Vegas, indistinguishable from the rest of the population, who could all be extras in a heist movie. It is dry, dusty, and hot, hit all day by clanging electronic bells and digital flipping of pixelated cards. The first place the Burners tried to hold their regional was in a town in the mountains called Parrumph. It was conservative and looked at the Burners as a pagan tribe of glitter, drugs, and buttsex. They didn’t get the permits.

“Parrumph?” I asked the Australian from Vegas.
“P – A – R – R – U – M – P – H,” he spelled out.
“You might have guessed from the name.”
He nodded.

They hold the Burn now in an abandoned rock quarry – about 600 people. It’s called the Forgotten City, and the stone mined there was dolomite. The canyon is called Bootleg Canyon and the stone is so hard that they have to drill holes for their tent pegs. Nothing is unBurnable there, they can make fires like giant clouds, explosions can eat up oxygen and not even mark the rock. Conveniently, there is also a Taco Bell about a mile away.

This year the Las Vegas artists are recreating a 1950s bar that overlooked the Los Alamos nuclear testing facility. Patrons of this bar used to sip cocktails while watching atomic tests pound Nevada into oblivion. Martini, oblivion. Martini, oblivion. Manhattan, oblivion. You can go be a part of this on the Playa this year, if you can find it in the dust. It’s called Nuclear Dream and it’s a giant unexploded bomb with a bar inside.

New Mexico

The mountain area around Albuquerque is, in some seasons, a tinderbox. Pine forests drop rafts of needles that become a combustible carpet. The wind is very strong and will fan any spark; sometimes the New Mexico regional events happen under a total fire ban and they have to substitute propane. It’s not the same, say organizers. People like to gather around fires.

Colorado

If you drive north for seven hours, you will reach the Rockies, which reach almost three miles into the sky. There are two main approaches, the Western slope of the Rockies, spare, tough, and lonely, where burns number 100 people, and the Eastern slope, where more than 2000 ascent from a string of cities at the mountains’ base.

In the last two years, record-setting fires have raged throughout the Rockies, miles and miles wide. In 2012 alone, wildfires burned an area five times the city of San Francisco. During the Apogaea regional Burn that year participants could see the massive glow from the fire in the distance at night. “It’s a huge roaring sound,” said a camper, “like a freight train bearing down on you.”

The camp is almost superstitiously wary of fire. They place barrels of wet towels next to every flame, and also fire tools, which are shovels and rakes to frantically scrape a dry patch of land around the perimeter of a fire, should one break out. It is tempting fate, to light fire in these mountains, like inviting the devil into your camp. He passes in dark blue in the night, narrow, nodding slightly and seeing the waves.

Texas

Flipside is on a river in a dusty overgrown orchard of pecan trees, abandoned and throwing off the pruning of human cultivation. This is the second location; the first had to be abandoned after they unknowingly placed the camp over a vast network of fire ant tunnels.

Flipside is the largest regional Burn, a glimpse of the future. “You don’t even need to go to Black Rock City anymore,” say various organizers. “Most of these people have never been to the Playa.”

Across the country there are acculturation classes, workshops to brainwash the virgins; one regional holds a dress rehearsal for those going to the Playa for the first time, so they can get used to all the stupid shit that is supposedly preparing all of us for the collapse of civilization.

Stoned, drunk, the virgins have to erect tents in an orderly fashion in the dark, which is precisely what I will be doing if the Apocalypse comes. Nothing teaches the principle of Immediacy better than not knowing what the fuck you are doing.

They say that Burning Man is now global in scope, that the Playa doesn’t matter anymore. Burning Man diplomats fly around the world spreading Playa culture like Coca-Cola. Burning Man has changed local rituals, and been welcomed in most places.

I wish I could capture all the songs sung in these places. They ought to be tallied and added to the sum of the human race. We humans are as creative at violence as we are at love; love always stays one step ahead of the violence, that is one thing we can depend on. But it will always take perseverance of some kind, the going up into the mountains, the lighting of fire in the night.

About the author: Hannah Miller

Writer, Lamplighter, radical includer.

7 Comments on “Burning Land

  • Dan says:

    Love ya for mentioning Apogaea, our population this year is going to be 2100 actually!

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  • Vincent says:

    This is great! Now with BundyFest happening from Sept 5th – Oct 5th, we ban burn all year round. BundyFest is just 80 miles from Las Vegas – close to Bunkerville.

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  • Arizona:

    Saguaro Man will be held April 30-May 4 outside Snowflake, AZ with 600 participants looking to create COMMUNITY and BURN some stuff!!

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  • Al says:

    How awesome is this quote?

    “Nothing teaches the principle of Immediacy better than not knowing what the fuck you are doing.”

    Love it

    We do an unofficial burn in southern Louisiana called Burning Bayou at the T-Bois blues festival. This year it rained all day during the days. Kinda like the Playa in reverse. At least it stopped raining at night. You have to wear mud boots to get around, what we call shrimp boots down here, nothing else will do. Our trick was to get the effigies that had been sitting in the rain and muck for a week to burn. Of course if the preceeding weather is right, the cow pasture, where the event is held, produces enough organic material to where nobody cares what the current weather is. :-) But we were successful of course. We burned our alligator effigy, Big Al, with the utmost efficiency, poofed our Mechagator poofer, danced all night, chilled in our lounges and had a grand time, along with the other cajuns at the fest.

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  • PhoeniXashes says:

    global? those areas listed in the article seem like border spills up north and south america. why not mention the south african burn, asian ones in korea and japan. mainland china and taiwan maybe in the pipeline this year and check the makings of the 1st major chinese theme camp – chinese beyond borders and join us: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bm.ccbb

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