Image provided by: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, NE
About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 13, 2000)
Every summer, Leroy Fletcher makes the trek to Nevada's Black Rock Desert. The Empire, Nev., native rides his rusty gray bicycle across the desert floor. Three white ferrets peer out from a carrier perched on the bike’s handlebars. With his sun-weathered face and cowboy hat, Fletcher looks like he could be out panning for gold. Instead, Fletcher was one of 28,000 people who migrated to the Nevada Desert to see a 50 feet-tall wooden icon burnt to the ground in a festival called Burning Man. The festival ran from Aug. 25 to Sept 3. Fletcher has attended the event for the past eight years and is now a staff member with the Burning Man project Fletcher can’t easily describe the event When asked to, he sim ply smiles, rubs the ears of one of the ferrets and looks to the sky. “I don’t know... I don't know what Burning Man is, but whatev er it’s about, it’s certainly some thing special.” The Burning Man tradition began in 1986 when California resident Larry Harvey organized a group of friends at San Francisco's Baker Beach. What started 14 years ago as a small annual party has become an international event, held every August in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno, Nev. University of Nebraska Lincoln senior English major Mark Baldridge agrees the festival is special. He attended Burning Man in 1998 and made a second trip in 2000. instant Disneyland, Brigadoon on crystal meth, a doomed post-apocalyptic party that you stagger home from with dust in your hair” Baldridge said. For the members of the tem porary community, the event is a place where they come to view art, to create art and to see the namesake of the festival go up into flames. Burning Man is an enigmatic event, a cultural phenomenon that does not advertise or have corporate sponsors. It is a gather ing proliferated by word of mouth and the power of the Internet Some describe it as acult; oth ers say it’s a carnival. The various radio stations that spring up with in the experimental city describe the festival as “everything that Woodstock wishes it could be." The focal point of the event - the man - towers 50 feet above the barren desert floor, a wooden effi gy standing upon a platform of plywood and straw bales. For one week this wooden structure exists as a vertical land mark for the residents of Black Rock City. The man is the center of the encampment and art installa tions that radiate around him. In preparation for the “bum,” Harvey and his group spend months organizing the infrastruc ture of this temporary village. The building project resem bles a real-life version of the com puter game “Sim City,” where the player builds a simulated city from scratch. The Black Rock City engineers design an ephemeral city, complete with roads, a power grid and enough Port-a-Potties to accommodate 28,000 incoming residents. This is a community for artists and musicians - a village for self proclaimed weirdos and eccentrics, a place where the con straints of society are set aside. At Burning Man, creativity and invention are encouraged. Costumes replace corporate dress codes, and decorated golf carts are more common than SUVs. Traffic jams do not exist in Black Rock City, but large living rooms on wheels do. One such structure, resem bling a parade float, creeps slowly past the assembled tents and RVs. The large, motorized /ehicle with a disco ball, barstools and overstuffed couches drives lazily past the fire dancers, the stilt walkers playing soccer and makes a left turn at the fire breathing dragon. Here the mobile lounge makes a stop, picks up a rider, hands out a drink and wheels itself across the alkali basin mov ing slowly toward the man. Festival Ignites Creative Spirit A 50-foot-tall wooden form of a man bums while a crowd of28,000 looks on.The bonfire was the culmination of the weeklong celebration known as Burning Man. LEFT: A Burning Man partici pant dishes food from a can while standing in front of one of the many "art cars'seen in Black Rock City. STORY AND PHOTOS BY SHARON KOLBET FAR LEFT: A winged bicyclist makes a stop while peddling across the open desert. Bicycles were the most popular form of transportation within the Burning Man community. LEFT: UNL senior English major Mark Baldridge sets up camp in Black Rock City at the intersection of the roads "6 o'clock" and "Sex Drive." Each year the streets of the temporary dty are laid out according to a particular theme. This year's theme was"the body," which gave rise to street names such as "Gut Alley" and "Head Way." Baldridge made his first trip to the event in 1998 and returned again this August to par ticipate in the seven-day art event.