Playa Fire by Stewart Harvey

Author:Stewart Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

In 2001, I chanced upon a fellow sitting quietly on a mat in front of the Man.

I spent quite a lot of time on the playa alone myself that year. For the first time the Man had been placed on an A-shaped pedestal, and it added immeasurably to his dynamic against the horizon. Like Henry Mah, I sat on the playa for more than one sunrise, and I got to know the play of early morning light on the desert surface most intimately. It’s probably the reason I feel so strongly about the playa being a place of spiritual healing. I especially found myself hanging out at the Temple of Tears. It fit my somber mood, but it also lifted my spirits. By the time I returned to Portland, the doctors at OHSU had declared Bryan cancer-free. The 2017 Burn will be my twenty-seventh, and happily, it will be Bryan’s twenty-first.

The theme for 2002 was “The Floating World.” I’m not positive, but I seem to remember that originally, Larry intended to play on the Japanese ukiyo-e style of art from the lavish Edo period. By the time the theme essay was written, however, it had become a treasure hunt on the high seas, and so the playa that year was filled with ships and pirates. One of the great adventures was a treasure hunt for gold doubloons, which depicted a treasure chest on one side and the symbol of the Man on the other. If you found a doubloon, you could keep it, use it to gain admission to the lighthouse base of the Man, or gift it to someone else. I still have one somewhere with our other Burning Man memorabilia.

“The Floating World” was notable in that it produced some of the most spectacular seagoing vehicles to ever sail the playa. The most notable was a battle-scarred vessel of considerable scale: La Contessa. It was massive, and of course it had a sound system. The creators of it—Simon Cheffins and Gregory Jones, along with dozens of others—were very generous with their time, and by the week’s end, nearly everyone on the playa had had a ride. It came back for many years and was easily one of the best “playa schooners” to sail vast old Lake Lahontan in decades. There was also a giant white whale that Flash Hopkins drove around, and Pepe Ozan’s opera set piece Narwhal, which resembled a friendly sea mammal and has also returned to the playa many times.

What Burning Man offers is a world apart from the one we live in from day to day. It is a world of fantasy and imagination, and in it we are transported to a head space long dormant in urban adult life. I think the reason spiritual elements appear so effortlessly on the playa is that it is so removed from the relentless commerce of contemporary America, where our senses are bombarded with the thousand inane trivialities of daily living, and the only way out seems to involve buying, booking, or subscribing to something.

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