The Burning Man festival, at its weekend peak, becomes Nevada’s third largest city, behind Las Vegas and Reno. The makeshift city that rises up out of the desolate plain just beyond the Pyramid Lake Reservation is called Black Rock, and if you ever find your self there, you will be required to participate (there are no spectators at Burning Man) in the world’s largest art installation. Ticket money is relayed back to punters, who apply for grants to build huge art cars that trundle around the enormous playa blasting out music; or who build massive theme camps that cater for late night drinking, crazy golf or human car washes. There is a theme each year and this year was evolution. The ticket (from which the above text was taken) bears a large psychedelic picture of Charles Darwin, his head emerging from pink clouds, his brain connected to a nearby tree. In the spirit of participation I applied to be a lamplighter, something that appeared to be a kind of quasi-mythical order that “lights the city.” As I found out later, the lighting of the lamps did in fact turn out to be something incredibly affecting. My great, great, great grandfather Daekin was also a lamplighter in pre-electricity London, but unlike him I didn’t pee my pants the first time I saw an airplane. I felt there was a kind of synchronicity, lighting lamps was in my blood. So after being accepted as a member I signed myself up to the donations list and pledged to bring some food and drink items from a long list. I could pledge what I felt I could manage to bring or afford. These items made up the nightly dinners that are the given to the working lamplighters each night. The meal allocation works on a pog earning system. There is one meal a day in the lamplighter’s camp. If you work, you get a pog. A pog is worth one meal. Pledging to donate food and drink gets you two pogs to allow for two days off. You can earn pogs by working in the kitchen or the bar instead of lamp lighting. You can work as little or as often as you like. It just depends if you want to eat that night.

Burning Man is a cashless society, bartering or gifting being the only means of commerce. For example, I had the brakes on my BMX tightened for the princely sum of two cold domestic beers; then later gifted a spokey-dokey style flashing light for said BMX for nothing in return. Before arriving, what I feared most was finding myself, refreshed, holding forth a sweaty five to a shocked barman, demanding a stiff one, to the judging eyes of all around, including the giant titular man himself, as I have polluted the event with my filthy lucre. I did not, but I did give away a lot of booze and received a lot back, so I think I enjoyed the system correctly. We took a huge amount of alcohol, which needed a lot of help to get through. At one point I actually briefly considered washing with vodka.

I have heard rumours that the same policemen patrol the event each year. These brave men and women actually enjoy the event and understand the Burning Man community’s values, so they help the event pass without too much trouble. Because although it may sometimes feel like you are on another planet, somewhere between District 9, Mad Max and Alice In Wonderland, you are still very much in Nevada and therefore bound by it’s laws; drugs being one of law enforcements priorities on the playa. There are actual under cover officers dressed like event participants who go around asking for gifts of drugs, catching out unsuspecting Burners.  But as the festival has grown more law enforcement officers are needed. This year they have been bussed in from surrounding counties. Cops with less cultural sensitivities, which is why Burning Man has volunteer police liaison officers who are trained to swim within the cultural gulf between playa people and the long arm of the law and smooth the waves. I was horrified though to discover that these police liaison officers are identifiable by, not a badge or hat, but zebra skin. Surely one of the silliest skinned animals on the savanna. There are three types of law enforcement on the playa. Three strains of potential knuckleheads, itching to fire up their tasers at the least provocation. And what stands between that and us? What is there to calm the waters? Trained hippies draped with animal skins, and not just any animal skins: the strangest animal in Africa, a kind of weird stripy horse. I could not think of any thing more likely to antagonise the apes in blue. But I was wrong. These people are not all naked hippies gurning their way through another 8-hour psy-trance set. They are people who like to build things and then blow them up. They are more like kind anarchists, people who want to live at the end of the world, but with a system that takes care of each other and the land but yet whilst also burning things to the ground. There are 350 volunteers in the playa medical team, led by a brave doctor who came to the event unsure of what to expect but who now goes back year on year to look after the some 50,000 people who make up Black Rock City. The cops seem to be eager to just let the event unfold and then disappear. After all, what other event brings so much revenue into Nevada and cleans up after its self so religiously? And the good gambling folks of Las Vegas don’t even have to take their eyes off the slots, except to maybe wonder why that couple by the roulette looks kind of dusty. Everyone wins.

On my way to the event I crossed the International Date Line. It’s not time travel - I arrived an hour before I left - but it certainly “baked my noodle”, as the yanks say. I figured the disorientation would help with my adjustment to Burning Man. I also caught a bug that me and my traveling companions passed back and forth in a game of ping-pong infection, which saw the bug get bigger and bigger and weirder and weirder until it knocked us on our backs. During my stopover in LAX on the way to SFO I enjoyed what I imagine happens over a lifetime for LA’s usual star struck immigrants. I arrived excited, searching for famous faces, looking for opportunities, then ended up sleeping on the floor, tired and broken, outside a coffee shop, having realised that all your dreams are pipelical. Except this all happened to me over the space of half an hour as jet lag and alcohol got their prickly paws into me.

Over burritos on Mission Street my traveling companions and me began the arduous task of organising our trip. As the ticket says, it is a harsh desert environment and provisions would be vitally important. So first on the list was outfits for the playa: A red spangled tutu; feather boas were out because they left MOOP (Matter out of place) on the playa; hot pants and Hawaiian shirts; orange boiler suits and berets, and a bag full of other equal wonderfulness. Then, after dealing with the vitals, we moved on to other items. An RV, from the surely not so unsuspecting Cruise America; dust masks and day and night goggles (there are whiteout dust storms); water, gallons of it; a bike, as the playa is vast; sunblock, aftersun and assorted creams for skin cracking; then any tiny comforts you think might help you beat cabin fever or dust sickness. Burning Man is so dusty that I don’t think it will ever leave me. In twenty or forty or even fifty years, I might shake my head and witness the spreading of a fine cloud of dust falls down around my shoulders. Land speed records are attempted on land near the site, favoured for the flatness a salt lake acquires. The dust is also highly alkaline and also corrosive. I was warned not to bring or wear anything I wanted to take back to “real life”. Burners sometimes refer to the outside world as the “default world”, something you have to travel back into that takes adjusting to, unenthusiastically for most. I was soon to find out how this felt when deciding that my first taste of the “default world” should be a massive neon lit casino complex in downtown Reno. I had a turn for the worse and got a little jittery. After a cashless utopia Reno felt like a hellish nightmare with neon fighting it out with desperation to cover the most space. And then there was the food. I tried ordering from the children’s menu, asking for half portions, but still received meals that in size resembled aid packages one might send to Africa during a particularly bad famine. Most times I ate until I was full but to the casual observer it appeared as if the meal had not even been dented.

I was told that the lamplighters were held in high regard but did not realise how high that regard went until my first shift. After donning the Egyptian style robes and riding the large truck out to three o’clock we began our procession. Burning Man is organized in the style of a clock face, then each ring of concentric streets spreading out from the middle is named for a letter of the alphabet. So if someone wanted to meet you at four o’clock and A you could easily find them. It’s a fine system drawn from sensible but boring American town planning and negates the need for any Glastonbury style meet-you-by-the-man-with-Welsh-flag chaos. All along our route people stopped to cheer us on, even during a dust storm that caused a white out on the playa. We were encouraged to shout back “we love you too” causing volleys of love to be batted back and forth. Somewhere on the route I lost my American flag scarf and had to turn back to find it as the best way to prevent MOOP is to not even let it touch the ground. As it had I decided that the best recourse would be to find it then before it blows away. The storm got stronger and the visibility significantly went down so I decided to return to the Lamplighter’s camp and try to find it after the storm. All the way back people were shouting to me that I was late. But because of a combination of my dust mask and the dust I couldn’t find the volume to reply that I had just finished my shift. So as the third giant art car cum sound system slowly passed alongside me, it’s MC shouting encouragement, all of it’s dancers turned to cheer me on, I found the unique communion between people that is achievable only through the power of waving a bit and being waved back at a bit. We humans truly are a magical species. Especially when we are naked and there is a lot of nudity at Burning Man, my personal favorite being a naked man on stilts. Burning Man is a lot of effort but the madness is almost so unique that even if you only go once in your life you should put it on the list titled ‘100 dusty things to do before I die.’