DON THOMPSON Associated Press writer | Posted: Saturday, September 4, 2004 12:00 am
BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev. - There aren't many options for getting around Black Rock City, perhaps the world's most fantastic and illusionary urban setting.
The vanishing city appears and disappears in a week on seven square miles of long-dry lake bed in one of the flattest and most remote places in America.
The 30,000-plus residents can walk through the clinging dust and stifling desert heat. The more experienced brought bicycles.
Then there are the "mutant vehicles:" 500 or so fire-breathing, articulated, neon-lit, steel- or cloth-clad, Mad Max versions of parade floats that creep and crawl around the moonscape. Sharks, butterflies, dragons, couches-on-wheels, flying saucers, elephants; the art cars are limited only by the imagination.
Organizers of the annual Burning Man counterculture festival 120 miles north of Reno are struggling this year to avoid a repeat of the transportation tragedies that plagued last year's event.
The trick is imposing those regulations in a fanciful utopian society where freedom and self-responsibility are supposed to take the place of legal limits.
Katharine Lampman, 21, of Belmont, Calif., was killed a year ago when she accidentally fell under the wheels of a moving vehicle. In addition, two plane crashes at the festival's temporary air strip sent five people to area hospitals. One victim later died.
In response, the city's DMV - Department of Mutant Vehicles - is this year taking on more of the regulatory role of its real world counterpart.
The 100 or so light aircraft that use the landing strip are no longer allowed to take pleasure flights during the festival; once they land, they're grounded for the duration.
And the bizarre mutant vehicles must be licensed and obey the 5 mph speed law.
"I think people realize when you have a larger and larger crowd, there has to be some civic responsibility," said Dan Donovan of San Francisco, driver of a spaceship built around an old Frito-Lay delivery truck with a hip-hop dance floor on top.
Donovan, 39, said festival organizers have always been strict, even more so this year. But he said regulations can't prevent every accident.
"On a certain level, how do you stop people from doing that?" he said, referring to Lampman's death.
Mark Sheets, 47, Lake Tahoe, has been coming here for six years, driving a mutant vehicle for four.
He agrees some responsibility has to be on the individual.
"At Burning Man you kind of have to pay attention," Sheets said. "Everyone's kind of responsible for your own safety, because there are hazards out here."
But he believes the golden age of Burning Man is coming to an close.
"It's inevitable they'll have to bring a little more order to it - it's getting too big," said Sheets, who drives the Medusa Train, a giant Day-Glo red, two-faced head atop a golf cart, multicolored, snakelike wands protruding from the head.
The vehicles are not just transportation around the desert, but a traveling roadshow that organizers hope will carry Burning Man's cutting edge artistic message to communities nationwide.
This year the Black Rock Arts Foundation is paying to send several "fire sculptures" on an interactive art tour after Burning Man ends.
"They look like giant baby perambulators - baby carriages," said Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. "Burners put wood in them and they spout flame, and they're mobile."
Organizers say they aren't licensing just any custom vehicle: they're looking for the "wow factor," something that makes observers gasp.
Promoting safety without limiting that creativity is a challenge, particularly when organizers expect the temporary community to largely police itself as part of an annual cultural experiment.
Instead of jail or fines, violators are towed around the encampment in what amounts to a public shaming. Harvey said he hopes their humiliation will sink into participants' collective consciousness to promote compliance without impinging on the underlying sense of freedom.
Organizers seek similarly subtle ways to bring structure to a community seemingly a riot away from anarchy. They charge admission, collect garbage and sewage, water down the dust, publish a daily newspaper, provide medical care for those who fall victim to the oven-like heat.
There are street names and "addresses," laid out in concentric circles around the central pyramid where the Burning Man will be torched tonight in a pagan-like ritual display of renewal.
The streets this year are named after planets, but the gathering is growing so large, "I ran out of planets," Harvey said. "Fortunately, about the time I got done, they found a new planet."
Imposing a bit of order on a city built on creative chaos is a balancing act that enjoys varying degrees of success, Harvey said.
"Fortunately," he said, "we get to erase the city every year and start over."