The shuttle was an ancient Ford school bus with cheap office chairs scattered around the interior and a pair of fuzzy dice dangling over the driver’s head. He ground the gears and took us out along a dark two lane highway atop the levee and pulled into a small gravel lot illuminated only by a gibbous moon. One side of the lot rolled into weeds and down to the Sacramento River, churning with the rain that fell on the farmlands up north. The other side was the old river road where occasionally a car or truck whished by at sixty miles per hour. In between was a gate with no lights and a young man taking cash for admission. We brought our own booze in a backpack.
We walked along the gravel with other celebrants through a graveyard of dead or at least comatose art cars. I recognized a few from pictures I’d seen of Burning Man. Propped up on the dirt, next to an old fishing boat with the paint long gone, a monster the size of a van, plaster protuberances in all directions and a flaming tail. Further along, a pair of silver Volkswagens augmented with sheet steel to resemble great crawling ladybugs, an impression oddly consistent with their clear bubble sunroofs. A pair of towers with satellite dishes atop them looking skyward. A distillation tower, retired from a refinery, crafted into a thirty-foot robot, obviously female. A root beer-brown Citroen with major plastic surgery to resemble I couldn’t tell what in the darkness but it seemed vaguely amphibian. A huge ’62 El Dorado, cut open and decorated with countless objects – dolls, horseshoes, miniature gorillas, etc. I couldn’t help noticing that for all the effort to make it a rolling museum of kitsch, no one had bothered to fix the trashed upholstery.
Past the parking lot was an open area between metal buildings, each a warehouse converted into a combination workshop, art studio and performance venue. Great iron racks held bits and pieces of everything imaginable. Electric lights seemed directed at random, creating whimsically highlighted spaces everywhere. A long string of white lights ran up a tree and flashed like captive lightning. A stage backed by dusty Plexiglas stood in a large cage under multicolored lights. Several 55-gallon drums were filled with trash wood and fired up against the night chill. People were gathered around them, and in other groups here and there, talking, drinking, smoking, catching up, getting acquainted.
We talked to people and found everyone to be incredibly friendly. Probably three quarters of the crowd was under thirty. I talked to a guy who couldn’t have been much over twenty. He had a band and did his own booking and had to leave soon for the East Coast to take care of business. He had a green cross painted on his face, and looked around at the scene, and said he thought this was what Andy Warhol would be doing if he were still alive. Maybe –- maybe not. I never met any of the scene’s big kahunas, don't remember their names. One was pointed out to me, a handsome and vigorous man in his fifties with his gray hair done up in a wild Wolverine-like pompadour, under constant attack from well-wishers half his age. There were other artists spoken well of, and I was amused to be told in all awe that so-and-so actually had a piece in the Crocker Art Museum – albeit down in the basement, never on display.
For a few minutes we sat on a swing in a studio and watched a band set up to play while the DJ spun a techno-infused sound effects track. A huge plastic penis head was decorated with Christmas lights. Oddly disturbing paintings lined the walls to the ceiling. A long-dead player piano sat off to the side. The people smelled of clove cigarettes. Before anything really started happening there, we heard noise and went outside to the stage. A costume contest was parading across it, people dressed in robes and ropes and netting, their faces mostly hidden, a sort of amateur Bedouin chic. Outside the cage people applauded or cat-called, held up bottles and cigarettes and cell-phone cameras. I never saw a call for winners. It was probably just a parade, expression without competition.
The costume theme was “nets”. Some of us wore the theme. My wife wore a skirt and fishnet stockings. I took the camouflage netting off an old army helmet and wore it like a neckerchief. Others were more subtle, some others more extreme. Lots of fishnet stockings and short skirts in the crowd, with overcoats against the chill. The coat of a middle-aged woman who was laughing constantly fell open frequently to reveal a fishnet body stocking under an elegant evening bikini and high heels. Another young woman, taller even than me in her high-heeled boots, danced alone swinging an over-sized electric-lit bolo around her head. A guy had a pair of lady mannequin legs (in fishnets) tied upside down around his neck – girls enjoyed getting their pictures taken with their face in the V where they met. Off to the side, a cabal of drummers kept the rhythm going for anyone who wanted to dance on a Persian carpet thrown down over the concrete slab of a long-gone building. It reminded me of the music that played outside Sproul Hall twenty-four hours a day when I was a kid. I couldn’t help but wonder if this scene would seem strange to some people, yet despite nearly thirty years’ self-exile to the suburbs, it only made me think of home.
Towards the back was the engineer-artist’s playground. It had been clear from looking around that one of the chief skills of an artist these days has to be welding. But in the back, out under the open sky, were benches and benches under flashing LED candelabra set up to work on electric motors, bicycles and tricycles, audio equipment, remote controls, all under the dead watchful eyes of countless robots stuffed into shelves, many of them vaguely familiar as toys that had had their day, others merely familiar in the strange way of robots. It was a Jawa paradise and as I looked into the open side door of a cargo trailer, accessible only by climbing a ladder and stepping over a stack of flatfile drawers un-retired from some engineering archive, I saw a couple of benches and soldering irons and oscilloscopes and boxes and boxes of tiny little drawers filled with electronic parts and thought, damn, I could do this too. Especially after finding, on one of the benches outside, a home-made flat-antenna theramin that made space music as a function of the proximity of your hand’s parasitic capacitance.
The bus driver said he was working until three, but by eleven we decided we were done. There’s no shame in living long enough to earn your rest. The bus that picked us up disgorged a crowd of new arrivals, more twenty-somethings dressed in odd combinations of grunge and elegance. We drove home glad for the acquaintances, the random information gathered on Burning Man, the realization that passion and creativity and skill are still working together somewhere in this world. As one of the people there said to me, passion if strong enough is its own skill. If you truly have passion, skill is secondary (and a lot of rock bands have proven that). We only regretted that we weren’t there in the daylight to see what the place really looked like and to get a better handle on the works of art scattered throughout the compound. Thus it surely wasn’t the last time we will go to the artist community, gallery and event space called
The Horsecow.
