Thunderdome

We arrived out of the darkness riding a four-person toaster, disembarked, pushed through the crowd and climbed up the side of a steel geodesic dome. The cross pieces were about a yard apart so it took some stretching and some gripping -- my fingerless biking gloves tended to slip. My shorts were artfully ripped to shreds and I wasn’t wearing anything under them so to anyone I climbed over who looked up to see whose dust-covered boots were half an inch from your fingers and caught a view you really weren’t interested in: Sorry, man. Uh, have a good Burn.

We hung on twelve feet above the ground surrounded in all directions by dusty people wearing their post-apocalyptic worst and watched the combatants try to kill each other with foam-covered wooden swords. Death metal blasted from speakers all around while the master of ceremonies directed the action with shakes of a long skull-encrusted juju staff and his assistants rippled their tattoos and looked mean, tore fighters apart when they got entangled in one another’s harness, and pulled them back to the wall between rounds for another head-on collision.

Just another night in the desert. Scenes like this are why Burning Man is just so gaw damn fun.

The first fight we watched devolved into fisticuffs but there was no blood (boo) and no disqualification (yay). I had to give the fat bastard who lost his temper full points for expressing his frustration with appropriate venom rather than getting whiny about it. But he lost the battle, in the highly qualified opinion of the referees, because the other guy took every blow, maintained his grip, and kept the legal hits coming. A few fights later two chicks went at it, full of poison and painted braids. The harnesses were hinged at the hip and the smaller one kept getting flipped upside down, her heading hitting the dirt, but she was a gamer and never slowed down. The fight ended when she took a thick-soled and high-buckled boot directly to her pubic bone and knelt down screaming, a hand raised in capitulation. The crowd went wild.

As much as this would freak a normal person out, it got to be the same after awhile, and after what looked like a boyfriend girlfriend pair went at it, all grins and spanks, dust rising off their clothes as if hit with a carpet beater, bruises and kisses in the afterglow, we got back into our toaster in search of further fun. What next? Roller disco … Fire dance … An electric cruise trailing marijuana smoke under the changeless desert stars … The magic of Burning Man is built into its open galaxy of possibilities.

This image of the Thunderdome copyright here and here.