Muserology Cafe

Surviving Burning Man (November/December 2011)

by Tallulah L., age 11, California

You are on a giant trampoline in a camp filled with kids from around the world. You can see a city of RVs with huge metal flowers towering behind them. Beyond those are other sculptures, stretching on for miles in the otherwise empty, white desert.

What is this place?

Burning Man is a once-a-year festival of about 50,000 people on the playa (a dry lakebed) of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Though most people think the festival is only for adults to scream and dance and burn a giant wooden man, that is not true. Harley K. Dubois, a founding member of the Burning Man board--who happens to be my little sister's friend's mom--says, "Kids have always been there and it is an amazing place." She got tickets for my family to go to the festival this year. None of us had been before. 

At Burning Man, most people stay in a camp. There are hundreds of camps with different themes, including one entire camp meant only for kids and their parents. That's where I stayed with my family.

Kids Camp was founded in 1998. It is very different from the other camps because scattered all over it are about six trampolines. In the middle is a giant ball pit. On some nights, you can watch kids' movies on an outdoor screen. The day before the 104-foot (32-meter) tower with the wooden man was burned, we burned a smaller version at Kids Camp.

Most parents who go with their kids are pretty unusual. To me there were two different kinds of parents. One kind of parent let their kids run around the entire place and didn't seem afraid of any risk. The other parents were always worried and sat at the edge of the trampoline to make sure their kids didn't fall off. And then there was my family, who had no idea what was going on.

In the beginning, we were always depending on strangers to do things for us. When we got there, we wandered around for a long time until a family staying near us showed us to our beat-up and dust-covered RV. Later, when my dad, my little sister, and I were walking our bikes home, I accidentally dropped mine. I pulled it upright, but the brakes did not work. A man walking by us stopped and fixed the bike in under five seconds.

One of the things that makes Burning Man so famous is the art. The only cars you are allowed to drive are "art cars," which are vehicles transformed into art. They can be made from buses, motorcycles, or bikes, as well as cars. Once I saw a bus with brown fabric streched over it in the shape of a dragon. People were singing and dancing on its back. A three-story-tall praying mantis was parked in the middle of the playa. Music played all night while people danced to it.

It all made me feel like I was on a different planet. There was so much art there--not just a little spot where you could look at a few paintings like in a museum. Instead, there were miles of desert filled with sculptures stretching so far I could not see the end. Giant metal dandelions brightened the dusty sky. 

Burning Man started on Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986. Fifty or fewer people came, and the wooden man was only eight feet tall. There was no party that lasted for days. All they did was light the man on fire and throw him in the water. Now, 25 years later, it's one of the biggest temporary cities in the world. 

The first wooden man was built in honor of the summer solstice. Since then, there have been lots of arguments over what it means to burn the man. It felt kind of weird and dark to me. Why not just burn a giant pineapple? My little sister was scared because she thought they would pick a real man to burn.

There are some problems with Burning Man. Wind blows up to 70 miles per hour and dust storms can last all day long. Inside our RV, a thin layer of dust was everywhere. It had squeezed its way through crevices and cracks. When we went outside for even five minutes, we came back covered head-to-toe in dust. There was a problem with our RV: The man who rented it to us said it came with 30 gallons of water, but it turned out it was not even half full. We did not have enough water to take showers, so we had to use Handi Wipes instead. It was so hot that everybody stayed inside from 12:00 to 2:00, though hardly anybody had air conditioning. 

My parents only got three to four hours of sleep at night because of all the music. We left in the middle of the third night because they couldn't stand not to get enough sleep any longer. There is a custom that Burning Man is supposed to be like a survival experience, but we really just wanted a shower.

But there are good things about it too. The culture of Burning Man is interesting. It is illegal to buy or sell anything but ice or coffee. (They sell coffee because many adults would not go if they didn't.) I like the idea of not buying and selling because it makes people want to help each other. Burning Man also feels very safe because everyone is nice to kids. Every time you walk down the playa, people will run up to you and give you gifts. Once after walking about half a block, I was given a shark tooth, a big velvet flower, and some candy.

Overall, the festival was chaotic, loud, exhausting, and hot. Although it was a little too much for me, and I won't be going back soon, it is something I will remember for my whole life.