Letter From America.(Burning Man Festival)(Brief Article)

I hadn't even gotten out of the car, but already I was having grave doubts. A pack of fat, naked, middle-aged men in body paint had just cruised by on bicycles. A bedraggled guy nearby shouted poetry. Men in animal costumes strolled casually along, trailed by a skinny, longhaired camper wearing nothing but tennis shoes. "Look at all these freaks!" muttered my new friend Matt, a fellow first-timer. "They ought to roll this place up and make it into a golf course!"

We had finally arrived at Burning Man, a weeklong festival of fun and psychological meltdown that takes place every year on a desolate swath of dried lake bed deep in Nevada's Black Rock desert. We had driven hundreds of miles to get here and, it felt, traveled just as many hours. Matt had come from San Francisco, I from New York. But now it was hard to escape an existential question. Who were these weird people, and what were we doing here? Little did I suspect that by midnight I'd be resplendent in a sparkling polyester wig and dancing to rave music. Or that Matt would be clad in nothing but a borrowed red sundress and a fuzzy wool cap.

But I get ahead of myself. Burning Man is famous for getting uptight people (like me) to shed their inhibitions. It began back in the 1980s, when a loon named Larry Harvey invited a select group of friends to watch him torch an eight-foot version of what has since come to be known as "The Man" on a San Francisco beach. He'd just broken up with his girlfriend, so torching a crude stick figure seemed just the thing to do. Over the years it grew--this year it towered 70 feet--and so did the crowds. By 1990, what once seemed a lunatic fringe was such a sensation that it decamped to Reno. This year's "burn" drew 25,000 people.

You can only consider it a rite. Why else would someone sweat the days away in temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then dance through the night in acid-influenced raves and desert soirees? At Burning Man, you party down and whack out, 24/7, amid a sort of tent city of theme camps. Like "Haiku for Beer." Or "Karaoke Trampoline." Think of it as a Woodstock for the New Millennium, a locus of what psychobabblists might call a "transformative experience." At least that's what one shrink told me. But he was wearing a black wig and a dress. The idea is to shuck "societal expectations," as the good doctor put it, and "connect with our true selves." For some, of course, that means drugs. But it also means other things--getting naked, shouting bad poetry, hugging sweaty people you would normally avoid and dancing all night long to earthshaking techno. Round about dawn of the second or third ...