The Old Man at Burning Man

It's something we've all been meaning to do. The father-son bonding adventure. You know: The big fishing excursion, The road trip down Route 66. Last year, Wells Tower took a completely different approach with his dad: Burning Man, the world's largest chemically enhanced self-expression festival. They went to witness the Slut Olympics. They went to see the art. They went to discover what draws 60,000 people to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Then they set up camp and took off their clothes. And things got truly interesting

February 2013

The land, the very atmosphere  out there, is alien, malignant, the executioner of countless wagon trains. I am afraid to crack the window. Huge dervishes of alkaline dust reel and teeter past. The sun, a brittle parchment white, glowers as though we personally have done something to piss it off. An hour out here and already I could light an Ohio Blue Tip off the inside of my nostril. One would think we were pulling into this planet's nearest simulation of hell, but if this were hell, we would not be driving this very comfortable recreational vehicle. Nor would there be a trio of young and merry nudists capering at our front bumper, demanding that we step out of the vehicle and join them. These people are checkpoint officials, and it is their duty to press their nakedness to us in the traditional gesture of welcome to the Burning Man festival, here in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

The checkpoint nudists are comely and embraceable, in the way that everyone ten years younger than me has lately begun to seem comely and embraceable—the women's dolphin smoothness still undefeated by time and gravity; the men bearing genial grins and penises with which I suppose I can cope: neither those lamentable acorns one pities at the gym, nor fearsome yardage that would be challenging to negotiate at close quarters. But here is the question: Do I want some naked strangers to get on me? Or, more to the point, do I want them to get on me with my father watching? This quandary is no quandary for my father. He is already out of the vehicle, standing in the coursing dust, smiling broadly, a stranger's bosom trembling at his chin.

My father and I are staid, abstracted East Coast types without much natural affinity for bohemian adventures. But we are here less for the festival itself than in service of an annual father-son ritual. Fourteen years ago, my father was diagnosed with an exotic lymphoma and given an outside prognosis of two years. When we both supposed he was dying, we made an adorable pledge—if he survived—to take a trip together every year. Thanks to medical science, we've now followed the tradition for a solid decade, journeying each summer to some arbitrarily selected far-flung destination: Greenland, Ecuador, Cyprus, etc. This year, we've retooled the concept and departed instead on a bit of domestic ethnography. We have joined the annual pilgrimage of many thousands who each year flee the square world for the Nevada desert to join what's supposed to be humanity's greatest countercultural folk festival/self-expression derby. Or it used to be, before people like my father and me started showing up. 

Now I, too, am in the daylight, being hugged by a small, bearded Mr. Tumnus of a fellow, and also by a bespectacled lady-librarian type with a scrupulously mown vulva. "Welcome home," they murmur in my ear. "Home" this is decidedly not. Whether it is good to be here, we shall discover in the coming week. Still, I reply, "Uh, it's good to be home."

At the adjacent welcome booth, dreadlockers, having been duly greeted, are trudging back to their hippie wagon. "I hope it doesn't suck this year," one of them says, eyeing our vast and foolish RV. "We're surrounded by all these bougie people."

"I'm so fucking stoned,"complains a bikini-clad girl wearing a fedora snugged over dreadlocks stout as table legs. "Man, I gotta focus. Gotta get ready for the Slut Olympics."

We climb back aboard, tracking pounds of dust into the RV. My dad is enlivened. "What a nice greeting that was," he says. "Did you know that woman didn't have any trousers on? I was so focused on her breasts I didn't notice she was naked until after the ceremony."

···

When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Burning Man with my 69-year-old father, "Good idea" were the words out of no one's mouth. Perhaps this was a poor idea. Mere moments here and my emotional machinery, specifically the feelings-about-my-family manifold, is beginning to smoke, creak, and blow springs with a jaw-harp bwaaaang! 

The root causes of my embarrassment, unsurprisingly, naturally, track back to my childhood, a montage of my father perpetually falling short of the dull, decorous Ward Cleaver ideal I imagined everyone else had for a dad. Because my father is constitutionally incapable of being embarrassed, I spent much of my early life being embarrassed on his behalf. In elementary school, I was embarrassed by his car, a mulch-colored Datsun coupe which, when the clearcoat gave out, my father repainted, with brushes, a pupil-
puckering shade of kelly green. I was, and am, embarrassed by his house. After my parents divorced (I was 6), the home became a tribute to unreconstructed bachelorhood, a place where the dominant cuisine was ramen noodles, where the dirty-clothes hamper was a delta of fragrant laundry on the kitchen floor, and where, when the furnace broke, it went unrepaired for the better part of a decade. For much of my adult life, my father's house has existed in a state of entropy so ideal that were a band of vandals or a flood to hit the place, it could only enhance the house's orderliness.

I was embarrassed by my father's fearlessness about his body—how, for example, when we met for a tennis game, he never bothered to change ahead of time or repair to a restroom but instead shucked his trousers off in the parking lot without a care for who observed him in his sagging BVDs. I was embarrassed, and also sort of impressed, one day when I was 7 when I saw him drink some of my pee. The setup was this: I'd spent the morning pissing in a Collins glass I'd hidden in the garage, which I intended to take down the street to show a neighbor friend for reasons unclear to me now. In any case, I set it on the kitchen table while I went to find my shoes. When I returned, my father was hoisting the glass to his lips and uttering these words: "What's this, apple juice?"

I recall yelling, "Noooooooooo," in slo-mo basso. Too late. He took a generous slug. Then he set the glass down, turned to me, and said only this: "Don't ever, ever do that again." 

But I think what I'm feeling now is the opposite of the old embarrassed feeling, more a kind of petulant recognition that my father's heedlessness, his lack of inhibition, are in fact virtues that I failed to inherit. Did I mention that my father is no free-ranging hippie papa but a professor of economics who once voted for George
W. Bush? Yet when I asked my father to come with me to Burning Man, though he'd never heard of Burning Man, "Absolutely" was his prompt response. Never mind that his immune system is faltering. He now requires monthly transfusions of immunoglobulin. His chronic chest cold seems to be getting worse. His doctor recently noticed sulfurous halos around my father's pupils, inspiring worries that he may someday soon go blind. His mouth has lately broken out in ulcers, part of a painful accumulation of signals that this year's trip could be our last one together. 

And yet, while I love my father, these trips with him are not always enjoyable for me. It is not just that he likes to dry his sink-scrubbed underclothes by flying them from the antenna of the rental car. It is also the sleeping arrangements. My father is the sort of thrifty traveler who stays at hotels with hourly rates. Once, in a jungle in New Zealand, we got drunk and passed out on the corpse of a decomposed rat. My father insists on sleeping nude, even when we share a room, sometimes even when we share a bed, and this sort of closeness can be difficult to bear. 

And so it's probably wise that this year we have included two auxiliary homeboys in our party: my father's first cousin Cam Crane, and a grad-school buddy of my father's, a Canadian professor of economics in his emeritus years whose actual name is James Dean.

 Cam is 57 years old and is among the kindest and most capable people I know. He is the sort of person who, on camping trips, always brings two of everything in case somebody else needs his spare. Both of Cam's parents were dead of alcoholism before Cam was 23, and he has lived his life in an underparented, not-all-who-wander-are-lost sort of way. Cam is widely loved among members of our family, but we are sometimes confused by the life choices he makes. For example, Cam spent this past year staying in the spare room at the house of his ex-girlfriend and her husband to care for their quadriplegic dog as it died of Lou Gehrig's disease. His duties involved manually voiding the dog's bladder and bowels and "walking" the creature by means of a little cart built for this use. The dog, whose name was Sierra, was at last put down the week before Cam set out for Burning Man, to Cam's mixed relief.
Cam acknowledges that his life probably needs to tack in a new direction. "I really think Burning Man could change my life," he said to me on the phone a few weeks back. How? "Well, to be around these people all getting together for a common reason—it might help me focus on my own path." 

Then there's my father's old friend James Dean, who views the week a bit less ingenuously. Dean, 71, is famous among his friends for a lifetime of resounding successes with women, if not wives. He plays the saxophone and rides a big motorcycle, and if he didn't you would say, "That guy ought to play the saxophone and ride a big motorcycle." He does not expect Burning Man to change his life: "I think it's probably just a sexed-up art party" is his take on the week ahead.

···

Black Rock City—temporary home this year to nearly 60,000 souls—comes into view. It spans more than two miles, with concentric "streets" laid out around an open expanse of desert or "playa" where stands the eponymous Man (a sort of neon stick figure atop a plywood mansion). The city is breathtaking, especially if your thing is tarps and ropes and improvised shade structures. The dominant aesthetic is hard-core post-apocalyptic sun-retardant functionality: PVC-and-Tyvek Quonset huts, moon-base yurts made of foil-faced foam core, army-surplus wall tents—all lashed to rebar pilings sledgehammered deep into the hardpan. No camp seems to lack a soundly anchored shade structure, an appurtenance that we've heard constitutes the difference between having a good time at Burning Man and roasting miserably in your RV. Winds here crest at sixty miles an hour. Thanks to Cam's foresight, we've at least got masks and goggles against the frequent dust storms, but shadewise, all we've brought is a crappy little steel-and-nylon awning from Walmart. Roving past the pro-grade battenings of the other campers, Cam, our logistics man, says, "I think we might be fucked." 

And the genuinely sort of scary thing about Burning Man is that if you've fucked yourself in the food, water, or shade-structure departments, you are quite fucked indeed. According to the principles set down by Larry Harvey, who inaugurated the festival twenty-six years back by torching some art on San Francisco's Baker Beach, nothing may be bought or sold at Burning Man. (After the festival outgrew California and relocated to the desert, an amendment was made for coffee and ice.) "Gifting," as you've probably heard, is the soul of the Burning Man economy, which is helpful if you're in the market for some Ecstasy or a chakra balancing, but stuff like rebar, rope, and triple-gusseted tarps is too heavy and precious to hand out for free. 

But what really distinguishes Burning Man from Bonnaroo or any other festivals on the indie-bohemioid trail is that there's no main attraction: no famous bands or beer tents or dreamcatcher salesfolk. At Burning Man the attraction is the mass of fellow campers, each of whom is doing his bit by, say, hosting the Slut Olympics, or giving a lecture on Foucault, or knitting a Buddhist stupa out of pubic hair and setting it on fire. And the art (if that's the word for a flaming neon hoagie on wheels) has gotten a good deal more elaborate since the first beach bonfire. Among the hundreds of visual extravagances in store this year: an actual-size replica of an eighteenth-century shipwreck, a diesel-powered cast-iron dinosaur, a snowstorm in the desert, plus a menagerie of flammable installations (a plywood cathedral, a multistory effigy of Wall Street) to be torched in celebration of life's transience and other arty ideals. The whole thing defies expectations pretty spectacularly, especially if what you expected, as I did, was a Grateful Dead parking lot with no bands and more intense personal filth.

It is, in short, worth the lamentably expensive ticket price ($240 to $420, depending on when you buy). The ticketing system's supposed to accommodate veteran Burners, but somehow things got screwed up this year, and a full third went to people like me and my dad—here, the old-timers fear, to party and gawk and score free shit but not to "contribute" to the festival in any real way. 

We pick a campsite in a quiet neighborhood on an outer ring of the city. To one side of us, some rather abject fraternity gentlemen cower in the lee of their Subaru having Heineken brews. Our closest neighbors are several women in their thirties whom James Dean promptly diagnoses as "horny" by means of divination lost on the rest of us.

The professors mix up a batch of gin and tonics while Cam and I lash our miserable little Walmart gazebo to the chassis of the RV. I am tempted to nap in its washcloth-sized patch of shade, but my father has other plans. My father is dressed in adventure sandals, cargo shorts, a muslin tunic he bought in Thailand, and a nouveau legionnaire's chapeau complete with trapezius snood. Through a pair of dime-store spectacles ($4.99 price tag still on the lens) he is reading today's schedule of events. We have a happy range of activities from which to choose. Something called the Adult Diaper Brigade is welcoming participants. There is also "Make a Genital Necklace," "Fisting With Foxy," "3rd Annual Healthy Friction Circle Jerk," and "Naked Barista." Not all the offerings are lascivious. Some are educational ("Geology of the Black Rock Desert"), creative-anachro-geeky ("Excalibur Initiation and Dragon Naming Ceremony"), culinary ("FREE FUCKIN' ICE CREAM!!"), and spiritual ("Past Life Regression Meditation"). None of these options are seriously entertained.

"I think I'll go to the Naked Barista and have a naked cup of coffee," says my father.

"I'm coming with you, Ed," says James. "Are you going to get naked?"

"I think that's the arrangement," he says. "You have to get naked to get your cup of coffee."

"You don't think you're going native a bit prematurely?" I say. 

"I don't see what the big deal is," he says. "I'm quite confident no one will look at me."

We set off. We have brought bicycles. Black Rock City contains miles of byways, and to travel on foot would be a sure way to turn yourself into a Slim Jim. Only when we leave the camp does it begin to register how very astounding this whole thing is. The sun is setting, and the dusty avenues teem with weird life. A golf cart made to resemble a bluefin-sized sperm crosses our path (this year's theme is Fertility 2.0), followed by a hay wagon belching fire. Men cycle past wearing destroyed tuxedos, monkey outfits, suits of armor made of gold lamé, or T-shirts beneath whose belly hem bare genitals wag. (This is known as "shirtcocking" in the local argot.) Women wear, uniformly, their underwear. Or the vast majority do. In real life these women are bankers, substitute teachers, receptionists at gravel quarries, but here they have all entered into a common sisterhood of underpants in a collective mission to make the playa a place of beauty and terrible longing. God bless them.

I am now feeling the onset of an unpleasant sort of tourist panic. As one of the people who siphoned off tickets from the regular Burners, I'm gone in this guilty little fugue: Wow, you know, I thought this was going to be a half-assed and risible demon-sticks-and-reefer-and-Himalayan-salts dipshit convention, but afoot is a pageant of trippy ingenuity and gorgeousness that must have taken a hell of a lot of work and money and gymnasium hours to bring off and that can only be diminished by the gawking presence of guys like us—whom the etiquet-tician Amy Vanderbilt once described as "decrepit extra males." 

We creak along. The Naked Barista occupies a shanty alongside a jungle gym under which people are applying henna tattoos to one another. Under the shanty a hairy man is foaming a latte. In line is a naked older guy who I know is from Southern California because his buttocks exactly resemble a sun-dried seal's corpse I once saw on a Santa Barbara beach.

This is not my father's scene. "I may have seen enough of this," he says. "Only the men seem to be naked."

It is happy hour in Black Rock City and I, for one, think some sort of very stiff, inhibition-destroying cocktail is in order. Nearby, something called Homojito is going on, which
Cam rejects. 

"No one is giving away blow jobs," laments James Dean. "There ought to be a barter station."

I explain that there is no bartering in Black Rock City, only gifting. 

"Yeah, but there's always an implicit barter, or I guess it depends on whether you belong to the Chicago School or not," says James Dean, professor of economics.

Onward through the shifting dust to a camp where a woman in a wedding dress is pumping on a swing. Behind her a shirtless Chippendales guy in a gold harlequin mask appears to be handing out free booze. Uncertain of proper mooching etiquette, we grin and cringe around the premises for a quarter of an hour before the Chippendales guy waves us over for a dose. He's not just giving it away, though. He explains that I have to first spin an arrow on a little cardboard dial listing a menu of chores and humiliations. The card commands me to bare my breasts, which I do. The bartender grimaces. "What's second prize?" he says.

In return for this degradation, I am treated to the vilest cocktail in all of Christendom: a crimson sludge consisting of gummy bears deliquesced in vodka. Okay, so having now logged my first transaction in the Burning Man economy, it seems pretty clear that the festival's utopian, pan-inclusive rhetoric doesn't extend much past the promotional literature. I mean, What's second prize? I thought this whole thing was about Larry Harvey's Principle No. 5, radical self-expression, i.e., showing people your tits and stuff. Which I guess applies if you're a sexy underpant woman or a Nautilus-hewn Los Angeles-based life form. But if you're a schlubby white dude with a pale belly and sort of sucky tits, then it's junior high school redux: What's second prize? 

This private tantrum is halted by the sound of my father's laughter. He is being spanked by a Cleopatra in a stressed bikini. He knocks back his shot and then heads to an après-ski-theme party across the way. Folk in toboggans and little else dance beneath a shower of synthetic snow. Where is my father? He is roving the crowd, dispensing tiny little key-chain flashlights, our meager yet handy contributions to the gift economy. And here he is now, clinking cups with a topless woman in white faux-fur chaps, having a splendid time. He gives her a flashlight. "That was a rather unusual toast," he says. "She said, 'Here's to your hemorrhaging anus.' And then I gave her a light, and I said, 'The better to see it with.' "

My father, repartee king. In five minutes with the anus woman, he has uttered more words than I have in the past two hours.

Cranky. Why am I in despair among these fluffy pals? I suppose because this is supposed to be it, this is supposed to be Xanadu, miles and miles from the uptight squares and cultural toxins of late capitalism, free to make weird remarks to strangers about their anuses, free to shirtcock or to don a pair of underpants with the words permission to come aboard blazoned on the ass. But what if you do not care to don such a pair of underpants? What if you do not care to reveal your genitals to strangers? Well, my friend, then you are part of the problem, a cultural toxin, a dreary spy from what is known in Black Rock City as "the default world." You should not have come here. You should be at home, buying consumer durables on the World Wide Web. 

And now the sun is going down, tinting the sky and the brown hills with Easter-egg hues. My father takes a great portion of desert air into his lungs and lets it out in a staticky, bronchitic sigh. "I think this is spectacular," he says. "This works. People are pleasant. They like having their picture taken. This is wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful! What is it that motivates it all? The urge to be unique!"

···

We awake to the sound of the RV's tin hide—tick-tick-tick—deforming in the sun. Sleeping arrangements are these: Cam and I split the big rubber mattress in the RV's master bedroom. James Dean sleeps in the little roost over the cockpit. (Dean's body philosophies are not far from my father's. To retract suddenly the curtains to Dean's roost is a good way to get an eyeful of scrotum.) My father, Ed the Uncomplaining, Ed the Jolly Receiver of the Short End of the Stick, sleeps very happily on the RV's hard and sticky floor.

The professors rose early and are just now returning from a trip to the plaza of portable toilets a couple of blocks away. But isn't there a toilet in the RV? Yes, there is, but as the uptight captain of this vessel, I have levied an edict against deucing in the vehicle for fear of cumulative odors. The Burning Man organizers have done a fair job of placing toilet villages at convenient intervals throughout the city, but the toilets are not pleasant. They radiate a smell that registers in the nose not as merely bad but dangerous, like a shipwrecked supertanker of tainted smelling salts. Step inside one of these Porta-Johns and flashbulbs explode behind your eyes. 

James Dean returns from the toilet in his underpants, carrying his shorts at arm's length. An unexplained misadventure took place at the commode. Still, it sounds like the fellows enjoyed themselves at the latrine plaza.

"Your father is very good at walking up to bare-breasted women and asking if he can take their photograph," Dean tells me.

"They're extremely gracious," my father confirms. "Even when they desperately have to poop."

"You just walk up and ask them?" I say, quite astonished.

"I just ask them, yeah. My first thought was to do it surreptitiously, but then I discovered that tattooed naked boobs like to be photographed."

Now the team reviews the program of events to plot a course for the day. Other than Saturday, when the Man goes up in flames, there aren't really any marquee events. You basically find your way through offerings of individual camps listed in the program.

"This might be worth going to: Critical Dicks," says Dean. "I think it's a dick contest. It starts at noon, and it lasts for two hours."

"You're going to compete, James?" I ask.

"No, but perhaps your father would."

Dad is pondering other possibilities. "There's the Romp of the Tranny Goddesses. There's the Human Playapede: 'Now join playapede friends ass to mouth to ass.' I'm not sure I want to participate in that one. There's also Anal Probe."

"That wouldn't be my first choice," says Dean. "Here's one we should go to: How to Drive a Vulva. Pussy ninja tricks at Camp Beaverton."

Agreed. We make for Camp Beaverton. But seconds after mounting his bike, my father realizes he has forgotten a seat cushion he bought at the Las Vegas Walmart. Executing a slow turn in the lane, he falls hard into the dirt, his bare legs tangled in his bike frame. He gazes up at me with a dazed expression of embarrassment and mild shock. 

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tripped."

He rights his bike and moves along. 

Cam and I watch him go. "My mom used to do a lot of stuff like that, falling down or whatever," he said. "It was usually alcohol-related, but still, it's sort of a weird wake-up call. You know they're not going to be around that long. But Ed's been doing okay. He's keeping up all right. I hope he's going to be with us a while."

"I hope so, too," I say. 

Bicycle caravans are a challenge at Burning Man. By the time Cam and I get to Camp Beaverton, my father and Dean are nowhere to be seen. How to Drive a Vulva isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway, just some nervous lesbians saying stuff like "Talk to your partner" to a crowd too vast for the tent they've got. We get bored and move on. The afternoon's a bit of a drag. I am so peevish and abstracted that three times people approach me wanting to be high-fived and three times, assuming they've got their hands up for someone behind me, I leave them hanging and they go, "Awww, man!"

I return to the safety of the RV after several hours roving the playa. My father is MIA. I picture him on a gurney, succumbing to a bronchial attack. Maybe lost in a dust storm, pedaling out into the desert's lethal infinitude. Close to dinnertime, he returns, and in the manner of some nagging spouse, I commence to chew his ass. "Where the hell did you go?"

He shoots me a blank and rather guilty look. "James and I went to the Naked Tiki Bar," he says. 

"You got naked?"

"I certainly did," he says. "It was a remarkably friendly place. And I actually found it very liberating to see these enormously fat women being perfectly willing to bare everything. It was fun to see all of that voluptuality. What did you discover?"

"We waited for you at How to Drive a Vulva, and then when you didn't turn up, I came back and waited for you here."

"I'm sorry."

"You ditched me."

"I didn't mean to. I'm really, really sorry."

My little nag sesh is mercifully cut short by a visit from an old friend of mine. He is a fellow known as Mur-Dog, an actor and voice-over man who has been coming to Burning Man for some number of years. He is a believer. My project of writing about it is, in the opinion of Mur-Dog, doomed. "You can't explain this experience in words," says Mur-Dog. "This is about getting outside yourself, giving up your fears, giving yourself over to the impermanence of everything. We've got so much of society in us: trying to impress people, worrying about what our friends think. Then here it's total freedom. Give up the fear. The fear of death, the fear of whatever's limiting you. Why not fuck that girl? Why not take your pants off and run around screaming? You come into this thinking it's gonna be this hippie rave party, but it goes so much deeper. It goes to the base of some deep human stuff. It's for everybody. I mean, I motorboated some huge-titted woman last night. It was so magical."

"You did what?" my father asks.

"When you put your face between a woman's breasts and go brbb-brbb-brbb."

"It really is a remarkably friendly place," says Dad.

"You will be transformed here," says Mur-Dog. "Ed, by Saturday you'll be wearing a dress. No, you'll be walking around buck naked with a sock over your dick."

"Actually, I was naked very recently at the Naked Tiki Bar. I enjoyed myself."

I acknowledge to Mur-Dog that while my father has more or less gone native, I have yet to surrender to the experience. 

"All right," says Mur-Dog. "Tonight you're coming out with me. We're going dancing."

I inform Mur-Dog that in my late teens, after serially disgracing myself to the strains of "Groove Is in the Heart," for the good of all mankind I incinerated my dancing shoes.

"Fuck that," says Mur-Dog. "Tonight you're going to dance until your legs hurt, then you're gonna dance some more. We're gonna see the sun rise. You've gotta liberate yourself. Leave the notebook at home."

Very well. I resolve to accept the teachings of Mur-Dog. That evening, when the professors are readying themselves for bed, Cam and I rendezvous with Mur-Dog on the open playa. The playa at night is a vision unlike anything else in the known world, and it is impossible to describe without resorting to psychedelic clichés. It is like being in a malarial brain. It is like a synapse-level view of an acid trip. It is like a voyage through a violently bioluminescent deep-sea-scape designed by Peter Max and Wavy Gravy and ravers and dragons and gay Martians. The playa is a mile expanse of indigo blackness across which traverse such things as pirate ships, a car disguised as windup teeth, an octopus blasting huge jets of flame, a bunch of other unrecognizable things blasting even huger jets of flame. The soundtrack is screams and diesel engines and propane detonations and several hundred really good sound systems going full blast. Thousands of cyclists and pedestrians, beribboned in traceries of incandescent technology, float and course through the distance. Some people, to their own peril, have disdained to wear lights. These people are known in the local idiom as "darktards."

As per Mur-Dog's instructions, I left the notebook at home, so I'm reconstructing here, but this is what basically went down: Mur-Dog led us across the playa to something called Opulent Temple, which was a great arena of seething humanity where confusing music blared and green lasers gridded the sky and the ecstatic sweat of dancing underpant people glowed orange in intermittent blorps of propane flame. Mur-Dog wore a trucker hat and a red blazer and no shirt and a tie, and he danced like a madly romping puppet. I wore, I dunno, some bunny ears or some shit and tried to dance like some teenagers I saw, I think, in a TV ad for breath mints. Cam and I drank of Mur-Dog's champagne. We drank of his bourbon and apple juice. I was offered and accepted three different illicit substances—including a drug called molly that I'd never heard of before—and though I more or less swore off recreational drugs back in high school, in the interests of achieving immediacy (Principle No. 10) and psychological surrender I ingested them all. 

The group's experience was mixed. A tribe of the nearly nude hauled Mur-Dog onto some scaffolding to dance with them. Cam wandered around, smiling and shrugging. I danced my breath-mint dance with a tiny Asian woman dressed as a butterfly, by which I mean I stepped on her several times. And how was my dope journey? It never left the driveway. Or if it did, it didn't carry me into transcendent mortal-fear-abandoning head spaces. It carried me into a head space whose inner monologue was this:

"Is there not something deeply embarrassing and sad about a man on the verge of 40 doing a breath-mint dance, moving his unexcellent body to tuneless, lyricless, thudding music he finds both baffling and bad? If this music is not about robots fucking, then what in God's name is it about? Well, it seems to express a kind of high-tech erotic vehemence, which the crowd reflects via complex dance maneuvers that are sort of lonely in their virtuosic self-orientation. 'Oh, if only someone were as good a dancer as me, then I might have sex with that person, but it shall never be' would be a fine subtitle for most of the dancers in the observable vicinity. And what does it mean when the beat breaks and, prefatory to an intensification of the pounding, the music goes silent save for this rising tone akin to the noise of a bottle being filled, and the flames spurt high, and everyone pumps their fists as though to say, 'Oh yes, oh yes, the bottle-filling noise has come again, this bottle-filling noise, a most profound and excellent thing with which I am very much of a piece'?And now here is Mur-Dog, making a hoisty-hoisty pump-up-the-volume gesture at me with his palms, an exhortation to dance like no one's watching. Oh, but Mur-Dog, don't you see? If no one were watching, I would not dance at all."

At last, when the champagne was gone, we left. "Was that a rave?" Cam asked me.

"I think so, more or less," I said.

"I'd always wondered what one was."

Shortly after 4 a.m. we made it back to the RV, whose farting, snoring squalor was a comforting familiarity, a relief.

"So how'd it go last night?" James Dean asks in the morning. 

I give him a synopsis. "Sounds as though you had your first middle-aged experience," he says. 

"I did," I say. "It was sort of upsetting."

Professor Dean offers these words of condolence: "Get used to it."

···

By day three, our filthiness is profound. There is no part of my body I cannot rub with my thumb to raise a gray cigar of silt. On the recommendation of James Dean, I proceed with my father and Cam to PolyParadise, an encampment of polyamorists whose gift to the community is something called the Human Carcass Wash. It is an open tent with a tarp floor, where perhaps fifty nudists have queued. Until now, if given the choice, I'd have preferred to have a hole of large diameter drilled in my foot rather than be naked among strangers. But I am trying here, friends, so there is nothing to be done but to remove one's clothes. I disrobe brusquely, a little angrily.

My hope is for a simple shower. This thing is not that. Before the wash begins, we are broken into little cadres to receive instruction from the (also naked) administrators of the Carcass Wash. A very genial blond man with an air of ecclesiastical gentility and a somehow angelic blond pubic bush delivers the disappointing news that we are not here merely to be scrubbed by polyamorists and sent on our way. We will first wash others, dozens of them, before we are washed ourselves. The washing of the carcasses will happen not with hose or sponge. We will mist bodies with spritz bottles and squeegee carcasses dry with cupped palms. It is a ritual, we are told, that has its roots in cultures other than our own, where, when a visitor arrives, his hosts will honor his body by stripping him nude and manually laving his sweaty creases. Which cultures? I think he said Persian. Really? And here I'd thought Tehran was more the sort of place where trying to loofah a stranger's taint would get you a scimitar in the neck. Is that how they kill people there? Let's puzzle this out. Pay no attention to the devastatingly lovely young woman next to you, whose flawless left gazonga is bulging a little bit against your right triceps. All thoughts on the ayatollah. 

After the briefing, we are dispatched to the lavage gauntlet. So, you ask, did I touch the penises of other men for the first time in my life? I did. And did I also touch the vaginas and breasts and buttocks of women, and was that experience erotic? Well, sort of I did, and no, it was not, so scrupulous was I to be a good scrubber and not a lecherous busyfingers impersonating a good-faith body honorer. But did I not also lay hands on drastic cases of keratosis like burnt raisins sprouting from peoples' hides and weird patches of wiry hair and surgically crafted transgenitalia that haunt my imagination even still? Excuse me, but the Human Carcass Wash is a privileged space where people come to have their bodies honored, not to be judged in print by a sneaky media poisoner, so I will not answer that. 

So, you ask, did I wash my father's body? And in light of his doctor's recent concerns, did I feel as though I was washing his living corpse and murmur lines from Ecclesiastes: As he came forth from his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came. And did my father take my naked body into his arms? And was he teleported back to 1973, when he held for the first time a child he was not sure he was ready for or necessarily wanted? And, most importantly, did my father rinse my pecker? For some reason, I was afraid of that. Not that my father would, as a going concern, want to rinse it. But I'm saying that if he found himself in a squad of strangers, all of whom were rinsing my pecker in a totally body-honoring Californian manner, my father is such a sweet guy that he might start to worry that he was being a bad dad by not getting in on the body honoring. Well, the answer to all of that is no. To sidestep that whole problem, I made sure I got into a different corral of nudists, and I didn't see my father until we got out the other side.

By the time I emerge from the gauntlet, my father is already clothed. He stands tentside in his Thai tunic and his legionnaire's cap with the trapezius snood, tucking into a rusty half-eaten apple he stowed in his backpack. And the gorgeous woman whose breast I drew nigh to, and whom I spent my entire HCW experience trying hard not to look at? My father is regarding her as a sixteenth-century pilgrim to the Vatican must have admired his first stained-glass window. Chomping and watching. Full-fed in body and soul.

"Botticelli-esque," he murmurs. "Remarkable how some of us have let ourselves go and others of us have taken very good care of our bodies."

"How was your carcass-wash experience?" I ask.

"I thought it was quite wonderful," he says in a faraway voice. 

We step out into the boulevard, still damp. The wind blows up, and in an instant we are battered like fish sticks in alkaline dust.

···

On the north side of the playa, at a remote remove from the lasers and fire leapers and bare-flesh frolics and booths where you can receive a cookie after having your ass struck with a paddle, stands a structure known as the Temple. The Temple is a splendid simulacrum of a Siamese palace made of plywood laser-cut to lacework that would shame a doilymaker. Large enough to accommodate many dozens, it is a structure of such intricacy and beauty that I am glad I will not be here to see it incinerated on Sunday night, the evening after the Man burns.

At the Temple's gate, you're checked by a silence that seems to thicken the air and halt the wind. And inside, you see people asquat under the central spire with tears runneling the dust on their cheeks. You see a young woman lying in the lap of her friend, her spine bucking with the force of her sobs. You see a guy trying for some reason to snug a latex glove onto a piece of driftwood and to lay the gloved driftwood onto a shrine, which is one of perhaps thousands of little shrines—feathers, bandannas, booze bottles, Nalgene tankards, cheesy studio portraits, snapshots—lashed and propped and taped and stapled to the Temple's ornate walls.

Letters to dead parents: "Beautiful dreams, mummy and daddy."

"Goodbye, Dad, you are a great father. I love you."

"Fuck you dad, suicide...isn't [obscured]." 

"Love you, dad." (This in a mini-coffin containing also a dildo and a photo of a man in a leather vest blowing someone and also, it looks like, being penetrated.)

Letters to dead infants.

Lots of letters to dead pets: 

"To the world you were just a dog, but to us you were the world." 

A general outpouring of emotion that would, in the default world, strike an East Coast media poisoner as cloying, sentimental, and precious. But here it affects you as you are sometimes affected upon entering a church, when an emo wad thickens in your throat, not because you believe, necessarily, in God but because it is forcefully heartbreaking to witness our strange species trying to reckon with its curse, its knowledge of death. You are in no way tempted to laugh at the hippie guy who is standing amid the crouched and huddled crowd, weeping and saying, "I'm here today because my cat died. He liked drinking rainwater, and he liked drinking tuna water. I miss my small, furry, gentle friend. I miss my pookie. What can I give to have him purr in my ear one more time?"

What happens is something weird, a new sensation coalescing this week in some not wholly conscious part of your brain. Perhaps it's an effect of being here with your elderly father, or your late-breaking awareness of your arrival at middle age, but you become abruptly, terrifiedly conscious of the terrible velocity of time, of life, a kindred sensation to the instant you sometimes experience during a commuter jet's descent, when your nervous system suddenly alerts itself to the preposterous number of MPHs at which the ground is hurtling up at you and you begin to twitch and shudder under a fusillade of thoughts like these:

"I do not do volunteer work. I am a poor carpenter. I give very little money to charity. My hair is thinning. I am a miserly Captain Bligh of an RV skipper, having forbidden the men from deucing, or even showering, in the RV out of fear of depleting the battery and water reserves. I am bad about returning e-mails. I love my father. My father is dying and will leave no worthy successor. My life is at least half over. Out of cowardice masquerading as prudence, I have sired no children and nourished no lifelong commitment to a member of the opposite sex. My dog's halitosis is noxious and incurable. The ivory-billed woodpecker is almost certainly extinct. Super-PACs are destroying American democracy. The Milky Way is whorling into a huge black hole. They eat dolphins in Japan. I'm getting muffin tops."

And in the shadow of this splendid monument to cut-rate sentiment, you go somewhat to bits. A mortifying brine gouts from your eyes and pools in your dust-retardant goggles. 

It takes a moment to collect yourself, to prepare a face to rejoin your group over by the gate, where James Dean is saying, "I don't know what to make of all that. One minute we're dwelling on anal hygiene and sexual fetishes, and then there's this temple and this air of quiet spirituality. Where does religion come into all this?"

"I thought it was intense," says Cam, whose own eyes are damp (he tells me later) with remembrance of Sierra, his ex's hospice-patient dog.

"I don't know that it's religious," says my father, gazing contemplatively at the Temple's gold-lit steeple. "It's just amazing the lengths people go to, to be thought of as special. I never imagined that a crew of folks could build a temple as elegant as this, only to burn it down." 

"I'm just trying to find the common theme, and the only common theme, I think, is that this could only happen in the United States," says Dean the Canadian. "Both in its excesses and its excellence. Some people look at America as a nation of vulgarity and excess, and others think it's the most creative country in the world. I think it's both. Who else would burn a sculpture that took a year to build? But Ed, you and I know you can't run an economy this way."

"I don't think it's about running an economy," says Cam. "It's about freedom. It's about celebrating creativity, the human spirit."

"Yes," says Dean. "But for most us, we've channeled our creativity into purchasing excessive camping supplies at Walmart."

But Dean's diagesis is halted by a sudden explosion. A fleur-de-lis of fireworks erupts across the playa, where one can see the sperm car chasing a vagina barge. 

···

Saturday night. Tonight the Man burns. A little after dusk, we make our way to the playa. The city, already, is beginning to decay, with spots of bare ground between camps. The festival's commandment to "leave no trace" is losing out to the selfish pragmatism of the default world. Several folks have left unpleasant traces in the form of water jugs topped up with dark amber tinkle.

Down, down across the playa, the hordes are gathering around the Man, who stands above a multistory plywood mansion shaped much like a drill chuck. We take our seats. I very quickly hand out a hundred or so of our camp's tiny flashlights. Even in this, I fall short. My manner is efficient, peremptory. "Would you like a tiny flashlight? Of course you would. They're extremely convenient."

When I return, Cam seems to be maybe making time with a hippie matron in a leopard-print halter and rainbow-glo ligatures about her neck and chest. Good man.

My father, somehow, appears to be in animated grinning rapport with a young woman in minuscule shorts, brassiere, and pierced tongue. "I'm 19," I think I hear her say. 

Out before the Man, a gang of tribal majorettes brandish flaming batons. My father and his young friend take note, but it does not halt the flow of language between these two. What are they saying? Something naughty? Is my father—horrible! miraculous to imagine!—getting some sort of angle going here? I draw near to them. She is telling my father that she is interested in doing something to do with environmentalism. My father is getting the opposite of an angle going. He is saying, "Yeah, but I worry that all that environmental stuff is going to inhibit trade." She is saying she would like to go to Africa someday. "I once calculated fertilizer subsidies in Malawi" is his reply. 

This is why I love my father. Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred men in the vicinity would be trying to persuade this girl out into the dark of the evening with talk of "Baby, let's bump uglies. Let me fly my freak flag with you." But of course, that particular flag, the lecherous-septuagenarian-horndog flag, is not freaky at all. Much freakier, much more radically self-expressive, when you are down in the dust with some winsome young lady, is to ply her instead with talk of fertilizer subsidies and not take it there at all. 

The fire dancers retreat. The drill-chuck-mansion pedestal goes up in a great pumping beefheart of flame. My father sits in a rain of cinders big as playing cards, more than sufficient to ignite the infant wisps of his remaining hair. Unconcerned, he gawps at the flames. The danger is unreal to him, or not as important as the splendid inferno before him. In childhood, I knew my father as a man to cringe at loud noises, to wince, cower, shield his precious carcass when you raised your fists to him, as I did at least once in my teenage years. That man is not this man, to whom the risk of minor incineration is worth an extra instant of beauty. The transformation dates, I think, to the cancer treatment. There is likely some best-selling wisdom here, à la Everything I Need to Know I Learned from My Christ-Bitten Kindergartner. If not a bankable bathroom title, the inferno begs at least some modest, affirming revelation. Don't fear the reaper. Regret not the past. Stand in the flames. Hide not your genitalia. Naked boobs like to be photographed. 

But my mind, unfortunately, is dwelling not on life's precious evanescence but on the eight-hour traffic jam we've been told to expect in the post-burn exodus. Instead of getting into a soul communion with my father, I am screaming at him, "Move! Move! Move!"

We speed back to the RV and beat the traffic handily. 

"Well, I thought that was extraordinary," says my father. We are riding south through the Great Basin Desert in the small hours of the night. "A fine capstone to our adventures. I hope not, but perhaps."

He is returning to the real world, to thoughts of his faltering immune system, his racking cough, the sores in his mouth, the rings around his pupils. 

As it turns out, these troubling symptoms are unlikely to kill him. The pupil halos turn out to be benign. His lung infection proves treatable. The doctor doubles his transfusions of immunoglobulin, and when I see him next, he's looking healthy and feeling fine. We ponder a trip next year to Myanmar. 

And Cam. I almost forgot about Cam. Cam stayed at Burning Man, still on the lookout for a new community, a desert sweetheart, a sense of clarity and closure to his curious year. On Sunday evening the Temple burned, and Cam had a good, exhausting cry over the decline and death of Sierra the dog. By the pulsing light of the embers, Cam met a lovely young woman, a "playa goddess," in his description. By gosh, he and the playa goddess hit it off, and by his own account he got to third base with her. One Californian wrinkle was that two other people were also getting to third or some other base with her at the time Cam stepped onto the field. But that was okay, that was cool. The only truly disappointing thing about the evening was that when the playa goddess started trying to get to third base with Cam, that project got derailed because Cam was wearing some high-concept outdoorsman's trousers that had no zipper access. Still, no regrets. He got more out of the w