DESERT WANDERERS FIND THEIR PROMISED LAND

Gerlach, Nev. -- So bizarre, so immense is the Burning Man Festival
that it is, as its adherents take pride in claiming, a difficult
thing to describe.

But let me try. Annually, during the last week of August, some 50,000
people descend upon Nevada's remote Black Rock Desert, 110 miles
north of Reno -- the type of place that gives meaning to the idiom
"middle of nowhere." There they engage in a weeklong bacchanal that
mixes Woodstock with Mad Max and, in toto, resembles a kind of
surreal, sprawling state fair. Burning Man is not for the timid.

The camping conditions are horrible; daytime temperatures reach well
over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and two eight-hour dust storms struck
during the course of this year's festival, reducing visibility to 10
feet and covering everything with silt. Public nudity is in vogue,
and the practice of toplessness (and sometimes bottomlessness)
extends from small-town teenage girls -- one was seen calling out,
loudly, for the services of a body-painter -- to the 60-somethings
clutching each other in a fully nude embrace at the "Polyamory
Paradise" camp. Finally, the place is utterly saturated with drugs.
Everything is available, from alcohol and cannabis to Ecstasy and
research chemicals with names like 2C-I.

Uncomfortable with at least a few of Burning Man's debaucheries, but
curious about this fabled slice of the American counterculture, I
decided to go, joining a camp that included two semi-itinerant
Wesleyan grads, a McKinsey consultant, the daughter of a British peer
and an editor of National Review. Burning Man lures some very strange
types to its brand of escapism, but they are strange affluent types.

After entering the festival gates, one passes into a demonetized
society where the rides on the giant seesaws, the rounds of miniature
golf, the costumes, the body-paint jobs and everything else are
dished out gratis. Still, merely to participate in this bout of
unreality comes with a high price tag. Gate admission is $295, and
the rental RVs in which many "Burners" stay go for $2,500 for the
week. And then there is the cost of airfare, gas, food and other
substances. Flying from Montana, staying in a tent and splitting
expenses, I spent just north of $1,000. At the beginning of its
22-year history, Burning Man was a small and informal affair
featuring self-described "redneck" libertines. Now it is an
intricately planned 168-hour-long rave. The demographic of those who
attend these days became obvious while I gambled in my Reno
hotel-casino, awaiting the arrival of the biofuels bus that would
take me into the desert for $78, one way. Next to me at the roulette
table, it turned out, was another Burner, still in civilian garb.
Rather outdoing my $5 wagers, he was betting recklessly. But he won
big and walked away from the table $20,000 richer. This introduction
to Burning Man was apropos of the festival's many internal tensions.
It is a society that prides itself on a back-to-nature freedom, but
it caters to people who will go back to the office when the festival
is over. It is also flavored by the fashionable environmentalism of
the West Coast, even though the festival, because of its far-flung
location, has an appallingly large carbon footprint.

Last year's festival theme was environmental sustainability -- "The
Green Man," as it was called.

But when asked about the seeming contradiction between that
environmental motif and Burning Man's consumption, many of the people
who attended last year seemed to believe that, regardless of what
they were actually doing, the event had at least "raised
consciousness" about the ecosystem. This year's festival was styled
"The American Dream," and various, occasionally puerile displays
could be scouted out: Tocqueville quotations about the virtues of
America on placards lining the road leading to the campgrounds; a man
in a George W. Bush mask being led around in chains by a dominatrix;
a Guantanamo Camp offering the waterboarding experience to all
comers; and an abundance of American flags, half flying the right
way, the others upside-down. Yet for all this, there was little in
the way of formal politics. Abiding by the mood of escapism, only a
few Burners donned the paraphernalia of the Obama campaign.

They were frowned upon by seasoned Burners, as if it were declasse to
introduce mundane partisan politics into Burning Man's sacred cloisters.

What politics did exist were off the charts.

Entheon Village, a klatch of latter-day hippies and New Agers, was a
choice example.

There I heard "The Secret History of the War on Drugs," a lecture
delivered by Charles Shaw, who was introduced as a "regular
contributor" to the Huffington Post (although he has posted on the
site only twice). To a hundreds-strong audience, he delivered witless
one-liners about the Bush administration (the predictable exception
to the Burners' aversion to partisan politics) and wove a
preposterous conspiracy theory that blamed every evil on, and
attributed every power to, the American government. According to Mr.
Shaw, the powers-that-be had hooked GIs in Vietnam on heroin to tamp
down the risk of mutiny, and the Reagan administration had introduced
crack to urban areas because the president "didn't really like black
people." In the course of the week, I returned to Entheon Village
once more, seeking refuge from a sandstorm.

During my first day at Entheon, I had overheard an organizer telling
volunteers that their job was to "make the space more sacred."
Sanctity had been otherwise in short supply at Burning Man, so I made
my way past the encampment's lecture hall, past the inflatable
Buddhist temple, past the "Sound Healing Yurt" to the God and Goddess
Dome, where I took out my rosary -- my costume for most of the week
was a Friar Tuck outfit -- and began to pray. When I opened my eyes,
I found an erotic massage going on next to me. Apparently I had
misunderstood the dome's name. I exited, but not without a sense of
revelation, one that was confirmed in a visit to the Relaxomatic
Plushitorium -- a camp filled with recliners and settees, all of them
crowded with bodies.

There was also, when I went, a generous supply of In-and-Out burgers
brought in from Reno for the occasion. On one side of me sat Dan, a
Manhattan hedge-fund analyst and self-described conservative; on the
other, a girl who gave her name as Orange, a California-based
environmental consultant. These two -- one would think them
diametrically opposed -- had nonetheless come together in the spirit
of getting away from it all. Reluctant to discuss the outside world,
they both seemed to find pleasure in the do-what-you-like libertinism
of Burning Man and its separation from the outside world.

Dan even noted with obvious pride that, three years ago, when
Hurricane Katrina struck, few Burning Man revelers learned about the
disaster unfolding on the Gulf until they left the desert.

The festival ended in the traditional way: with the ritual
incineration of a four-story-high wicker man. As I watched the flames
shoot up and consume the looming figure, I found myself standing next
to a grotesquely muscular Slav dressed in a faux white fur coat. He
periodically pushed a button on his dragon-inspired modified sedan,
causing it to spurt an enormous plume of fire into the air. A female
retinue loitered nearby, tittering endlessly. This was not a festival
about deeper understanding or spiritual hokum.

The pretense of a demonetized society notwithstanding, consumption
was king at Burning Man. The gargantuan pyrotechnics, the drugs, the
sex -- this was just wanton hedonism.

Ordinary and not-so-ordinary people gave the finger to "the man,"
shirked responsibility and behaved recklessly. And then it was over.
Back in Reno, decompressing from the experience, I found that my
hotel was filled with burned-out Burners plummeting back to reality.
I overheard one girl in the lobby Starbucks having a phone
conversation filled with worry about missed work. She began crying
and between sobs said into her cellphone: "I don't want to lose my
job." The hotel was happy to host the Burners: A cocktail waitress
told me that, despite their shabby appearance, they seemed to have
more money to tip and gamble than the usual tourists.

Money to burn, you might say.