Chapter 3: Immediacy
When the only way to know is to go.
Box Camp Balcony, Late Night
Black Rock City is in the final throes of its major construction phase—transforming into what feels like a post-apocalyptic Disneyland for the dedicatedly strange, mystic, and wyrd. People from all over the world are flooding in—pilgrims drawn to the playa to watch a giant effigy burn.
Obviously, it’s the celebration of human culture that draws them, right? Or maybe it’s the idea of building an all-encompassing social community where everyone’s a huggable neighbor? Or maybe—like the graffiti in the portos out on K Street claim—they’re just here for the LSD.
What exactly is out here in the dust that people find so attractive?
One of my campmates recently offered an alternate theory: people don’t come to Burning Man to find anything—they come here to lose something. Loss can be a cathartic process. Maybe that’s the real draw. Maybe people make this pilgrimage to sacrifice something to the glowing god of fire.
From the Lamp Lounge balcony, I can see the Temple—still just a skeleton, bathed in artificial floodlight. No meat on the bones of this church of loss and sacrifice, but there it stands, far out on the playa beyond the Man, taking shape under many human hands, still looking like the city itself—mostly empty, just chalky roads linking distant and disparate camps in the darkness.
Even these early, pre-event moments have been an emotional rollercoaster. In just a few days, this place will be a complete zoo. I’m still having trouble adjusting to the overwhelming, buzzing energy of a city growing by exponents each day. For now, though, from the relative safety of the elevated viewing platform, I’m able to take a breath and get my mind and body ready for my first Box Office shift—a midnight-to-six-AM graveyard. I’ve worked a graveyard shift before, and I know the wakeful transition from night to day can be weird and surreal, and I’m assuming there is no exception to that out here. Plus it’s a strict rule to perform the duties of your Box Office shift sober, too, so, it’s key to bring some energy to start the shift—essential wakefulness to make it through to the end.
I descend the solid wooden stairs from the deck—hand-built on the playa—to the lounge below. At the same moment, two lost-looking young women, oiled and sparkling, frolic into the bar. From over the railing, I get a good look at them: radiant figures with wet hair, brand-new tops, and neon accessories. Shining like freshly minted dolls, they strut into the Lounge with a carefree grace possessed only by unicorn’d creatures of myth—or aspiring Bay Area Instagram influencers. They were jolly, engrossed in their own conversation, thrilled about their stroll across playa in moon boots. That’s when they turned into our empty Box Camp lounge, and I met eyes with them.
“Sparkleponies,” I whisper quietly under my breath.
I’m in awe to look upon them. Their sequined skirts gleamed like disco balls in the lounge’s soft light, and their glitter-flecked, freshly moisturized skin looked completely foreign to the ghost-white coating of dust on literally everything that surrounded them, as if they'd just been air-dropped into the desert. They are spotless. I couldn’t decide if they were real or if I’d just inhaled way too much dust. I glance at the chalky grime covering my own skin. The dust, mingling with sweat, was caking into a fine mud. I grimace, feeling like a creature made of slime.
I offer them a quick nod and try to play it cool.
“Hiii!” one of them chirps, her voice petite and chipper. They float past me, barely disturbing the air as they plop down on the nearest couch, giggling. There they sit, two perfectly manicured creatures of comfort, effortlessly beautiful and seemingly impervious to the dust that had claimed the rest of us. My hands are dehydrated and rough, my cuticles cracked and bleeding from a half-day of construction work, while these two looked like they’d just walked on as backup dancers in a hip-hop music video.
And yet, despite my initial judgment, there was something about their presence that was mesmerizing. It wasn’t just their appearance—it was their carefree attitude and complete lack of concern. They hadn’t shown up in the Lounge to help build, sweat, or aid the communal effort. No, they were just present and being—floating through the chaos with the grace of a gazelle.
I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. These women didn’t seem to struggle with identity crises or existential dread. They didn’t second-guess every interaction or worry about whether they were ‘fitting in.’ No, they were truly free—free to just exist in the absurdity of the moment. And in that sense, I admired them. While I wrestled with my own web of self-doubt and self-imposed misery, they were simply present.
I snapped out of my trance and walked toward the back of the bar. Thankfully, I had left my canteen here, so I had some semblance of belonging here—the lone staffer in an empty bar. What could I say? What did we have in common?
“You’re out here early,” I said, a general statement in their direction.
“Yeah~” the first Pony responded with glittering eyes, “We’re with Astro Bar, 4:00 & B. We’re gonna have a big tower and a DJ—you should come!!”
In this moment, I realized they embodied something I hadn’t yet achieved—total detachment from the weight of expectations. They weren’t bogged down by pressures of Burning Man’s hallowed ethos. While I was busy trying to prove my worth in the eyes of others, they had already mastered the art of being unapologetically themselves—they were here to look clean and promote a bar.
There is a purity to it, in a sense. Their role in this chaotic ecosystem wasn’t to build or break; it was simply to exist—to fill as much space in a club as possible. They were a reminder that Burning Man wasn’t just about self-expression through toil. Their artistic contribution, in this case, took the form of performance art—showing up, looking radiant, and letting everyone else deal with the rough stuff setting up. And in their stupid simplicity of radiant, glittering detachment, they reflected something I was missing—a lightness, an effortless ease I couldn’t grasp.
Sure, they weren’t lifting ladders or rigging lights, and maybe they didn’t need to. Maybe their contribution was to just bask in the joy of the world and the wonderful absurdity found in this desert party ground.
For a moment, I imagined trading places. I could be one of them—a carefree party animal with no responsibilities, only concerned about which sparkle paste to wear with which set of pasties. But I knew better. I wasn’t built that way. I was too caught up in my own head, overanalyzing everything, trying to find meaning in the madness. That’s my role tonight—depressive human calculator.
I stole another smiling glance at the sparkleponies as they relaxed back into the couch, still giggling at nothing in particular. They were happy, untouched by the angst that gnawed at me. I chuckled to myself, taking another chug of water from the canteen. Maybe I was jealous, or maybe I was just tired. Either way, the sparkleponies had figured something out. They were beautiful, they were useless, and maybe—just maybe—this is exactly what Burning Man needs to stay relevant.
Let me be clear here, in this tale of many cities, this Lounge is not really a club space—It’s a staff bar for the people who call it “Working Man”. It’s an hour before the call time for the graveyard shift, and the Lounge is a complete ghost town. I gaze back at the expectant Ponies, unsure of what they want from me and no clue how to give it to them. They seem to be looking for a party, something fiery and fun and loud, but instead, they found this dead bar on a Thursday with a faded man pretending to be a bartender.
Thankfully, other early arrivals for the Box Office night shift started to trickle in. The Lounge began to fill with grungy but cheerful volunteers reporting in for the midnight shift. Many were in costume, ranging from utilitarian punk-rock gothic to festive carny, some with a hoodie or extra layer for warmth to get through the chill of the dead of night.
I was wearing a faded hoodie that half-obscured an obnoxiously bright Acapulco shirt, along with my playa-chalked chucks and a pair of butt-hugging chinos—an outfit certainly deserving of cringe from the sparkleponies at the time. But now, the tables had turned. They were caught on the wrong side of it, their glittering wardrobe and immaculate appearance outnumbered six-to-one by people with actual utility and responsibility. They started to look nervous and uncomfortable on the couch, and with some sheepishness they handed me a thin business card with an instagram handle on it. They tried to promote their camp one more time before scurrying out of the busy Lounge, sneaking away into the night to find a new place to be pretty.
Gate Road, midnight
The beautiful thing about Burning Man is that it’s packed with adventure at any hour. It’s a city that doesn’t sleep. I hop on the bus, ready to take on the graveyard shift at the Box Office, and the energy of the night swirls around me with a quiet intensity. Out here, the people who "do the work" are a special breed. They're the ones who keep the wheels turning while the rest of the city dances, drinks, and spins through the night. The thousands of volunteer Burning Man staff aren’t just for show, they’re physically building the engine of this thing and keeping it running throughout the hectic week, eventually serving a total population of around 80,000.
The vibe in the work bus was so full of utilitarian grit you could chew on it and spit it out. It’s easy to feel smug about your sense of belonging here when you’ve got a “real” job to do and have tools hooked to your belt, and most people in this bus were wearing some kind of tactical gear. Maybe that’s the point—the city is a collision of all the archetypes, and no one is better than the other. The builders and the barkers. The ascetics and the exhibitionists. The saints and sinners. Everybody feels important, and everybody plays a role.
So on this midnight bus ride into the dark, bouncing on beaten washboard roads toward the menacing Gate structure I passed through just a few days earlier, I tried to accept this dichotomy. Maybe this place works because of the tension. While the sparkleponies preen and flit from camp to camp, somebody else is hammering rebar, delivering fresh ice, or pulling an all-night shift to make sure everyone with a ticket gets to take the ride.
Burning Man Box Office (Window 13), dead of night
On my first night working the Man’s Box, very few people even made it to the will call windows. Raging winds shut the Gate line down, and the flow of traffic was ordered to stop. Tonight, the white-out dust storms were so thick and visibility so poor, it was genuinely hazardous to be outside of a sealed shelter. Of course it is utterly impossible to drive safely bumper-to-bumper in a white-out dust storm, so we had a lot of downtime between the pulses of traffic Gate would allow through to Will Call.
They arrived in waves, otherworldly silhouettes pressing through the wall of blowing dust, tromping up to the Box Office windows. With little need to form a formal queue in the dead of night, one of these shadows bounded straight up to me. Clutching his papers, windblown, exasperated, and looking like a Mad Max extra, he leaned through my window and explained, with a kind of breathless urgency, that he should have a ticket in his name.
I nodded slowly, not sure what to make of him.
“We hit a deer outside Susanville,” he said, as if the casual conversation would speed things along. He had a wild look in his eye, almost feral.
“I can’t find you in the system,” I said, heavily.
“Crew leader told me to come to Box. That Box’ll fix it.”
Part of the fun of living is solving problems on your own, so I figured I’d do my best to quietly resolve this problem before getting the attention of the shift lead.
“It looks like that transfer didn’t go through, but I can activate it here.”
“Thanks, man,” he said, blinking at me, relieved, as if he had just swerved out of the way of another disaster.
“Oh sure,” I nodded. “Welcome home.”
I affixed his official wristband credential and handed him his ticket, and off into the grim dusty night he went.
“Easy as that,” I murmured. Maybe not every contribution to a society has to be sensational.
. . .
Somewhere between night and day I drifted into a half-sleep, caught between the realities of the playa and a twisted hallucination about the Temple. In my mind, the spires were alive, writhing like skeletal fingers reaching for the sky, while I fell inward, pulled toward them, feeling their weight, as if they could pierce through everything I thought I was. Who was I without this costume? Without the playa name, the mask, the persona, and the noise of ego? The answer came in the form of a deep, aching grief—a void where my identity had been, now swallowed by the Temple’s vortex. I startled awake, heart racing, supine on some stranger’s couch, the afterimage of the dream clinging to me like dusted sweat. I needed to rehydrate and take a walk—it was time to go deeper, beyond the ring of the inner playa—and venture into the Temple properly.
The Temple, two hours to sundown
With plenty of daylight left to lose myself in it, I arrive at the Temple. There’s something mystical about this place, perhaps due to its size, scale, intricacy or sheer flammability. It’s an emotional crucible, designed to extract your most raw and vulnerable self. As I walk, step after step, I feel it—this weight in my chest, this lump of emotion climbing up my throat. I try to keep my composure, but as I circle the structure, I’m overtaken by a quiet wave of grief. A hard sigh escapes my clenching throat, and in that moment, I feel exposed—not just to the people around me, but to myself. Wearing a pretty ugly cry face, I share an exchange of glances with a pair of Temple goers, holding each other while they walk side by side. Also in that intimate, vulnerable state, we briefly acknowledge each other’s shared grief. It’s obvious that we’re here because we’ve chosen to be—this place is a monument for release, for purging the things we’ve carried for too long.
For now, I measure myself against the towering spires twisting around throngs of people, keeping some distance. There’s a solemn quiet as dozens of people mill through the twisting maze within the wooden structure. I am here alone, but I do not feel alone. I begin walking again, counting each step, letting each foot fall before the other, measuring the Temple’s circumference counterclockwise while keeping my eyes soft and my hands folded, resting against my belly. It doesn’t take many paces before I feel the lump of emotion gouging my throat again. Thankfully, I’ve entered the dark side of the Temple, and I’m obscured enough by its shadow—the wooden beams creating an eclipse between me and the sun—before my eyes water and my guts clench as the overwhelming emotion of the place hits me. I stifle the sobs and suck back the urge to cry as I swing around to the west side of the Temple, exposing myself to the sunlight once more. It feels calming. I exhale, and the wave of emotion exits with it. I keep my pace steady, illuminated by the sun, measuring the expressions of the faces I see around me.
By the time I begin my second lap, I’ve made it halfway around the Temple when the quiet sobbing returns. I exhale deeply, trying to make each breath slow and deliberate. I feel another torrent of tears coming, but after a few measured breaths, I regain my composure, slipping back into the stern, solemn mask I wear so often.
To my immediate left, I hear the click of a camera’s mechanical shutter and turn to look directly down the barrel of a photographer’s lens. He knows I caught him photographing me in a private, solemn moment, and for a brief second, I sense he feels guilty, perhaps for being intrusive and injecting himself into my quiet release. I wave and nod, offering a smile, and he returns the gesture, sheepishly hurrying off to another corner of the Temple. I wish him well and hope his photos turn out, but I wish he’d asked first.
Being captured on camera jolts me—a strange realization hits. If he’s watching me from the outside, how can I see myself from the inside?
Another horrendous dust storm rolls across the lakebed, dislodging anything unsecured, sending it miles away into the trash fence. I sneak further into the Temple and hunker down, checking my phone. It’s still in airplane mode. I wonder who in the outside world has tried to contact me? Maybe nobody. I don’t bother checking any further, knowing I don’t even have a signal to connect to.
The storm continues, kicking up a wall of fine brown sand. I stay in the relative safety of the Temple for a long while, sealed into the spired wooden shelter deep in this inhospitable desert, closing my eyes to rest while the gale winds blast fine powder across the landscape. Time passes, but I could not tell you how much.
Box Camp, next day
I stumble out of my dusty tent, groggy and irritated after a night spent in the fine, chalky mist that’s now coating every inch of myself and my belongings. I’m still reeling from the immense feelings of grief and loss that weighed on me overnight, and in the harsh morning sunlight, I don’t have my shit together. From a distance of 40 feet, in her shimmering emerald dress, the camp’s Head Matriarch, Nimbus, watches me fumble as I tap and double-tap each pocket on my shirt, shorts, and bag.
“Didja lose something?” Nimbus asks with melodic perkiness in her voice. I’m shocked to see her this morning and even more shocked that she seems to read my thoughts. I swallow hard and approach her in a meek greeting.
“Good morning,” she says, her eyes flashing and teeth an immaculate pearlescent white, “how are you holding up?”
“I, uh, can’t find my keys.” I try to pretend she doesn’t already know what I’m thinking.
“I could tell you lost something.” She smirks through the entire sentence. I want to ask her, deadpan, if she can read minds, but I decide against it. Anyway, if it were true, I wouldn’t need to ask. We exchange pleasantries and check in with each other using simple language, both fully exposed in the bright light of the morning. I can tell that she gets it. She empathizes. She’s seen enough volunteers come and go through Box Camp, and she’s been out here long enough to know the kind of intensity that lives in Black Rock City. She’s experienced her own personal loss and suffering and has emerged stronger for it. As our conversation progresses, I feel another wave of that raw emotion welling up inside me, and I reach a moment where I feel like an imploded, collapsing building. Parroting the most clenched Burner phrase ever, I smile weakly and ask, “Can I have a hug?”
Nimbus offers her embrace, and while hidden from coworkers and onlookers, I weep. At that moment, covered in grime, lovesick, homesick, and just generally feeling like an empty husk, holding this woman in a gentle but clutching hug feels like a much-needed hot steam bath. I’m dirty and tired, and this simple act of being seen and held during a sudden and intense downpour of emotion feels like a great relief. In the face of the harsh desert elements testing my emotional and physical survival, I turn my guts inside out with each breath, forcing all the rotten air out of the bottom of my lungs. A good cry feels like throwing up—and purging is necessary if you are full of sickness. It’s even better if you have someone holding you—or just nearby—while you do it. Years of passive gender training and unironically listening to The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” had squashed my urge to weep. Instead, I’d typically swallow that hard lump in my throat and let it sit in my gut like a hot coal. I never knew what to do with this emotion when it hit, but letting this sadness rip through me feels hugely cathartic. What a relief to have someone in your life who cares enough to stay with you even when you’re at your saddest. With a sniffle and a smile, I leave her embrace and return to my own two feet. I mindlessly tap one more pocket on the butt of my chinos.
“I found my keys.”
Nimbus takes a studied look at my entire face and with a glistening tear welled in the corner of just one of her eyes, she smiles at me and speaks.
“Glad I could help.”