I tried to sneak into Burning Man last weekend. They run a tight ship, those folks at Burning Man.
I had no intention of going to the festival this year. Burning Man is always a lot of laffs, but it’s become frighteningly expensive, especially for us starving MBA students, and the Nevada desert isn’t exactly a skip and a jump from Philadelphia.
Then my Labor Day plans fell through, and when a friend called on Thursday night offering a free plane ticket to Reno, I was quick to accept. Some people spend all year preparing their Burning Man camp, laying in provisions, raising funds, planning logistics. I stuffed my sleeping bag, tent, and leopard-print capri pants into a backpack, and jumped on the next plane heading westward.
Join me now in Reno. I am riding a bike up and down the aisles of Wal-Mart. The bike is a Huffy Sea Star. It has fat pink tubes, pink plastic pedals, and chubby white tires. My knees are pressed into my chest, because the Huffy Sea Star is designed to transport a 12-year-old girl, not a 30-year-old man. But this is the bike I have chosen, because a) it costs $34, and b) it fits conveniently in the back of our rented Dodge Intrepid. Also, the Huffy Sea Star allows me to maintain my sanity in the fluorescent drear of Wal-Mart. I dodge and weave among the mummified night janitors, narrowly avoiding catastrophe when I discover the Huffy Sea Star has no hand brakes.
We provision ourselves. We find a Baja Fresh open at ten o’clock on a Friday night. We are cruising down I-80, and the Milky Way shines brilliantly overhead. Everything is perfect. Where is the rub? There must be a rub. There is a rub.
I have no ticket for Burning Man. More importantly, I can’t buy a ticket anywhere. The event organizers, in an attempt to prevent 30,000 attendees from showing up at the last minute, close the box office on Thursday night. I made a desultory attempt in Philadelphia to buy a scalped ticket on the internet, and, having failed that, decided to place my trust in Jeebus.
While driving out to the desert, we formulate a brilliant plan: I will hide in the trunk of the car. Because the thousands of addled hippies on their way to Burning Man have likely hit on exactly the same plan (albeit not as quickly as we did, and probably relying on lots of finger-counting and napkin-based diagrams), the event organizers will be on the lookout for stowaways. Not to worry. In an ingenious, Rumsfeldian twist, I will hide myself beneath the bag of Ruffles potato chips that we are planning to subsist on for the next three days. “Just a bag of potato chips back here!” the dusty, red-eyed car inspector will call out. The bag of potato chips will chuckle smugly to itself. Later, high fives.
Let me be clear about this: trying to sneak into Burning Man makes me a bad person, on par with, say, Idi Amin or Leona Helmsley. Sneaking into Burning Man runs counter to the positive energy, the ethos, the vibe, the whole very specialness of that very special event. I know this. I also know that because Satan was postmodern way before postmodern was cool and because She likes to devise fiendishly ironic punishments for us sinners, I will spend eternity on a shadeless plain where naked bearded hippies with sunburnt scrotums will force me to listen to original compositions on their wooden flutes. I am comfortable with this.
All I can say in my defense…I have no defense. Like St. Augustine with his purloined figs, I am stealing mostly for the sheer pleasure of stealing, and like St. Augustine, I harbor no illusions about my wicked nature. So basically what I am saying is: I am like St. Augustine.
Now it is 1:30AM, and we are a few miles from the entrance of the festival. The lights and plumes of flame and laser beams are clearly visible across the playa, and it is time to put our brilliant plan into effect. I go into the trunk. The potato chips go in on top of me. My friend makes a final check of his handiwork, and contents himself that the plan is flawless. We are doomed.
It takes the car inspector 3/10 of a second to find me crouched in the back of the Intrepid. I briefly weigh whether yelling out “Nobody here but us chickens!” in falsetto will help or hurt the situation.
“There’s a guy back here,” the car inspector says.
“Really?” responds my friend, ever the smooth one.
Because nothing bad ever happens to me, our botched attempt to defraud the festival has no repercussions. The car inspector directs me over to the box office to buy a ticket. Because we were “jovial” about the whole affair, the ticket vendor opts not to hit me with a $200 “stupid tax” on top of the $300 entrance fee, nor to confiscate my friend’s ticket. Stowing away apparently isn’t by itself a crime worthy of censure. To earn a stupid tax, a stowaway has to get actually indignant with the car inspector after being caught. Why anyone would behave so, well, stupidly is beyond me, but I guess some people feel a greater sense of entitlement than I do regarding gigantic outdoor art festivals.
After buying a ticket, I sheepishly apologize to the car inspector and offer him a beer from our cooler. He gladly accepts the beer and waves off the apology. “It was worth a shot,” he says. “For $300, I would have done the same thing.”
