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 strange, mystic, and weird. 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 a kinda-libertarian-but-not 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. Maybe that’s the real draw; loss can be a cathartic process.

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, the skeleton of chalky roads linking distant and disparate camps in the darkness.

Even these early, pre-event moments have been an emotional rollercoaster for me. In a very short time, 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 this elevated viewing platform, I’m able to take a breath and get my mind and body ready for my first shift in the Box Office—a midnight-to-six-AM graveyard. I’ve worked graveyard shifts before, and I know the sleepless transition from night to day is weird and surreal. Plus, it’s a strict rule to perform the duties of your Box Office shift sober, so, it’s key to bring some energy to start the shift to survive it to the end.

I descend the solid wooden stairs from the deck 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. Clean like freshly minted plastic dolls, they strut into the Lounge with a carefree grace. They were jolly, engrossed in their own conversation, and thrilled with their stroll across the playa in moon boots. That’s when they turned into our empty Box Camp lounge, and I met eyes with them.

“Sparkleponies,” I whispered quietly under my breath. A playa creature of myth—half fawning groupie, half Instagram influencer.

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. They are spotless; as if they'd been air-dropped into the desert. 

I glanced at the chalky grime covering my own skin. The dust, mingling with sweat, was caking into a fine mud. Feeling like a creature made of slime, I offered them a nod and tried to play it cool.

“Hiii!” one of them chirped, her voice petite and chipper. They floated past me smelling of sweet muskmelon and plopped down on the nearest couch, giggling. There they sat, two perfectly manicured creatures of comfort, effortlessly beautiful and seemingly impervious to the dust that had claimed the rest of the camp. 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 for a music video.

And yet, despite my initial judgment, there was something about their presence that was mesmerizing: their seemingly carefree attitude and/or complete lack of concern for the reality surrounding them. 

They certainly hadn’t shown up in the Lounge to help build or aid in the effort to build it into something nice—they seemed perfectly content to relax on the couches. 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.’ They were free, like this was just another Monday for them and they were on their way to a rave. In that sense, I admired them. While I slowly walked down the stairs wrestling with my own web of self-doubt and self-imposed misery, they simply were.

I snapped out of my trance and made straight for the back of the bar. Thankfully, that’s where I had left my canteen, so I had some semblance of belonging here—the lone staffer in an empty bar. How could I be a good host to these guests in a camp I represented? What did we have in common?

“You’re out here early,” I said, a statement in their general 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 that they didn’t seem to be bogged down by the pressures of Burning Man’s hallowed ethos and guiding principles. While I was busy trying to prove my worth in the eyes of others, they had 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 to fill space and look pretty. 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 hard stuff. And in their stupid simplicity of showing up, they reflected something I was missing—a lightness, an effortless ease I couldn’t grasp.

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 I wasn’t built that way. I was too caught up in my own head, overanalyzing everything, trying to find the greater meaning in this festival of art and debauchery. I leaned into the bar and shrugged nonchalantly. “Eh, thanks, but I have to work a shift tonight.”

The second Pony raised an already overly-arched eyebrow and retorted “You go to... work at Burning Man?” She made the four-letter word sound vulgar.

The sparkleponies relaxed back into the couch, giggling while they waited to ambush more souls with an invite to da club. I chuckled to myself, feeling sufficiently dunked on, and took another chug of water from my canteen. Maybe they were beautiful, maybe they were useless, and maybe they are exactly what Burning Man needs to stay relevant.

I should be clear here, this particular Lounge is not really a club space—it’s a staff bar for people who call it “Working Man”. It’s an hour before the graveyard shift call time, 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 with a lone man pretending to be a bartender. I ducked out of sight and tasked myself with tidying up, just to pass the time.

Eventually, other Box Office staff began to trickle in. The Lounge started to fill with grungy but cheerful volunteers reporting in early for the midnight shift. Many wore costumes—ranging from utilitarian survivalist to punk-rock goth to full-on fey fairy—some with a hoodie or extra layer for warmth to get through the chill of the night.

I was in a worn-out grey hoodie that half-obscured an obnoxiously bright Acapulco shirt underneath, along with my butt-hugging chinos and playa-caked Converse low-tops—an outfit certainly deserving of the cringe it received from the sparkleponies. But now, the tables had turned. They were caught on the wrong side of town, their glittering wardrobe and immaculate appearance outnumbered six-to-one by people with actual utility and responsibility. They started to look nervous and uncomfortable from their station lounging on the couch, and with some sheepishness the head pony 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 bustling 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. 

A classic yellow school bus hauled me and about three dozen volunteers out to the perimeter of the city where Gate Road meets the Will Call office.

Out here, the people who "do the work" are a special kind. They're the ones who keep the wheels turning while the rest of the city frolics, drinks, and dances 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 passionate grit you could chew on it. Tactical gear and cargo shorts on the Gate staff. Loony and festive costumes for the people behind the Will Call windows. Two completely different sides of the same mask that new arrivals first see when they arrive at this party city.

It’s easy to feel smug about your sense of belonging when you’ve got a “real” job to do and have tools hooked to your belt. Maybe that’s the point—the city is a collision of all the archetypes, each one striving for some kind of recognition. The builders and the barkers. The ascetics and the exhibitionists. The saints and sinners. Everybody feels important; everybody plays a role on the Grand Stage that is living.

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-nighter to make sure everyone with a ticket gets to take the ride.

Box Office Will Call (Window 13), dead of night

On my first night working The Man’s Box, very few people even made it to the windows. Raging winds shut the Gate line down, and the whole flow of traffic was ordered to stop. The white-out dust storms were so severe and visibility so poor, it was genuinely hazardous to be outside of a sealed shelter. Because it is utterly impossible to drive safely bumper-to-bumper in zero visibility, we had a lot of downtime between the pulses of traffic Gate would allow through to Will Call when the winds did subside.

When they did arrive, they did so in eerie fashion—as otherworldly silhouettes pressing through the wall of blowing dust, tromping up to the 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, immediately alerted in the system that no such ticket existed.

“We hit a deer outside Susanville,” he said, as if this would speed things along. He had a wild look in his eye, feral. Delirious from the long hours on the road and the many more trapped so close to the destination, idling in the white-out.

“I can’t find you in the system,” I said, heavily.

“Crew leader told me to come to Box. That Box’ll fix it.” He was clearly on edge.

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. After pressing this deer-murderer for a little more information, we had a phone number and an email for an art camp lead that indeed had a pile of unused tickets—allocated but unassigned.

“It looks like your transfer didn’t go through, but I can just activate it here and get you on your way.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, blinking at me, relieved, as if he had just swerved out of the way of a disaster. “It is absolute hell getting on-playa some years.”

“Oh sure,” I nodded. “Welcome home.”

I affixed his official build-team wristband and handed him his ticket, and off into the grim dusty night he went. I never saw him again.

“Easy as that,” I murmured. Maybe not every contribution to a society has to be a sensational one. Very little else happened on this dreadfully dusty and dull night.

Somewhere on this shift, between night and day, I drifted into a half-sleep, caught between the harsh conditions of the playa and a twisted vision of the Temple. 

In my hallucination, the spires were alive, writhing like skeletal fingers reaching for the sky. Meanwhile, my body fell inward, pulled toward them, feeling their weight. My clothes, my skin, and my very body was pulled away into this gravity well while I watched it all happen.

Who was I without a persona? This costume? Without the playa name, the mask, or the noise of ego? The answer came in the form of a feeling: a deep, aching grief—a void where my identity had been, my sense of self swallowed in the vortex. I jerked awake, crashing into my point-of-sale terminal at Window 13, startling myself. The graveyard shifts tend to end not with a bang but with a snore. Thankfully, I could hear the commotion from the morning shift outside, prepping to relieve us of our Boxxy duties. 

I needed to rehydrate and take a walk—sleep would have to come later—and find some time to venture into the Temple properly.

The Temple, afternoon

I arrived at the Temple with plenty of daylight left and nowhere else to be. There’s something mystical and humbling about this structure, perhaps due to its size, scale, intricacy or sheer flammability. It acts as an emotional crucible, maybe even specifically designed to extract your most raw and vulnerable self. As I approached the twisting spires, I felt it—a weight in my chest, this lump of emotion climbing up my throat. I tried to keep my composure, but as I circled the structure, I’m overtaken by a towering wave of grief.

There are so many monuments and epitaphs here. So many memorials. So many letters addressed to the dead; this is a very real and very living art exhibit to honor the dead.

A hard sigh escapes my clenched throat, and in that moment, I felt 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. Fully experiencing that intimate, vulnerable state, we acknowledge each other’s shared sorrow. It’s obvious that we’re here now because we’ve chosen to be—this place is a monument for release, for purging the things we’ve carried for too long.

I measure myself against the towering spires twisting around the throngs of people, still keeping my distance. There’s a solemn quiet as dozens mill through the twisting maze of the Temple’s wooden structure. I am here by myself, but I do not feel alone. I begin walking again, measuring the Temple’s circumference contrawise, keeping my eyes soft and my hands folded. It doesn’t take many paces before I feel the lump of emotion gouging my throat again. I’m on the dark side of the Temple, 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 feels of this place crush 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. These emotional tides relentlessly ebb and tug at me, the wave of emotion surging underneath it all. I keep my pace steady, illuminated by the sun, measuring the expressions of the faces I saw around me and slipping back into the 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 despondent daydreaming. I narrow my eyes hidden underneath sunglasses, nod, and offer a smile. He returns the gesture and sheepishly hurries off to another corner of the Temple. I wonder if his photos turned out, and I do wish he’d asked first.

Being caught on camera jolted me. If he’s watching me from the outside, how am I seeing myself from the inside?

. . .

Another horrendous afternoon dust storm rolls across the lakebed, dislodging anything unsecured, sending it helter-skelter into the trash fence. I took refuge inside the Temple and hunkered 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 further, knowing I don’t even have a signal to connect to.

The storm continued, kicking up a wall of fine brown sand. I stayed 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 early in the morning and even more shocked that she seems to be able to read my thoughts. I swallow hard and approach her with a meek, wordless wave.

“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. We exchange pleasantries with 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 building in mid-collapse. Parroting the most clechéd Burner phrase ever, I 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 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 during those critical developmental years. 

Instead, I’d typically swallow that hard lump in my throat and let it sit like a hot coal in my gut. 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 cheerfully and speaks.

“Glad I could help.”