Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire

Largest Outdoor Arts Festival In North America

(AP)  The drums are beating. The migration is on. It's time again to burn the Man.

More than 20,000 artists, spiritualists, old hippies, young thrill-seekers and curious travelers are expected to land on the high-desert floor 120 miles north of Reno by the weekend for the 14th annual Burning Man Festival.

Billed as the largest outdoor arts festival in North America, Burning Man is a psychedelic adventure that combines wilderness camping with avante garde performance - a Mardi Gras-like celebration on what appears to be the surface of the moon.

"It was definitely worth the trip," said Randy Gilliland, who traveled nearly 3,000 miles from Tampa, Fla., in an old Sears paint truck he bought 12 years ago for $75 to attend a Pink Floyd concert.

The counterculture event on the vast dried mud of an ancient lake bed culminates Saturday night with the torching of a 50-foot wooden man draped in fireworks and neon.

Artists will toss their paintings, sculptures and other creations onto the raging bonfire to reinforce the celebration of art for arts sake.

If you have to ask why, you don't get it, organizers say.

"It's almost impossible to explain," said Ochressandro Rettinger, 23, a computer programmer who made the trip from Albuquerque, N.M.

"It's just great to be with your friends and build a community in the middle of nowhere and not have to follow the normal rules of society," he said.

Organizers say they've gotten a bad rap in recent years from the media, which tends to focus on the nudity, pagan rituals and hallucinogenic drugs that make the rounds.

Mr. Mega Bolt creates lightning bolts as an expression of performance art.

A few arrests are made each year for the sale of drugs. But local law officers, who team with a private security unit known as the Black Rock Rangers, take a tolerant approach to the week as long as people keep to themselves.

"We've never had a major incident," Washoe County Sheriff's Sgt. Rob Davis said. "They set up a whole city. They even have dedicated streets.

"When I first heard about it, I thought it was a throwback to the 1960s. But as I learn more about it, it's more about artistic expression - an event where people can freely express themselves."

The tent settlements and theme villages stretch about 3 miles from end to end. Bicycles are the main mode of transportation because motorized vehicles can't move once they park at a camp site.

With the wooden effigy in the center, the encampment is laid out in a huge circle with avenues running outward on the face of a clock.

They bisct the circular roads that are named after planets and orbit the center first Mercury, then Venus etc. That's so you can meet your friends at the corner of 5:30 and Neptune.

Grays, browns and reds dominate the rocky landscape framed by jagged desert mountains that rise up from the desert floor like sand castles.

With 20,000 to 25,000 expected, "Black Rock City" becomes one of the five largest cities in Nevada for the week.

The rest of the year its a desolate, 400-square-mile expanse of flat, chalky land called the playa.

Burning Man creator Larry Harvey said the event is an outgrowth of "San Francisco's Bohemian Scene." He started the first one at Baker Beach in 1986 with the burning of an 8-foot effigy and moved to the Nevada desert in 1990.

"We've given you all a chance to live like artists here," Harvey said in a speech at last year's event.

"This whole experiment we're running is an effort to recreate culture in our modern world. Because if we don't do it, I can justly fear that when the machine stops, we're going to find ourselves so isolated from one another that none of us are going to be able to cope with it," he said.