by jim holt
Here’s a portrait of one of my heroes: a guy my age (old), wearing only a long leather work apron, welder’s helmet and gloves, welding part of a two-story structure in the desert.
It was 1998, my first visit to Burning Man.
The sight perplexed me. The flood of questions that washed up inside my brain (I now realize) surged as part of the ocean of logic I had acquired and cultivated over a lifetime of conventional living.
Why weld naked? Why weld in the desert? Why weld at all out here when everything will be dismantled in less than two weeks? Why such a large structure? Why a structure?
The answers have come to me after a dozen consecutive trips to Black Rock City, most of them intuitive.
The answers, however, if embraced by the bulk of Americans, would serve the country well in its effort to achieve self-sufficiency, to acquire alternative energy, to practice conservation and to perpetuate sustainability.
In one of those early years at Burning Man, I was invited to stop for breakfast by one of my neighbors. It was delicious. Spicy scrambled eggs, some sausages, toast, reggae music (everything smells and tastes better out there).
“How are you powering all this?” I asked.
Answer: a solar panel recharged a deep-cycle battery that, through a power converter, allowed him to plug in his toaster, stove and music box.
Brilliant.
Now, at home I do the same thing daily, powering up my laptop and other wee electronic devices with just a pillow-sized solar panel, allowing me to exit off the grid for at least part of the time.
Also, in the process of “leaving no trace” in the Black Rock Desert, ten days of every year, I’ve learned how to conserve water.
One of my inflatable beds somehow got punctured (don’t ask … could be any number of intriguing incriminating stories) so I rolled up each of the four sides of the mattress and placed it under my outdoor shower to collect the dirty water. Leaving the shower bag of water on the hood of my car all day enabled me to have a nice hot shower at the end of the day.
I just left the collected water exposed during the day and, of course, it all evaporated into the desert air.
I could do the same here at home (and if my neighbors are reading this – relax – I’d put up a curtain).
Before Burning Man and before this lesson in shower water, I never would have thought to water my plants with the greenish collected water that remains after I steam broccoli in a wok. Now, I do and that’s a pint less disappearing into the sewer.
A lot of the conservation and sustainability lessons learned at Burning Man come about due to problem solving. Everything is problem solving out there, miles from anything.
My car battery died one year. I started to panic and worry but then I remembered the lessons I had learned up until that point. I opened the hood, clipped my solar panel to the battery and let the sun do what it does. Problem solved.
Another year, I had to file a newspaper story (that’s before I gave up trying to articulate and describe something that was better left un-described and merely embraced) … but how in the middle of the desert?
I found a burner whose trailer was filled with people typing at laptops, all online.
How so? I asked.
He powered an uplink satellite system with propane. Brilliant. Burning Man is about gift giving so brought him beer. Even more brilliant.
If every American saved their shower water and charged their laptops by the sun a significant amount of oil would stay in the ground and a significant amount of water would stay in the lake. That deserves bringing them each a beer, I think.
I saw a burner on one of the Survivor TV episodes (she wore a necklace that had a pendant of ‘the man’ ) and I thought “that stands to reason … being out there you learn a lot about surviving’. What she learned, she probably shared with others. That’s what I’m thinking.
Me?
I’m enrolling in a welding course at the local college.







