Smith: North Bay’s denizens fire up Burning Man

The dust was blowing in the wacky, phantasmagorical temporary city in northern Nevada, but Guerneville resident Chelsi Lee's smile pierced it like a beacon.

A student at Sonoma State who works for State Farm insurance, Lee said she's at Burning Man for a second time because it's just so great to break away from the “default” everyday world. Her favorite pursuit at the eight-day party, art festival and experiment in collective behavior: Fire dancing.

Back home on the Russian River, Lee said, “I can't be out fire dancing because the fire department gets really mad.”

You can scarcely wave a flaming baton at Burning Man, which opened Sunday in the Black Rock Desert 90 miles northeast of Reno, without someone from Sonoma County or the North Bay feeling the heat.

The annual gathering of nearly 70,000 generally elated souls on a table-flat ancient lakebed draws a large contingent of artists and participants.

One of the best known is Petaluma sculptor David Best, who on Tuesday recruited passersby to complete his ninth temple at Burning Man. Once it is finished, people will fill it with shrines, photos and tributes to people and pets and dreams that have passed on. Tens of thousands will watch Sunday in silence as it burns.

The temple shares a vast circle of land, called the playa, with more than 200 pieces of often marvelous, even breathtaking sculpture and other art, and with a towering effigy of a man that will burn Saturday night.

On Tuesday the man was not finished, so participants couldn't yet approach and touch it.

Not far from the man, a team of volunteers helped Berkeley artist Kirsten Berg erect, against a decent wind, the butterfly sculpture she named “Imago.”

Part of the crew included first-year Burning Man participant and Santa Rosa resident Dimitar Maznev, formerly of Bulgaria. He said of the free-spirited convergence in the high desert, “To me it represents liberation. It represents detachment from the default and corrupt world we live in.”

There was a foot race through Black Rock City on Tuesday and helping to monitor it was Vallejo resident and frequent visitor to Sonoma Valley Larry Boywitt. Through each of the 15 weeks Boywitt has spent at Burning Man since 2001, Boywitt has volunteered as a Black Rock Ranger.

There are plenty of law enforcement officers at the temporary city, and firefighters and medical professionals.

The Rangers are not professional first-responders but volunteers who assist participants and help them safely take on the often hostile physical conditions and the hazards of an experimental municipality replete with climbable artwork, legions of bicycles of art cars, strange conveyances, and opportunities to over-imbibe alcohol and other intoxicants.

Boywitt pondered for a moment what service he provides most often to Burners. “Show ‘em where the porta potties are,” he said. The Ranger reflected that it's far from easy to prepare for Burning Man, an extreme camping experience that requires one to collect all of the food, water, supplies and gear needed for the stay, as there is nothing available for sale but bagged ice and coffee, lemonade or other non-alcohoiic beverages.

“It's a big deal getting here,” Boywitt said,”but once you get here, it's magical.”

This is the fifth Burning Man for Frankie Loureiro, who grew up in Rohnert Park, attended SRJC and now lives and works in Concord. He carried, on a shoulder strap, a beauty of a bongo drum.

Employed in business development marketing, Loureiro pondered what it is that keeps him coming back.

“I think it's forcing myself to disconnect,” he said. “Take a break from it all. Clear my mind.”

“Grasshopper” is the playa name, or Burning Man handle, for Max Caruso of Sebastopol, a four-year Burner.

“I think the people are the best reason to come to Burning Man,” said Caruso, a property manager and retired Coast Guard officer. “But the art cars are a close second.”

Black Rock City is crisscrossed, day and night, by a world-class collection of wheeled vehicles from golf carts decorated as dogs to great sailing vessels or creatures built on the chassis of a large truck or bus.

“It's outstanding!” Caruso said from alongside one of roads that campers live along in tents, desert igloos and recreational vehicles.

Anne Jones stopped her bike to admire Space Whale, a great stained glass sculpture of a leviathan. She was on a break from her job as a registered nurse in a playa medical tent.

“There are 101 ways to kill yourself out here,” said Jones, who lives in Fremont but has a vacation home on the lower Russian River and hopes to move there one day. She told of treating mostly people who had been injured in various mishaps.

“Like that,” she said as a fellow on a bicycle took a fall onto the hard, pale, alkaline playa.

The two major areas of Black Rock City are the residential area where everyone camps and the great circle that the towering figure of a man and the temple share with scores of sculptures and other pieces of art, many of them enormous, fire-spewing and strikingly creative.

Out on the circle on Tuesday, Lisa and Robert Ferguson of Alameda sat and watched people on foot, on bikes and in art cars stop to admire Ursa Major, their 14-foot-tall likeness of a bear covered in a glistening coat of 160,000 pennies from all over the world. Last year, the Fergusons brought Penny the Goose, the sculpture of a Canada goose covered with 120,000 pennies. That piece has been placed for months at a health clinic in the Lake County town of Lucerne.

Robert Ferguson said Penny will stay there indefinitely; clinic owner Bob Gardner has purchased it. Happy to be back at Burning Man, Lisa Ferguson said she's also pleased that Penny will stay in Lake County, “where she makes people happy.”