My Playa Boy: One Single Mom's Adventure to Burning Man

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By Zélie Pollon
August 30th, 2009

People said I was crazy to take my young son to Burning Man, and maybe they were right. Burning Man is intense. Really intense. The week-long arts festival takes place on a desert flat in northern Nevada, in an environment that can force you to eat and breathe dust every day, can sap every drop of moisture from your skin and whose alkaline desert floor can eat your feet like some man-eating virus. It can be sweet and sunny one minute, and then slam you with an unrelenting sand or rainstorm the next. Dehydration is a major concern, so is sunstroke, not to mention the possibility of a nasty sunburn. So why did I – a single mother already stretched thin – decide to drive my tender 17-month-old 3,500 miles across the country to endure such hardship?

I took my son to Burning Man because, despite the sometimes harsh elements, it’s one of the most creative, beautiful, spontaneous celebrations I’d ever experienced, and I wanted him to experience it too. I took him because Burning Man aspires to be and often is the kind of community I want my son to be around: one based on collaboration, cooperation and a system free of commerce and capitalism. It’s one where people are creative and most often kind, generous and helpful. Sure, there’s a party element that you can either join in or leave behind. The partiers usually thrive all night, while families pass their time in daylight, and rarely the two would meet. In fact there’s a village dedicated solely to those with little ones: Kidsville, where entertainment included clowns, trampolines, costume making, and group trips into the desert to witness amazing, indescribable art.

Ok, so maybe there was a part of me, just a little part, that needed to prove to myself that I could do it, that having a son was not going to make me give up every one of the more outlandish experiences of what I’d begun to call my “past life.” On the contrary, I knew my son would love the sights and the people, the celebration and theater of it all, and I wanted to share that with him.

Burning Man is a camping trip like no other. Everything you bring in must also be carried out, which means, among other things, that there are no convenient garbage cans for those redolent diapers! Bicycles are the main mode of transportation used to explore a temporary city so expansive that in 2008 it became the third largest city in Nevada. There is nothing to buy, save some drink selections and ice, so my car was loaded down with food and water for a week, camping gear for any possible weather, and of course the indispensable costume selections.

Due to various traffic delays and the interminable play stops for my son, we arrived a day later than planned. This was a blessing in disguise, as opening day of the festival had been hit with a sand storm so severe all traffic was stopped for seven hours until the whiteout cleared. “A seven-hour sandstorm?” I repeated upon hearing the news. I entered the festival grounds relieved to have arrived, but hoping I hadn’t just made a terrible decision.

We set up camp before night fell, and collapsed into bed.

In the middle of the night an enormous art car passed by Kidsville blaring some disco tune. At least it wasn’t techno, I thought, calming my son back to sleep. Then I made an additional note to self: tomorrow, find baby earplugs.

We set out early the next day by bike, my boy sitting comfortably in his wee rider attachment, safely between my arms, taking it all in. He looked at me questioningly when the enormous bus decorated as a radio passed us by. “That’s right, honey, it’s a huge rolling radio,” I told him. That was easier than trying to describe the man painted from head to toe electric blue, or the fire breathing trucks, or the garden made up of hundreds of colorful silicone “flowers”.