by Rebecca Eisenberg

THIS ISN'T LIKE last year, I sighed, as our RV approached the white, vast, terrain-less, crater-like Black Rock Desert Playa where we had camped last year. We zipped past the narrow opening from the roadway where we'd last entered, our window cracks stuffed with towels, dust masks covering our faces, coughing. "Drive five miles north then three miles east; you'll see it," the lone guard watching the gate instructed us, as we peered toward the dusty plain and saw nothing but white.

"This isn't like last year," I quietly told the several officials and rangers who greeted us at the gate 10 minutes later, demanded our US$65 tickets, and rattled off the long list of places that we could not park. Unlike last year, where parking was a matter of choosing your spot, this year we attempted four (already claimed or too-grassy-for-our-generator) locations before settling at the far end, in a 20-foot-by-20-foot area reserved for "Anti-Burning Man Camp" - appropriate for our mood at the time.

"This isn't like last year," I said to the Princeton undergrad whom we found sleeping naked at the geodesic dome installation created by his San Francisco buddies. We were wandering through the sound installation created by my friend Aaron, who had planted 100 individual poles of PVC pipe in the earth, each crowned by a homemade speaker emitting a different sampled sound. The kid had discovered Burning Man when Web surfing last year, and, unable to convince any classmates to join him, flew out by himself. "It was like a mission," he said.

"It was a mission," echoed the school teacher from Arizona sitting at a campfire a mile from the campgrounds later that night after she described to us her healing ritual that she had shared with eight strangers earlier that evening. She would have performed it alone, "but that would have been showing off." She had read about Burning Man in the Happy Mutant Handbook last fall, and didn't care that this wasn't like last year.

Nor did the New Mexico artist burning his 8-foot wooden horse sculpture care that this wasn't like last year. He cried about the false hopes of his 30-year, poverty-punished sculpting career and his weak optimism toward gaining insight via fire. "The answer is somewhere," he explained, poking at the coals.

And, after my pal and I had finally walked two miles out into the black deep of the playa - where there were no more newbies to bump into en route - and we sat on the cold, gray rock, looking back at the horse-shoe stretch of lights, cheers, and neon explosions, deconstructing the meaning of the ordinariness of our everyday lives, it no longer mattered to me that Burning Man '97 was not like Last Year.

We inhaled deep the temporary manic creativity that had produced the makeshift village, laughed at our absurdity in loving the ritual, bemoaned the reluctance of people to free themselves all year 'round, and rose to criss-cross the ash-covered landscape that led us to the campsite that over the previous few days we had called home.

Burning Man '97: Letters from the Desert