Sep 30, 2026 · 27 min · 11 segments
Listen to more of The Big Story here: http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop Dispatches from the New American Holiday: Writer Bruce Sterling takes the kids to the Temporary Autonomous Zone…
Thursday, August twenty-ninth.
The gas station was packed with mobile homes and junker slacker mobiles.
The guy relented and gave us directions.
Seems like a multiple-pierced and tattooed lovely in a clingy peach taffeta costume had melted his heart.
Drove sixteen miles, then drove another twelve miles across the bottom of a very dead lake.
Driving across the playa is like space travel.
You point the front of the vehicle into emptiness and launch.
Gaseous trails of flying white dust spurt up like jet exhaust.
Cars and trucks leave huge wakes on the horizon like white prairie fires.
If the wind kicks up, the world becomes a twilight zone of milky haze.
Driving fast in a whiteout dust fog is an excellent way to get killed.
We're in a twenty-two foot Ford recreational vehicle in which I've brought the family to Burning Man: Nancy Sterling, wife, mom, Amy Sterling, nine years, and the littlest desert fox, Laura of Arabia, a hardened travel veteran at four months.
We've never lived in an RV before.
It's a mutant cross between an aircraft and a small chunk of suburbia.
It's brand-new, but it shudders, moans, vibrates, rattles, squeaks, and emits foul generator exhaust.
Reached the camp, found a place to park, got out to walk around.
Maybe five hundred vehicles here already.
People are setting up tents, parachutes, awnings, tiki torches, tribal flags.
The lakebed is a Euclidean plane with zillions of dry fractal cracks.
The parched Nevada mountains of the Black Rock Desert rise on three sides.
Weary treeless hills full of sullen majesty.
Thursday, August twenty-ninth.
The gas station was packed with mobile homes and junker slacker mobiles.
The guy relented and gave us directions.
Seems like a multiple-pierced and tattooed lovely in a clingy peach taffeta costume had melted his heart.
Drove sixteen miles, then drove another twelve miles across the bottom of a very dead lake.
Driving across the playa is like space travel.
You point the front of the vehicle into emptiness and launch.
Gaseous trails of flying white dust spurt up like jet exhaust.
Cars and trucks leave huge wakes on the horizon like white prairie fires.
If the wind kicks up, the world becomes a twilight zone of milky haze.
Driving fast in a whiteout dust fog is an excellent way to get killed.
We're in a twenty-two foot Ford recreational vehicle in which I've brought the family to Burning Man: Nancy Sterling, wife, mom, Amy Sterling, nine years, and the littlest desert fox, Laura of Arabia, a hardened travel veteran at four months.
We've never lived in an RV before.
It's a mutant cross between an aircraft and a small chunk of suburbia.
It's brand-new, but it shudders, moans, vibrates, rattles, squeaks, and emits foul generator exhaust.
Reached the camp, found a place to park, got out to walk around.
Maybe five hundred vehicles here already.
People are setting up tents, parachutes, awnings, tiki torches, tribal flags.
The lakebed is a Euclidean plane with zillions of dry fractal cracks.
The parched Nevada mountains of the Black Rock Desert rise on three sides.
Weary treeless hills full of sullen majesty.
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