It happened one night, sometime between 2000 and 2005. She swears it happened, but she can’t be more specific about the timing than that.
What Summer Burkes does remember is what she saw. She was deep in the desert with a few friends, wandering deeper—no life in sight. Then, at some point, some dark and indeterminate hour, she came upon an abandoned camp. There were cargo tents. And a lookout tower, which she climbed. At the top was a small platform; on it a TV set, glitching, and some dusty old comms equipment. Burkes listened to a transmission playing on loop. It told her where she was: the planet Arrakis. It also told her the reason nobody was there: They’d all been eaten by a sandworm. “That one made my hair stand on end,” Burkes says. She ran back down, scanning the area, frantic, for signs of the worm.
The danger was not, strictly speaking, real. Burkes was at Burning Man, the conflagrant annual confab in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. And the ghost camp, she now believes, sitting in the present-day comfort of her home in Northern California, was an art installation designed to transport nerdy Gen Xers like herself to Arrakis, the setting of Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s a planet covered in a scorching desert-sea, its tidal sands undulating with the subterranean squirmings of giant, sightless worms. Walk across its surface in too even, too lifelike a pitter-patter and the creatures will hear you, surge skyward, and strike.
Is that what Burning Man is all about? Role-playing scenes from your favorite fantasies, with a frightening dash of Herbertian horror? You’d be forgiven for thinking not. Over the years, the event—expected to return to the desert in 2022 after a two-year Covid hiatus—has come to represent a kind of countercultural city on a hill, founded on druggy West Coast woozeries and lovey-dovey principles of living, a radical weeklong social experiment bolstered by a gift economy. “A load of hogwash,” says John Law, one of its founders. He’s a little peeved, because the bigger Burning Man gets, the more its most ardent devotees seem to misrepresent its geeky beginnings. “In reality,” he says, “pop culture was a much larger influence.” Though almost nobody talks about it, the origin of Burning Man wasn’t Mad Max. It was Lawrence of Arabia. And it was, very crucially and in a way that has never been properly acknowledged, Dune.
But Burning Man began on a beach, you say. Very good: In 1986, Larry Harvey and co. set fire to an 8-foot-tall wooden doll on San Francisco’s Baker Beach and made such memorable merriment that they were compelled to do it all over again the next year. Then the year after that, and the next, until the party got so rowdy the police shut them down. So Harvey called up Law, whose punkish, sci-fi-obsessed prankster buddies at the Cacophony Society had an idea: Let’s take it to the desert. The year was 1990, the beginning of Burning Man proper. “We drew a line in the dirt and stepped across it, and it was entirely transformational,” Law recounts in Spark, one of many Burning Man documentaries.
As early as that first year “on the playa”—Burner-speak for Black Rock—the Dune obsessives in the crew suggested everyone build mock stillsuits, a reference to the form-fitting bodywear that recycles precious fluids and keeps Arrakis’ desert-dwelling Fremen alive when they venture beyond the safety of their mountain villages, known as sietches. “They ended up with a bit of a compromise requiring less costuming work, and covered their entire bodies in playa mud,” Law says. In later years, attendees would bring their own Duneries to the proceedings. “I want to get together a group that would be interested in building a Fremen sietch on the playa,” one announced on the ePlaya message board in 2007. Another Burner, in 2005, called the decommissioned ambulance he rode in “the worm.” For years, Burkes and an artist ex-boyfriend fantasized about building a giant worm bursting out of the playa sand.
