Why I'm here

A burner without borders explains the attraction of life in Camp Katrina

By Tom Price

My leather gloves sag with sopped-up diesel, sweat, and the black water that oozes off rotting garbage. Under the cypress trees in the swamp out back, an oily sheen coats the water, smothering the snapping turtles but having no impact on the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Every night, after a day of working in a morass of twisted and broken homes, there's a dull ache in my throat from the mold spores and smoke boiling off the fire across the street, where an old man burns the insulation from downed copper wires. We have no electricity or plumbing, no running water, and it's a 15-mile drive to buy anything. This is what's left of Pearlington, Miss. Guardian city editor Steve Jones asked me to write about why I'm here. The answer's simple: There's nowhere else on earth I'd rather be.

For the better part of the last five months, I've been living in "Camp Katrina," helping clean up after the storm. By profession I'm a journalist, and I've witnessed suffering before: Pacific islanders losing their homes to climate change's rising tides; bushmen dragged off their homelands to rot in resettlement camps to make way for diamond mining; land mine victims hobbling on crutches through Angkor Wat.

But this is different. This is archetypal small-town America, the sort of mythical place where, on Sundays, Mom wrings her hands dry on her apron after baking an apple pie while Dad watches NASCAR with the kids, where in the evening families sit on their porches as the fog slips through the Spanish moss bearding the oak trees. This was that place, but no more – I may as well be on the moon. A little context: Virtually every home, business, place of worship, and public facility that lies within one mile of the Gulf of Mexico between Pascagoula, Ala., and New Orleans, La., is either damaged, destroyed, or simply gone. Think about that for a minute. Some stories you report, some you live – for me, this became one of the latter.

Five months on, and the residents are still sitting on their porches – if they still have them. Only now they're waiting for a shelter other than a tent or flimsy trailer, for someone to help them remove the wreckage of what was and create space for something new to take its place. And for many, the help they're getting isn't from the government they've paid and fought and bled for; it's from a bunch of artists widely derided for the self-absorbed pointlessness of their behavior. The dissonance is amusing sometimes, but beside the point. Why am I here? The better question is: Where else should I be?

It seemed unreal on the playa, another of those random rumors that swirl through Black Rock City. "I'm serious," my late-arriving girlfriend insisted, "New Orleans is gone, a hurricane blew it out to sea." Conversations sprouted: What would we do if something like that happened to us? At Burning Man there's a lot of talk about intentional communities, the sort of self-made social infrastructures Ethan Watters tipped in his book Urban Tribes as being the defining social characteristic of the future. Just in time, it seems; all around us the social structures we were raised to depend on – stable jobs, dependable pensions, Social Security – are collapsing. And as the winds and water of Katrina have shown, the once reliable federal government should now be counted among that number.

But real life is a hell of a lot harder than just building a theme camp. Could the people Rolling Stone derided by saying, "for all the talk of community, [their] only shared value is a collective dedication to self-indulgence" actually do something for someone else? Had we learned something in the desert that would be valuable in the real world?

As the news of the hurricane seeped into Black Rock City last August, the natural, organic, spontaneous response was a resounding yes. In the middle of the big-finish weekend that people had planned and worked for all year, they dropped what they were doing to find out how they could help, by the dozens and then by the hundreds. They opened their freshly drained wallets with a generosity that made me weep. And since then, they've streamed into the Gulf Coast, doing so with an élan that leaves locals wondering, just who the hell are these people?

When burners started hitting the Gulf Coast, the question of whether Burning Man is more than just a big art party in the desert stopped being some boring art-house debate or pedantic argument yelled over drinks at the Make-Out Room. This is about as real as life gets. Down the road from me, there's a 65-ish, toothless man named Morgan Collins who's had to stare for five months at the rotting morass of what used to be his mobile home, because no one from the government or anyone else would help him get rid of it. And today, in about five hours, a friend and I broke it up and bulldozed it out of the way. Meanwhile, at the other end of town, a half dozen other volunteers humped salvageable wood out of broken homes so they could rebuild a new one a few doors down for a 71-year-old retiree who was left only with the Harley he'd outrun the storm on.

It turned out what we learned in the desert had very practical implications. Sure, there're the topical things; burners tend to be, in general, pretty creative, self-reliant types who can handle being in a chaotic, unstable environment. So when they started hitting the Gulf Coast, they were prewired to know what to do: build shelter. Make food. Keep cold things cold and dry things dry. But more than that, all the talk about radical self-reliance, about operating in a gift economy, about thinking and acting from a place of civic responsibility – all that hot-air crap turned out to be exactly what was needed when things fell apart. Partying in the desert, it seems, was in some weird way like boot camp for a disaster.

More than just surviving in this harsh environment, we're thriving, making first order and then art out of the chaos of shattered debris all around us. This morning I found where a campmate of mine, faced with looking out at an oil-drenched swamp littered with debris, took a photo and created a laminated interpretative guide, pointing out the sites of the "Post-Katrina Pearlington Nature Preserve," pointing out things like the red-breasted rubber dinghy, perched in a tree. And every Saturday we take bits of debris and nail, staple, and screw them together into art, then invite the locals over in the evening for drinks to watch us burn them. "I've never seen anything like this," a woman named Debbie told me last weekend, gesturing around at our camp while watching an elaborate sculpture of broken chairs, table legs, and twigs go up in flames, a glowing metaphor of the environment all around us, "but I love it."

Why am I here? Because this is one of those rare, morally pure moments where what you do really, truly matters. There's no space here for the cynical ennui that often takes the place of intellectual discourse, no room for sitting on your hands because it might not be cool to show the naïveté of thinking you might actually make a difference. I'm fond of something Dave Eggers wrote in response to people expressing that same sentiment: "When you die, and it really could be this afternoon ... you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no's you've said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say. No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message."

It turns out that under all the art and glitter and spangles in the desert, under that frivolous veneer of indulgence and self expression and idealistic belief, there just might be another, better way our society could operate. The heart of this community beats with practical expertise in creating community, and building culture. To bring it closer to home, when the next earthquake comes, I'll bet you your vente double Frappucino that all over the Bay burners will be among the first busting out minigenerators and camp stoves and whipping up fruit pancakes to give away before the dust has even settled.

What's the connection between the desert and here? Why are so many people coming from that harsh environment to this one, and not just surviving but thriving? Because in a very real way, the hurricane zone turns out is like the Black Rock Desert–vast and unsettled, and frightening, and filled with awesome beauty and infinite possibility to discover just exactly who and what you're made of. What we used to count on can't be counted on anymore. So what are you going to replace it with?

So why am I here? Because this is a place where the values I have and share can be put to real, practical use. Remember that cheesy old story about the young guy criticizing an old man for flinging back starfish that had been washed up by a storm? "It won't make any difference," he said. "There are too many of them." To which the old man replied, "It matters to this one," tossing another back for a second chance at a life disrupted. That's what living in the Katrina zone is like: starfish as far as the eye can see. Do what you want with yours – I'm flinging mine.

SFBG

Tom Price is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and National Geographic Adventure, among other publications. Before the storm he lived in Salt Lake City and San Francisco. His current home, a 1978 Fleetwood Pace Arrow motor home, will appear in the August issue of RV Living magazine. He is currently exploring other parking options.