SS Serpent Queen

You can drive your car, camper, or motorbike into your camp at Burning Man, but you cannot use them to get around the city. For that you need a bicycle or some form of motorized art car or mutant vehicle.

These range from the trivial to the magnificent, from cute to terrifying, and the designs are the products of hundreds of fevered imaginations and, sometimes, years of construction and development - a furry animal, a dragon with a klezmer band on board, a mediaeval castle, a front porch pulled by a tractor, a flame throwing octopus, a steel lattice framed dance floor mounted on a ballistic missile carrier - and most have rib-breaking sound systems.

This week I was privileged to join the crew of the SS Serpent Queen, make it my home, and to meet its creator and spiritual leader, JB Henderson. He has been building and refining this ship for over a decade with enthusiastic and willing collaborators; some may have been Shanghaied but still come back year after year. 

It takes a lot of skills and a lot of labour to maintain and operate any ship.

The SS Serpent Queen takes Burning Man back a century to the age of elegant river travel with gambling and musical entertainment; bringing grace and savoir-faire that stands in contrast to the high-tech, LED-lit, rave machines that surround it. The dress code on board is Gilded Age instead of the usual Burning Man vibe of steampunk; more Mark Twain than William Gibson.

The Queen is built on a city bus decorated with colorful paddlewheels and an elegant crafted bow.. On the lower level there is a wood paneled salon and kitchen and above that is a huge wide promenade deck with a faux wheelhouse, smokestacks that produce towers of flame, a grand piano and stage for visiting musicians to entertain the genteel passengers. 

An analog world with fine carpentry, restraint, and attention to period detail that is truly unique and stunning on the Burning Man playa.

The Man Burns in Chaos - the Temple Burns in Silence.

Burning Man is a complex orgy of extremes that are elegantly distilled into the two structures that we come to see burned.

The Man is a gaudy, green overseer and convener located in the center of the circular city. He is the axis and focus for all all the creativity, who blesses the diversity and lunacy that comes together at Black Rock City.  When The Man burns on Saturday night, he is surrounded by 90,000 people and all that they bring; the outfits, the art, bicycles, mutant vehicles, and art cars. The noise, the lights, the exuberance. All of this reaches a crescendo as he burns to shouts and screams orchestrated to techno dance music from hundreds of high powered mobile rave parties.  When he is completely burned, thousands of people run around the circle of embers like a victorious heathen army dancing on the grave of a defeated enemy.  A collective experience of catharsis.

The Temple demonstrates the other side of Burning Man; a divinely crafted place of quiet contemplation and spirituality where people come for peace and many come to meditate, to rest and gather strength, to mourn or to contemplate loss. There is no art here. The Temple is decorated solely by Burners with personal remembrances of lost family members and fallen heroes; with personal promises to do better or to let go; with celebrations of hope and community. Many people sign The Temple to simply acknowledge that they were here; standing witness to the complete shared spectrum of grief and hope. When The Temple burns it is surrounded by total silence. This is not easy to achieve with tens of thousands of people - no disco, no talking, no fanfare. A communal reflection - and the silence lasts for a long time until every timber and every memory has become ash. 

Silence that allows time for the moment and the memories to be burned into everyone.