From our correspondent in the United States,
After the flood, the exodus. About 72,000 people trapped in the mud at the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock desert were able to begin returning home on Monday evening after the reopening of drying roads. Torrential rains have transformed this unmissable meeting of the American counter-culture, particularly popular with Silicon Valley millionaires, into a post-apocalyptic ordeal worthy of madmax. And the death of a participant, in circumstances that the authorities have not clarified, did not prevent Internet users from mocking fiercely.
What happened ?
Usually, festival-goers are rather at the mercy of extreme temperatures or sandstorms. But up to 20 mm of rain fell on northern Nevada, in the wake of Tropical Storm Hillary, which hit the California peninsula in late August. Enough to transform the Black Rock desert, and the “playa” – the immense esplanade of Burning Man – installed on the basin of what was still a lake, 15,000 years ago, in a gigantic quagmire.
The roads, impassable, were closed to traffic, trapping festival-goers on the spot. Fearing more rain on Saturday, organizers called on participants to “conserve water, food and fuel and find warm and safe shelter”.
Some preferred to walk in the mud to escape this hell and reach the only passable road. DJ Diplo has posted a video with actor Chris Rock sitting in the back of a pick-up after being rescued by “a fan”. “It was an incredibly grueling 10-kilometer walk, done at midnight through heavy, slippery mud, but I managed to get out unharmed,” said former Obama administration lawyer Neal. Katyal on X (ex-Twitter).
What do we know about the deceased person?
A festival-goer died on Saturday, and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office has opened an investigation. Authorities did not give details, merely stating on Monday that the death did not appear to be weather-related. A participant mentioned one death by electrocution from a generator set in the mud, but this has not been confirmed by the police.
Why Internet users are unleashed?
Burning Man starts like a bonfire in 1986, in San Francisco, to mark the summer solstice. In the early 1990s, the gathering moved to the Black Rock Desert every late August, two hours north of Reno and Lake Tahoe, celebrating music and the visual arts, with giant sculptures and extravagant costumes. Each edition culminates in a bonfire where a wooden mannequin twenty meters high, “the man”, is burned. All in a kind of hippie utopia halfway between an itinerant commune living on exchange and barter and a spiritual retreat with an ayahuasca/champi/LSD trend. And then the Silicon Valley millionaires arrive.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are becoming regulars, as are Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Startups are spending tens of thousands of dollars to come by helicopter or hire private chefs in luxury motorhomes. Air-conditioned yurts are appearing, influencers too.
Inevitably, this year’s “mud-apocalyspe” was celebrated by netizens, five years after the joy of the Fyre Fest fiasco. On the networks, the images of the clip of Shakira in the mud are looping, as is the Balenciaga parade of 2022 with models in the mud.
The influential Saint Hoax Instagram account identified the best memes, like “Wait, mom is watching rich people drown and catch Ebola at Burning Man”, “Burning Man, is that where rich people go to live like poor people?” But here’s the best, in the “funny because it’s true” category: “Being stuck at Burning Man is almost as horrible as being stuck in a conversation with someone who went to Burning Man. »