Two years ago, I returned from the desert to find that Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast and all but destroyed the city of New Orleans. So distant from the conventional vectors of information distribution is Black Rock City that I had remained completely isolated from the reports of devastation and subsequent tribulation until my return. This year, I quickly scanned the newspapers while gassing up the borrowed station wagon in Reno. Any calamities? Seeing none I had assumed I was safe, my week spent in the desert a welcome departure from the mundane plodding of civilization.

When finally reaching cell range, my phone lit up with three messages from my father. A sense of dread filled me instantly. My father is not a loquacious man and is normally content to leave one message and wait for a return call. Something had happened. I called him and his first words were a shaky, “have you talked to your sister?” Unfortunately I hadn’t and he had to tell me the story himself—an ordeal that I could tell was difficult, as he was just starting to make sense of the grief dealt him a few days before.

My aunt was barely fifty, her birthday back in June, and in many regards still the baby of the family. She was my father’s youngest sister and, due to a combination of maintaining a relentlessly youthful spirit and never having children of her own, had taken decades to escape the “Kids Table” at Thanksgiving. Her room, when we’d visit, was called the Magic Room, because each shelf contained fascinating objects, artifacts, and gadgets that would delight us to the point of requiring the door to be locked unless we obtained adult supervision. She was a constant ally to we children, letting us watch television far too late and do dangerous things with fire when our parents were distracted. Despite being in my father’s generation, she was one of us.

She had survived a heart attack three years ago, which betrayed her vim and vigor as finite. Taking her for granted as the heart of the family ceased, poking fun at her for arriving late to Christmas seemed less funny, and goodbye hugs (of which I shared many with her, living on the other side of the country) became lingering and immensely thankful. For three years, we all felt terribly lucky to have her. I can say, with colossal gratitude, that our last goodbye hug was the most devout perhaps of our entire lives.

But a goodbye hug is a poor exchange for a human life and Mary’s passing resounds the indisputable truth that my interactions with friends and family are all too often goodbye hugs. This is the cost of “following your dreams” and moving over two-thousand miles from those who raised you, loved you, and taught you to follow your dreams. As my father, sister, aunts, uncles, grandmother, and cousins all crowded a hospital room to offer whatever support they could, I was in the middle of a desert in Nevada on some journey of self-exploration and self-expression that seems woefully shallow in comparison. My only solace is that, just like with that unstoppable storm two years ago, all that I truly could have offered was another heart to share the burden of loss and another shoulder to cry on.

Despite any illusions that Burning Man is a non-hierarchical playground where the very notion of “status” is left at the gate, there are most definitely different classes of people in Black Rock City. Delightfully, they seem to have little or no relationship to the classes that citizens occupy before they arrive.

For instance, the person in line in front of me to get a coffee at Center Camp Café (one of only two places where commerce is not expressly forbidden) may be a corporate exec worth millions or a truck driver living paycheck to paycheck. I can’t tell because he’s wearing fuzzy pink boots and matching bunny ears. Whatever class he was before today has vanished. Likewise, every thirty minutes or so the “employees” of the Café, all of whom are volunteers, are instructed (over a megaphone stenciled with the words “instant asshole”) to take a “mandatory dance break”. They immediately jump to the counters and shake their stuff in front of the waiting customers. Clearly, they are not part of any lowly service class of whom we are entitled to make demands but just another subset of the participant/spectator hybrid population that all Burners comprise.

It’s really only when this hybrid breaks down that class becomes more pronounced. The “lower class” at Burning Man are the pure spectators, those who roam the Playa from party to party without ever giving back or those who slum it in RVs and snap pictures of topless girls. The “upper class” are those who are more serious about their participation, which includes everyone from hardcore theme campers through the Black Rock Rangers to the DPW and DMV, a phenomenon that seems exactly backward when compared to our typical relegation of the service industry to lower class.

It is in fact this very access (via the abstracted community of theme camps or the more formalized “we get to drive around on the playa and you don’t” of DPW or DMV) that makes real the class distinctions. There is not much to own on the playa, so things like name badges can translate as conspicuous consumption. Burners being who they are, the upper classes in Black Rock City do not escape populist scrutiny, which ranges from passive envy to genuine ire. This extends to the “owning class”, the year-round Burners whose day jobs involve securing the permits, raising money, selling tickets, and curating the world’s largest art gallery.

This upside down leadership pyramid, where your station in society is directly proportional to the blood, sweat, and rebar splinters you put into it, would make Greek philosophers proud. While far from from perfect, it’s equally far from the estranged democracy we seem to have in the (rest of the) United States.

I intend this post to double as an explanation for why I haven’t blogged anything for over two weeks.