Fire,
fire, junk mail
Once a summer, hundreds of people converge in the Oceano Dunes for
a night of weirdness, community, and a giant man made from junk mail
BY ABRAHAM HYATT
PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER GARDNER
There are freaks in the dunes. And they're building something.
Normally, the Oceano Dunes are the weekend home to thousands of off-road vehicle riders from across the western United States.
Every Saturday and Sunday, every three-day weekend, they arrive en masse, towing hundreds of four-wheelers, three-wheelers, dirt bikes, dune buggies, and jacked-up trucks. They park their RVs along a miles-long stretch of the beach and build fires and blast country music. They drive off the tops of dunes and roar around one of the only stretches of coastal sand they're allowed in.
But last weekend, when they heard about the weird building project, they stopped catching air and flinging sand, drove over to the strangeness, and revved their engines as they ogled. It was an impressive sight: a huge wood frame covered in chicken wire and filled with millions of pieces of crumpled mail.
The freaks building the project call it Junk Mail Man.
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The camp for this year's Junk Mail Man event, which took place the weekend of July 10, is small compared to what's parked on the rest of the beach. There are maybe 100 tents, a geodesic dome covered with a parachute, a U-shaped fire pit, a shelter with a techno-thumping sound system.
On the tall dune above the camp, the man himself lays on his back: a 28-foot-tall, almost prehistoric form that looks like the namesake effigy at Burning Man.
For the uninitiated, Burning Man is a massive, well-organized gala that happens once a year in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno, Nev. Its two widely known characteristics are the general wildness that takes place and the 60-foot-high (including the base) wooden man organizers burn at the end of the week.
Burning Man has been around since the late 1980s, and each year it gets bigger. Last year, 25,000 people took part - thousands of them half-naked, naked, costumed, painted, drugged out, or otherwise freaked out (thousands of sober and well-covered ones too). However they look, the driving concept is unchanged: uninhibited and radical self-expression, free from the bounds of "everyday life."
But as the event's grown, the party's become less anarchic: It now costs more than $150 per person to get in. Organizers team with corporate sponsors to provide grants to the largest art installations. The name itself is a registered trademark.
Seven years ago, "Buster Friendly," as he calls himself, started building large, frame figures, filling them with junk mail, and setting them alight at Burning Man. In 2001, he moved his man to the Oceano Dunes. Each year more and more people show up - this year, there were between 150 and 200.
But Junk Mail Man is very unlike its counterpart: first off, the goal is different. The ever-changing weekend that makes up Junk Mail Man has little hype, and no mystique. It costs less than $10 to camp; the name is not trademarked; a feeling of unpretentious art for the sake of art drifts in the air. Yes, it is about making strange things and hanging out with like-minded weirdos, but there is no you-gotta-be-weird-to-fit-in ethic.
Which makes the setting, with its hundreds of all-terrain vehicles and thousands of hailing-from-Bakersfield, sand-in-their-teeth rednecks, perfect.
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On the hill above the camp, a glowing plastic tube in the sand forms a de facto border between the rednecks and the freaks.
Around the man, dozens of attendees stuff his legs, arms, and torso with the handfuls and handfuls of junk mail they brought from home. Off to one side, a group melts down paraffin wax over a gas stove. They transfer the liquid results to a watering can and pour it over the mail.
Buster, the event's main organizer, stalks through the crumplers wearing a hard hat and work clothes. He's a bundle of hyper-focused energy and is oblivious to the off-roaders as he collects a single piece of junk mail from each person. The pieces are put in a bag and at some point Buster will randomly select one. The lucky person gets to light the man.
Dirt bikes and four-wheelers pull up to the glowing border and rev their engines. Combined with the constant whine and buzz that emanates from the surrounding dunes, it's sometimes hard to hold a conversation.
The sun sets; off-roaders leave and others take their place. Down at the camp, people have trickled down from the man and they stand around the fire; a few fire-dance in the center of the encampment.
Most of the people here are dressed in camping clothes, but there are a few exceptions. There's a man dressed as a Samurai and a woman in a pink fuzzy outfit. Another woman named Morley embedded a continuous looping strip of glowing plastic wire into her furry coat.
Morley drove down from Berkley. She's a four-time Burning Man alumna. In fact, at this year's event, she and her partner plan on building a scale model of the universe out in the desert, complete with specially commissioned soundtracks for each of planets.
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At Junk Mail Man, Morley is a queen of fire. When she fire-danced, she drew cheers when she spun the flaming, alcohol-drenched ropes so fast they left a fiery trail in the sand. When she pulled out her blowtorch for people to play with, it was an instant hit.
When asked to compare the two, Morley says Burning Man is more surreal than tonight but that they're organized with different goals. Burning Man is about a larger sense of art and weirdness, she says, while tonight is . she trails off looking for answer.
Trying to wrap up her thoughts, she says: "We're surrounded by people who didn't plan on coming to Junk Mail Man. They make it more real."
By 11 p.m., key builders are still gathered around the man, attaching his head. Junk Mail Man attendees have wandered back up from the camp and they join the encircling offroaders. Dozens of trucks' and ATVs' headlights illuminate the crowd.
A man in motorcycle boots walks across the glowing plastic boundary. Armed with a flashlight, he asks how long till the fire, talks for a few moments, and walks back to the safety of his own kind. A few freaks giggle. Tacket shakes his head. He's up here from Los Angeles with his girlfriend and a few friends and he likes the off-roaders.
"I grew up with people like that," he says.
Tacket and his friends are all veterans of Burning Man as well. They also have a hard time describing exactly what the difference between them is, but they agree on one thing: Junk Mail Man will never become Burning Man. Mainly, they say, because the space is too small and there are too few camping permits.
Later that night, Tacket's friend Melissa - she's the one with the cheap can of beer in one hand, a hoop through her nose, and a bandana covering her hair - comes up with another reason the event won't ever attract more than a few hundred freaks.
"These people," she says as she motions to the assembled attendees, "are more scared of [the off-road crowd] than [the off-roaders] are of us."
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It's time for the crowd to lift the man. Dozens of hands pull ropes and he slowly rises into a standing position. Workers rush in with sand bags to stabilize the base. But even with him up, there's still another hour's worth of work to do.
Workers connect wires from the top of the man to wood supports buried in the sand. Buster crawls up the front to take off clamps. People in the crowd shout, impatient, when they see him. The roar of engines is unchanged. Over the din, a chant goes up: "Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!"
Someone asks Buster about the four eight-foot-high burlap "scarecrows" around the man.
"Light them in about five minutes," he says as he removes a wood support from the base. "They'll make a good distraction for the crowd."
Morley fires up her torch. Whoosh. Whump. Crackle. Cheers. But the crowd isn't distracted long - they want the man.
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Finally, the clock ticks past midnight and Buster reappears. He's wearing a massive top hat and a black, bushy fake-hair coat that reaches his knees. While he was gone, he drew the name of the fire starter.
The winner approaches the colossus with Morley's torch in hand. The crowd realizes what's happening and bellows. Engines rev, rev, rev and air horns blast from the tops of trucks perched on nearby dunes.
Flames splatter across the legs and within seconds the front is engulfed - 30, 50, uncountable feet of junk-mail-fed flames. The intense heat pushes back the crowd and blasts pinpoint embers into the night sky.
"This is so fucking cool," a stout man in off-road gear shouts to a friend.
The mail burns; the man sags. His right arm comes off. The rest of him collapses. The crowd hoots.
A group runs, whooping, around the heap of ash, embers, and almost-glowing chicken wire. A few brave souls get close enough to light sparklers from the still-raging fire.
Buster stands with his arm around a friend on the rim of the crowd and, for the first time of the night, he looks relaxed. His coat shimmers and his eyes reflect sparks from the collapsed man.
"Bring more junk mail next year," he says.
Staff Writer Abraham Hyatt can be reached at [email protected].
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