My Parents Took Me to Burning Man as a Teenager

As people across the world finalize their packing lists and decide on their playa names in anticipation of Burning Man (August 25–September 3), I can’t help but remember this time of year, a decade ago, when my sister and I attended the anti-consumerist art festival with our parents. We were 16 and 17, respectively, and much like when we moved to small-town Oregon from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my parents’ line of thought seemed to be: It’s an adventure!

They weren’t wrong: I remember it as an immediately extreme experience, certainly evolved from its beginnings in 1986, but not yet the playground for tech billionaires and vacationing Victoria’s Secret models it’s since become (Instagram had yet to be invented). My mom, a life coach, went all out, coming up with a costume and giving everyone at camp an Enneagram interview (more on that later). My dad, a teetotaling Brit who’s most comfortable at the Four Seasons, had to escape the playa after just a couple days. The sandstorms picked up as soon as my family got there, and it was hard to see anything. Our nostrils were caked in dirt. Our bikes got flat tires again and again. But when the dust cleared, it was wondrous: One moment I saw a cabinet-size cupcake zipping across the desert; the next, we were riding on our own art car, a vehicle designed to be a moving beach.

Despite its reputation for debauchery, Burning Man does make an effort to accommodate nonadults. Children have been welcome since the very first Burn, and there is an official Family Survival Guide, which includes tips like, “Talk to them ahead of time about the kinds of things they may see and hear at Burning Man, such as fire, nudity, explosions . . . ”

I was a teenager hell-bent on sneaking out and drinking while at home, but the sheer enormity of the playa calmed my urge to party. Instead, I stuck with my parents the entire time, eating pancakes at center camp and biking. It really was an immersive art experience, a chance for us to wander around as a family, feeling struck by how much we didn’t know.

And so, a few weeks ago, at the behest of my very curious coworkers here at Vogue (“Your parents took you where?!”), I asked my mom and dad about their recollections of our time in the Black Rock Desert. Below, they explain how we ended up a motley crew of first-time Burners and whether it really worked as a family vacation.

So just walk me through how the idea of doing Burning Man as a family came up back in 2008.

Mom: I had heard about Burning Man because in Ashland [Oregon] there are tons of Burners, so I knew quite a few people who had gone. And then one of Daddy’s friends invited us because he had created a two-and-a-half-ton fish leaping out of the playa, and he was also hiring a chef and several big RVs. So we got to come along.

Dad: This guy was an entrepreneur in Texas, so I’d met him and he said, as Mummy says, “Oh, I’m creating this expedition to go to Burning Man. Why don’t you come along?” It fits into the context of Mummy and my wanting, I think, to . . . recognize that this might be an experience you would want to do—given how rebellious and difficult you were as a teenager—so why not get that experience in a safe way? We thought it would be a fun adventure. So the combination of those two things is what kind of sparked it off, I would say.

Mom: Yeah, I don’t remember it being anything about your rebelliousness or trying to teach you anything. I just thought that it would be good street cred for you and Grace to have gone to Burning Man during your high school years. And I felt confident that we could do it in a way so everybody would be safe and it would be a cool art experience.

How did you go about preparing for Burning Man, logistically and emotionally?

Dad: Well, we had to get an RV. And you can’t rent an RV if you say you’re going to Burning Man, because the sand is so terrible and, you know, I think people behave very poorly, so RVs often get trashed. So we did rent an RV, but we had to pretend we were going somewhere else, I can’t quite remember where. So yeah, we packed up gear . . . I mean the RV was big enough to sleep us all, but when we got there, we found that our RV was very much the poor end of RV life.

Mom: I remember I was doing a weeklong Enneagram intensive retreat down in the Bay Area at a convent, so I had a one-day turnaround before we went to Burning Man. So you all got everything ready and we each chose something we wanted to do. I think Grace was in charge of water, and you were in charge of food and maybe safety, and I can’t remember what I was in charge of. Probably cooking the food and that kind of thing. But we were each in charge of something; we thought it might build self-reliance and a sense of responsibility.

Dad: By watching all the Burning Man people be irresponsible. [Laughs] That was the general idea.

Mom: And survival, because it is such a cool idea to be able to go into the Black Rock Desert and create something, a whole city with thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. And then to go through and collect the MOOP, the Material Out of Place, to clean the desert and make sure that it’s a no-trace experience.

Had either of you ever done anything that bordered on the Burning Man experience?

Dad: I’d done an expedition driving from London to Sri Lanka, and then another expedition driving through the Sahara, so you know, I’m an old desert hand, really! But I would say the last kind of experience like that that I went to was the Isle of Wight pop festival, which in its time was tens of thousands of people, the Rolling Stones . . . all kinds of stuff. All I remember about that was that it rained from beginning to end and it was absolutely horrible, but that was the same kind of idea, experiencing art in the elements. But Burning Man was really unique, I think.

Mom: I had never been to anything like that. I had done my motorcycle trip across Canada and through Europe, four months and 10,000 miles on my own, but I had never been to a big festival like that. I’d hung around with plenty of kind of hippie folk from my dad; when he spent time in Esalen, he had lots of musical and artist friends and in fact lived in an artist’s community at one point, where everybody had studios and they lived in their studios, but I’d never seen anything on the scale of Burning Man.

Was there any point as we were either approaching the playa or on it where you thought, We made a mistake?

Dad: First of all, when you arrive, you know, they say, is this your first time? And then you have to get out and make a sand angel or starfish in the sand. So we all had to do that, which felt ridiculous to me.

Mom: And then you ring a bell!

Dad: And then you drive into the thing, and the first thing I saw on the road as we drove in was a St. Andrew’s Cross, and strapped on it was a naked man being whipped by another man in leather.

Mom: I did remember thinking, Oh, my gosh, is this the right thing for the girls? when the Critical Tits Parade happened. We walked by this guy and he said, “You got tits, girls? Break ’em out! This is the Critical Tits Parade!”

I also remember the incident that Daddy was talking about with the guy being flagellated. That was near the teeter-totter of death, which was an enormous teeter-totter, up in the air like 30 feet. Well no, that’s pretty high. Maybe 15 or 20 feet. But yeah, none of this is very safe.

Did you plan any outfits ahead of time?

Mom: I remember that I made my outfit by finding a dress at a secondhand store that was a Hilary Duff kind of prom dress [she is referring to A Cinderella Story]. I took it to our friend who works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and we made it into a mod kind of outfit by taking a cheese grater and grating the tulle. And then I tied affirmation cards to it, because I wanted to be The Affirminator. I was going to let people choose their affirmation card from the dress and look into my eyes while they told me which one they’d picked. Then I would say it back to them.

Dad: I don’t remember any outfits, but I remember the sand being so awful. And I also remember being so bored that I got into the vehicle and drove to Patagonia in Reno for some therapy.

Mom: I actually think you did that every day.

Dad: No, no . . .

Mom: I think you did! Every day you had some escape, which is kind of a pattern for you, to just go somewhere else. I remember in Portugal you would go buy Popsicles every day so you could just get out. And then I think it was the same with this. Because the sound of the generators was actually quite a big deal. And we had our generator going to create cool within the trailer, because otherwise, if we were just in the heat all the time, it was so tiring.

Did you guys do any drugs while you were there?

Dad: I didn’t. Did you?

Mom: I remember being very excited because one night I decided I was going to have a margarita or two, and that’s when I tripped over a piece of metal rebar and my arm kind of whiplashed out; it really hurt. So I made a sling and stopped moving my arm for three days. And somebody gave me some pills, to take away the pain. I remember when I went to see the doctor—because they did have a doctor stand—he said, “Yeah, people are trading pills like nobody’s business and you have to be careful.” But I think I got a Vicodin or something like that.

What do you think you got out of it, at the end of the day?

Mom: I would say the main thing was really the art. When we came here to Oregon, we came to experience the outdoors. So this was another way to experience the outdoors, but with 50,000 people. There was a lot of beauty there, in terms of the art and unexpected creativity. There was a sense of wonder. And even though people were camped right next to each other, either in tents or in these RVs, there was a sense of space and the delight of just happening upon some giant mushroom or a big circle that flashed . . . all kinds of odd things in the desert.

Dad: Talking about it now, to you, I remember that it was a fun experience. And I’m glad we did it. But we’re really quite conservative. Not as conservative as this conversation seems to suggest, because we went to Burning Man. But you know, for the full thing, I think you need to do some drugs and really get into the swing of it all, and come back with stories of women you slept with, or men you slept with, or orgies you attended. But we didn’t really experience any of that, because we were trying to get to sleep.