I’ve come to appreciate summer wear late in life. For years I was one of those folks who wore the same outfit day after day, regardless of season: black jeans, black socks, black shoes, button down shirt. It had something to do with believing that I was not the kind of person who cared about clothes, and so preferred to think as little about it as possible. Of course I was hot in the summer, but for some reason that was better than changing my routine. Instead I walked the streets in the nighttime to get some outdoor time, pretending I was the last lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse.
Today I write to you dressed in a pair of shorts that doubles as a swimsuit, a safari print shirt, and a pair of strappy sandals. When I walk down the street, I feel the summer air on my skin. When I walk through the park, I feel the contours of the earth under my soles. And I owe some of that to Jeremy, AKA Spider, a man who gifted me his sandals after he died.
A few weeks ago I was at a Burning Man regional — kind of a mini Burning Man put on by locals near Montreal named L’OsstidBurn. Instead of a desert, it was in a forest that sloped down to a beautiful cold stream. It was only 1/100th of the population of the big burn — 600 rather than 70,000 — but they shared the same ten principles and, critically, the same culture.
I have spent my life obsessed and engaged with subcultures, and the burner subculture is special. Other subcultures have a narrow band of expression in comparison: burning man really has a spectrum that embraces the hardest of the hardcore punks to the softest of the loving hippies and a huge messy swath in between. When you arrive, a Mad Max looking maniac will stop your car with a glare and a gloved hand and wave you on when — and only when — it’s time to go. No fucking around.
But then when you do get in, you might encounter a gentle, radiant soul who greets you with the most genuine hug you’ve had since you were three. As you explore Black Rock City you may benefit from the mix of brilliant grumpy gearheads fixing your bike and the sweet, free nature’s children providing you with a pillow lounge to rest in — because a city needs both infrastructure and joy, soothing and boundary setting. People’s tendencies and their talents are all needed and valued here. Most subcultures are stuck in a reactionary relationship to the dominant culture, while burner culture almost creates a through-the-looking-glass alternate reality that manages to mirror a broader range.
What this has meant for me — someone who’s chafed by both punk’s self-seriousness and hippie’s lack of rigour — is that I feel a real freedom in range of expression. Because we all contain multitudes and contradictions. At any burner event, you could encounter a joke about shitting your pants one moment, and a performance that invokes a deep moment of reverence the next: the sacred alongside the profane. Which brings me back to Spider’s sandals.
Each burn has an effigy (the titular Burning Man) and a temple, which is a place for contemplation and grief. There are sharpies hanging there in the temple for you to write something on the walls that will soon be aflame. People write heartbreaking things here, put photos and tokens of lost ones on the walls, and they are free of the rote words and sentiments you would see in more conventional settings.
One year I came across a framed text exchange, the colourful speech bubbles incongruous there. It was a conversation between two unknown people, one of whom was supporting the other kindly through a hard time as a good friend would. Below it revealed that it was not a good friend — it was the person’s father, and this was the last exchange they had before the father died of a long illness.
I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of grief — not (as might be expected) for the person’s loss, but by my own shock: this was a father? A father could offer this kind of support, and love? I had never mourned that lack in my own life and had never really been conscious of it. But that day I broke down and sobbed and sobbed until I was spent, and then was distracted by a man wearing a soldier’s helmet made to look like a disco ball.
But I had no such experience in the temple this year. This year, I came out feeling contemplative but not shattered, and then came across a large tarp with a selection of clothes and items as if at a yard sale. My first thought was that it was one of the “free thrift store” style of burner offerings that was common — such a great way to experiment with clothes for an afternoon that you neither have to buy or bring! — but it was not that.
There was a small sign that revealed that this assortment of things used to belong to Jeremy, a burner who had recently died of cancer. His friends had brought these things to the event because he would have wanted other burners to have his stuff. So now his hoodies and pants and… you guessed it… sandals were up for grabs.
I kind of needed them right then, too — I hadn’t brought a good pair. I sized them up — close enough… in good shape too. I strapped them on and immediately they felt good. I took ‘em.
Is it a little morbid? Ghoulish even? Let’s face it, any thrift finds have a good chance of having belonged to a corpse… there’s just some plausible deniability once they’ve become commodified.
Like so much of burner culture, it’s a combination of darkness and light that is contradictory and yet more completely human. Personally I get a little transgressive thrill telling people these are a dead man’s sandals… gifted to me from beyond the grave, washed clean by the transformative power of community.