Mission Bay, San Diego. The local Burning Man community’s regular gathering.
The San Diego beach burn happened at South Shores boat ramp — a seldom-used corner of Mission Bay near Sea World, across from Fiesta Island where the drunken louts tended to hang out. The Burning Man crowd liked it because they could play drums and wear weird costumes and burn effigies, and nobody much bothered them.
At around 9:30 PM the cops showed up — San Diego PD beach patrol. They gave one ticket to the guy who’d driven his truck onto the beach to drop off firewood and hadn’t planned his exit, and another for a glass container. They didn’t seem to notice that several people were wearing chef’s toques.
On their way out, the officers found a small cache of fireworks — not bottle rockets or M-80s, but actual tube-launched stars. They gave the whole gathering an ultimatum: whoever owns these comes forward or everyone gets cited. Nobody came forward. The cops confiscated the fireworks.
As they were driving away, they found the other box. This one was significantly larger. Apparently prepared for a time-performance presentation. The new message: no tickets, just come forward and defuse it or they call the bomb squad. More police cars arrived. Nobody came forward. The gathering slowly gathered up chairs and blankets and wandered off.
The last people to leave could overhear the officers, on the far side of the parking lot, expressing what sounded like genuine admiration for what they’d found.
Nobody said it, but everyone thought it: “Dude, they’re gone — let’s spark this up!”