Burning Man: Wheel of Time. Third burn.
My third Burning Man was the first one I drove to in the Pinzgauer.
The Pinz is not a fast vehicle. Its top speed in comfort is somewhere around 55 mph, and you don’t hold that for long. The drive from San Diego to the Black Rock Desert is long under any circumstances. In a 27-year-old Swiss military truck with air-cooled flat-four engine and carburetors that needed attention, it’s longer.
It was a fine way to get there.
The Pinzgauer has a quality that I’ve noticed in other old vehicles designed for serious work: it draws people. You park it somewhere and people walk over. At gas stations on the way north, someone would come over to ask what it was. At Burning Man, it was art by virtue of being itself.
I’d been planning a ground-art project that year — chalk lines and plumb lines, Nazca-style patterns on the playa surface. I had the Pinz for transport and the equipment to make straight lines. I wasn’t entirely sure what the final project would look like.
The project didn’t fully materialize the way I’d imagined it. The playa is larger than you think when you’re planning from home, and the ambitions of Burning Man projects have a way of exceeding the available time and energy. But I was there, in the Pinz, with chalk and rope, which is more than most ideas get.