I had just climbed up to the top of Mother Nature with 2 or 3 other people when I noticed the man wasn't green anymore. He looked yellow! So we looked at it a few seconds more and I said "OH MY FUCKING GOD! THE MAN IS ON FIRE!"...no one believed me and I had to really convince everyone that it was true. So I yelled "TONY! GET YOUR CAMERA THE MAN IS ON FIRE!" Tony had just gone to bed about 10 minutes before and he heard me yell but he thought I was kidding and stayed in his yurt. The next day I told another camp mate that the man had burned the night before and he didn't believe me either.
So we fired up the art car and started driving out there. It was about a mile away. The funny thing was that if you looked around the circle that is the layout of Burning Man; the lights from cars and bikes and people were all heading in one direction. All of them towards the man.
A similar experience had been described to me earlier in my burn by Gary, the maker of the Inner Mind. The Inner Mind had, among many other things, 4 huge halogen lights that were pointed straight up in the air. He said when he was testing the lights he would look out towards where people were and a large majority of them would all turn towards the light. Then he would turn it off and they would loose interest and go back to whatever it was they were doing. It is very easy to have a short attention span on the playa as there are so many bright and shiny and noisy things to draw your attention.
So we get out there and the Black Rock Rangers had already set up a fifty foot perimeter around the burning man. There was a fire truck there but it couldn't spray high enough so it was just soaking the stuff below. As we were watching him burn I noticed a lot of the same things happening that happen at the regular burn. Some people were yelling "Save the Man!" Others were yelling "Burn the Man!" and "Stop, Drop and Roll!" and "Down in Front" (even though the crowd was only 1 or 2 people deep) All the usual things that people say at the burn. Everyone was tingling with the excitement of it all.
Of course the playa rumor mill that is notorious at Burning Man was running at full speed. All kinds of silly or sobering theories were being bounced around.
So then two more fire trucks show up and one of them can spray almost high enough. So he starts spraying the water a little bit into the wind and lets the mist drift into the man. After about 10 minutes the left arm falls off and a rumble goes through the crowd. Another 10 minutes and the fire is out.
About 10 minutes later two of our camp mates, Jeff and Sarah, come up to Mother Nature and tell us they saw the whole thing. (One of the nice things about having an illuminated 25 foot tall art car is that your friends can find you fairly easily.) The man climbed up the wires holding two of the shade fabrics together. It was as simple as climbing a ladder and I had heard other people had done the same thing earlier in the evening so that in itself was not that unusual. But this man climbed all the way up to the base of the man and started pouring something from his canteen onto the mans foot. He then lit something else on fire and stuffed it into the foot. When Sarah saw that she said she yelled "Hey! What the Fuck are you doing?" This quote was in the special edition newspaper, The Black Rock Beacon the next morning, sans expletive.
I think most burners were not that fazed by the early burning of the man. So much crazy stuff happens out there that it really wasn't that big of a deal. They took him down the next day (Tuesday) and started rebuilding. He was put back up a day after that (Wednesday) without his head. Thursday they put his head on and right before midnight the neon was turned back on. From then it really just seemed like any other time at Burning Man.
