Veteran Hollywood Producer Todd Garner on Miracle-Infused Trek Out of Rain-Soaked Burning Man
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I haven’t been to Burning Man in 10 years. I went for the first time with my wife, and we ran around for a couple of days and thought, “Wow, that was crazy.” It was very stimulating. Lots of lights. This may sound very “woo-woo” and I’m not a “woo-woo” guy, but lately I’ve been hearing that it’s a great place to go to learn something about yourself. It wasn’t even supposed to be an option for me because I should have been shooting a movie in Australia right now but the strike shut me down, so I was at home and available. My buddies were planning a guy’s trip and I thought, you know what, I love these guys and I should go. Maybe I can learn something, see some beautiful art, meet some cool people and have a great time.
The first four days of Burning Man were beautiful. I was with a very, very cool camp. Everyone was in a great mood, the weather was great, there was no dust, and you could see for miles — it was ridiculously perfect. On the morning of Friday, Sept. 1, I had strike duty at the camp, helping to take down some tents and do some heavy lifting by moving things into storage, just basic chores as part of being a good camper. Then it started to rain. And then it started to rain even harder.
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It’s hard to judge the weather and harder to predict what’s going to happen, but we were hearing that it was going to continue to rain on Saturday and again on Sunday. Not everybody has WiFi at Burning Man — there are pockets of WiFi for people who have Starlink — so there was a lot of misinformation about the forecast. But the problem with rain on the playa is that it’s almost like an acidic lakebed, so instead of seeping into the ground, water collects on top of the ground. If you try to walk, drive or move around in it, it doesn’t turn into mud, it becomes something like a wet cement. Your shoes grab on and it becomes almost like a snowshoe of four- to five-inch-thick dense clay. If you’re walking, each shoe feels like it weighs 40 pounds because the shoes pick it up and won’t let it go. Needless to say, it becomes very difficult to walk.
The general mood was, let’s hunker down, make some food, take care of each other and make sure everyone is OK. The people in RVs would be fine, but it was the people who were staying in tents that would be in trouble because of the standing water. By Saturday when we woke up, it was no different at all. Based on information from the playa, it would take 12 hours to drain and dry out so when there was standing water Saturday morning, we figured we couldn’t get out until Sunday and people were already prepared to stay until Monday for the official burning of the man and the temple. But if it kept raining, we wouldn’t get out until Wednesday, Thursday or Friday at the earliest. If no service trucks could get in, we knew it would be a disaster. But the beautiful thing about Burning Man is that the first question people ask is not, “How do I get out of here?” — it is “Who needs help? How can I help?”
What Burning Man does really well is send in a fleet of water trucks and pump trucks pretty much all day, every day. The trucks are pumping porta-potties and RV toilets, and the water trucks are delivering fresh water so you can take showers, run sinks, wash dishes, etc. But when it’s raining and the roads are a mess, those trucks can’t get in or out so that’s when the fear factor starts to creep in. It became a real concern if nobody could get in with water due to this muddy, scary mess. People were afraid. It doesn’t rain at Burning Man. I think it rained once for 20 minutes in 2014. No one had experienced it before. Then these trolls started circulating stuff about Ebola due to porta-potties overflowing in the rain but that was misinformation. Then there were reports about someone who died but they’re saying he was found in a tent, and it was not rain related. You can speculate on what happened.
Still, with the threat of things getting worse, my buddy made the decision to walk out because he has a pregnant wife and didn’t want to take any chances. I thought it sounded crazy because the main road out is six miles, and that road was pretty much destroyed by the rain. But there is a service road off the playa, next to the mountains, which was only about three miles away. I don’t understand the science behind it, but we found that if we duct-taped our socks and walked in those, you could get some grip and your socks wouldn’t get stuck in the mud the way that shoes do.
We started to seriously contemplate “Should we do this?” We had three RVs with essentially six people in it. So our reasoning was, if we walked out, we will alleviate the burden on food, water and resources which could be used for other people in case they needed them for the rest of the week. If there were people in tents who needed help, food or a place to sleep, there would be some extra space. Should things get much worse, the last thing we wanted is for there to be six dudes completely draining resources across three RVs. And our friends are Burning Man veterans so they could stay, and they know how to navigate everything. Once we thought it over, we decided, OK, let’s go for it. That’s when things got interesting.
I set off with my friends Billy Rose and Santiago Arana and we didn’t really know where we were going. We knew that if we walked towards the mountains and took a left, we would eventually find the service road. We had warm clothes, food, water and power bars. We had ponchos and backpacks and fresh socks and shoes. We planned it taking it one step at a time and knew that we would eventually make it to a paved road. That was the goal. We headed out at 2 p.m. on Saturday and immediately things got a little scary because my buddy said that we only had four more hours of daylight. That put a whole new perspective on the hike. But as soon as we hit the playa, we could walk. It wasn’t awful and we knew we could do it because we were not sinking in the mud.
We got about three miles, and we could see the road and we noticed that there were trucks driving back and forth. We made it to a station where they were letting trucks in and out and there was someone there who was hellbent on not letting us leave. “You can’t leave,” a woman said. “The road is closed for 45 miles.” But we knew that this wasn’t a prison, and we could leave if we wanted to, so we agreed to disagree and we kept walking. After about a mile, we saw another group to our left and they were walking as well, so we felt like we weren’t alone and if something happened, we could hunker down together. As we got closer to the road, we saw emergency vehicles with lights on, tons of rangers on the side of the road all of whom were waiting to see what their next move was going to be.
Then, out of nowhere, we saw a white shuttle bus with blacked-out windows. It definitely wasn’t an emergency vehicle and sure enough, we walked up to the side and a guy opened the door and said, “Are you going to Gerlach?” We said yes and he said, “Get in.” Turns out he was a Burner who didn’t want to wait it out either and so we took off our dirty socks, put them in a trash bags, put on some dry socks and Vans and jumped in. Gerlach is 10 miles away, about a 25-minute ride, but it’s a tiny, tiny town with only about five or six structures. Once we got there, there were about 10 people milling about, and everyone was surprised and trying to figure out what to do.
The three of us instantly got on our phones trying to figure out if we could get an Uber or a taxi. There was a limo driver there with a sprinter van with four or five women who were getting on. We asked if we could jump in, and they said they were full. But my friend Billy was across the street, and he noticed a man holding a sign saying, “Heading to Reno.” We asked if they had three seats left in that limo and they did so we jumped in. We were probably in Gerlach only a minute and a half total. We were on our way to Reno and immediately tried to access our options like, should we get a hotel room? Should we get a flight out? We looked at flights and there was a plane leaving at 7:30 p.m. and our driver said we could make it to the airport in time, so we said, “Perfect.” We booked the flight, made it to Reno an hour later and got dropped off at the airport right on time. We walked on the plane and flew home. We never stopped moving.
I arrived back in Los Angeles an hour and a half later than I originally planned to be home had nothing happened. That’s exactly how Burning Man works. You just trust that you’re going to be able to figure it out and you do. Everybody was calm and working together to source the problem and figure it out. I’m sure there were certain people that tried to book it out with cars and got stuck or who got really intense with one another because they were wet and scared. But, for the most part, everyone helped each other, and nobody pushed anyone out of the lifeboat. It was really cool to see that.
I do not consider myself a Burner in any way, shape or form. But I will say that being inside of Burning Man is much different than it looks from the outside. It’s not a festival. It’s not a nonstop party. It’s like dropping yourself into a very, very interesting city. You talk to interesting people; you see amazing art and get to witness people gifting their talents to people. You can walk into camps and have conversations and be gifted coconuts, mangoes, pineapple upside down cake. The pictures you may see are girls covered in glitter standing in front of a DJ booth. That honestly, to me, is 1/1,000,000th of what it’s really about. I don’t think I listened to a DJ longer than 20 minutes at a time. We climbed art and looked at the view and looked at art and hung out.
I don’t do well with uncertainty. As a producer, I’m always trying to control everything and figure out nine steps ahead, so shit doesn’t go wrong. If this were a movie set, I would’ve known the rain was coming and we would’ve moved the production to a stage and that would’ve been that. But without the Internet, we didn’t know what was going to happen or even what our options were. We just had to trust each step and it was beautiful because every step then laid out in front of us like a lily pad.
My takeaway, when I was finally home and settled back in L.A., was that you have to take that next step and trust the path. Right now, because of the strike and no money coming in with no end in sight, there’s a lot of uncertainty. I can’t control anything other than my own business. That’s been so profound for me, and I learned that from Burning Man. When we took the first step on the playa, my buddy said to me, “We’re doing this and we’re not complaining. No matter what happens, even if we’re in the rain all night out in the desert, we’re sticking together no matter what and we’re going to keep going.” We took that next step, and it was the most beautiful thing, man. And all I can do now during this strike and in my business is move forward and then wait to see what the next step is.
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