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Burning Man is a study in contrasts.

It's the planned city, laid out (literally) like clockwork; with streets from 2:00 to 10:00, and the cross-streets conveniently lettered. Center camp is... in the center, at 6:00. Medical and ice are at 3:00 and 9:00. Major theme camps are at pre-assigned locations.

And that's about as far as the urban planning goes. Anarchy overlays the grid, and works, sort of, at least it works a lot better than one might expect.

Maybe that's because the western concept of property doesn't mean much when the fourth-largest city in Nevada springs up almost overnight, and then a week later, fades away like a mirage, like it was never there. Then, a year later, it returns, but never quite the same.

People arrive, often in the dark, set up, find fuzzy boundaries. Sometimes, delineated by a rope or a line of cars. Sometimes blurred, unmarked, with strangers becoming neighbors and then merging into semi-affiliated camps sharing things freely. Large camps one year split off into clusters of satellite camps, visiting each other across the "street" and the vacated space being filled by virgins. In my case, I spent my first Burning Man in the Kazbus camp, and have at least stopped by to say hi every year since then, this year they were kitty-corner from us... I once learned things from more experienced participants there, and have since passed them on to others.

Sustainability? Yes and no. Everything is imported. Everything must be carried out (or burned). The "city" works because it only lasts for a while. Maintaining banks of porta-potties for a week is practical; longer term.... there's no wastewater treatment plant on the playa, and the porta's get pretty grungy by the end of the week. It's similar with water... possible to keep hauling it in from the outside, but only practical for so long.

One of the bits of genius of Burning Man is the ban on driving except for arrival and departure, and of course art cars or "official" vehicles. In a way it's proof that bicycles and feet are perfectly practical methods of transportation at a compact, high-density scale. Just when one wonders how to translate that to the outside world, comes the mass exodus on labor day, the endless traffic jam as 20,000 cars all try to leave at once. If only we had high-speed rail to the playa, turned on for one week a year, dormant otherwise.

The weather; more extremes. 100 degrees by day. Sometimes into the 40s at night. High winds, sometimes exceeding 70-mph; dust storms, white-outs, dust devils like mini-tornadoes. It's a harsh place, a place of extremes. if it weren't, there'd be 500,000 people there instead of 50,000.

Then there's the primitives-vs-RV war. Those of us taking pride in roughing it, doing endless battle with the elements, scorning those safely sheltered in the safety of RVs. I'm sure they're equally condescending toward us, the scruffy-looking ones coated in white dust. To each their own.

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Back to the story. For the first two or three days, I took it easy, enjoyed the absence of a cell phone signal, not having any desire to check e-mail (although it's possible on the playa), not thinking at all about the office or my clients. In the calmness following the first white-out, my project manager background did come out, as we debriefed the event, came to the conclusion that in future we need to rein in the over-enthusiasm of the newbies who wanted to set everything up right now, and instead concentrate on getting a core structure up solidly enough to survive anything; then get some rest, be able to think clearly again, and stage from the shade structure to add to the camp complex over a day or two. Quality over speed.

Fortunately, we had a mellow and drama-free crew this year, and that was the only time all week I had to assert myself. Unlike last year, when I seemed to be spending way too much time keeping two or three people from damaging themselves or those around them. Two or three people who were off in other camps this year, aggravating someone else; or not present at all.

I began to spend a lot of time reading, jotting down notes. The connections began slowly, built, turned in unexpected directions. Connections between countercultures spanning my lifetime and a little more, a flow-state of rebellion over time, ideas about the next level of rebellion, about a quiet anti-corporate insurgency from within. A realization that my punk years were really, deep down inside, about rebelling against a suburban sprawl that we still only poorly understood, that wouldn't be well defined until later, by new urbanists who hadn't chosen that name yet. We rebelled against an absence of community, even an active suppression of community, an abandoning of common space and the center; we created our own community, in the inner cities at that time abandoned by most everyone else. Fitting, that it came to the surface in the community that is burning man, in the first half of the week when some said that the (initially) smaller size of the city made it feel like the older, more cohesive days.

That would change later in the week, as the crowd grew to record size (almost 50,000), as the shallow and materialistic ones descended on us for the weekend. We ignored them as best we could.

Breaktime...