A Stake in the Ground

On a dry lake in Northern Nevada, four miles from the pavement and 100 miles from just about anything else, a small crowd gathers on the alkali under the late-afternoon sun. It is 5pm on the 25th of July, 2024, and the raising of this year’s instance of Black Rock City begins with a single hammer strike, tapping a slim steel stake into the hard-packed earth. This is the “Golden Spike” that will mark the exact center of the city, the point in space directly beneath the feet of the Man. It will serve as the survey plug for the placement of civic infrastructure in the weeks to come, and a sort of axis mundi for the ephemeral city that will rise from the dust around it. Soon, for a week this will become the third-largest metropolitan area in the state, and then it will vanish without a trace until the next spike starts the cycle again next year.

As with most ritual objects the spike itself is a meaningless fetish, imbued with meaning only by our intentions. To an outside observer, it’s a length of spray-painted rebar hammered into the dried mud with what looks like the world’s oldest sledgehammer. But to those inside the circle, it is a direct physical connection to something larger than any of us. A chance to contribute directly, with sinew and bone, an actual physical action in the physical world with an undeniable physical effect. Not a pixel cloud, not another Zoom meeting; the feel of wood against the palm and the ringing peal of steel on steel. After so much separation, the beginning of a homecoming. 

ax​is mun​di : world axis : line or stem through the earth’s center connecting its surface to the underworld and the heavens and around which the universe revolves.

The ancients believed that the center of the earth, the pathway from this world to the next, can be any place we decide it is. In a world without a center, the center is whatever we agree on, and today this spike marks the center of our world, our Burnerverse. For a moment in time this place will be the axle of our global culture, the capital city of our notional nation. 

When you put a stake in the ground, you move from the ideal to the real. The spike we drive into the ground in Nevada has a powerful ripple effect, cascading around the world into hundreds of other cultural touchpoints. Not just the other ephemeral cities of Burning Man like Tankwa Town and Pyropolis, but also smaller spaces and groups. A beach cleanup on the Texas coast, a homeless outreach program in Detroit, a civic art project in Ukraine. Each of these marks a step towards defining the landscape in our own terms, not taking things for granted and not accepting powerlessness in the face of adversity. In a world that seems relentless in trying to tear itself apart, we choose instead to come together, and to work together to make our dreams real. Powered by kindness and generosity, fueled by love. We do this because we can, and for some of us because we must. Because to do otherwise would be to surrender to the helplessness of the world.

“We make the world real through actions that open the heart.” – Larry Harvey

As the shadows lengthen on the playa, founders, elders and DPW team leaders each step up and take a turn at the cockeyed hammer, adding their individual intentions to the collective will. Coyote and his two sons, teenagers now. Mr. Clean and Crimson Rose. John Curley, who has covered this event so many times, taking a well-deserved victory lap after surviving the stroke that nearly took his life. They each say a few words and take a swing, one after the other, until the spike is barely visible above the dust. 

After the hammering is done and the spike is christened with a bottle of cheap champagne, it will be followed in turn by countless other spikes: the nearly 20,000 placement flags that demark our city’s neighborhoods. The stakes and posts and lag screws that hold everything up, anchoring the vertical to the horizontal. And a 9.2-mile trash fence to hold it all in, with close to 2,000 T-stakes, bounding a playground where we can act out the 10 Principles and try on different ways of being in the world.

Fence Day, August 2, 2024 — installing what will be the Black Rock City 2024 perimeter (Photos by Nick Cahill):

Like all ritual acts, the Golden Spike ceremony exists in an odd relationship to time. I’ve been coming out to the black Rock Desert for more than thirty years, and as I get older, each Burn seems closer to the others than it does to the adjacent weeks and months on the calendar. A series of liminal, luminal moments that are more connected with each other than with anything else; more Moebius strip than straight line, sinuous and continuous.

Every time is the first time. Every time could be the last time. And every time that hammer strikes steel, it’s a wake-up call to go out and make the world we want to live in.

Cover image of the Golden Spike, 2024 (Photo by Martin Rodriguez)