Ladies and gentlemen, I just returned from a business, week-long sojourn in the desert, and let me tell you, dear readers, I have witnessed the American dream in all its splendid multiplicity! I have seen the eye of Sauron up close, and the stars and stripes were reflected back at me!

This whole thing started barely a month ago. People I don’t know terribly well alluded to taking my lady friend and I along on a dusty adventure out in beautiful Black Rock City, Nevada. There’s a yearly event there, you may have heard of it. Immolating Gent, I believe it to be called. Scorching Fellow. Something.

This year’s theme, the American dream, was so seamlessly integrated into the very nature of the event that, this being my first year out, I couldn’t imagine anything else being represented by what all those people were doing.

Apparently, the rights to explosives, nudity and free booze figure prominently in the American dream. Every other person you meet is completely naked, drunk and lit by the glow of extravagant pyrotechnic display. Every other tent, parachute or Easy-Up is a bar. Everything is unbearably loud.

Those things are part of a much larger American sensibility, that of radical self-expression – part of the dual-tenet that defines the event, along with radical self-reliance.

Being charged with this assignment, a detailed report for you in Hornetland on this event and its ramifications on the American dream, gave me a degree of purpose to my visit. I pursued it, relentlessly, through its many incarnations.

After an exhaustive journey through a great Western American puddle (Reno), we made our way through the Pyramid Lake Reservation, out to the periphery of the playa; from the edge of that great Pleistocene lake bed, the journey into the city is only a few weird miles.

“Is that part of the American Dream?” my lady friend inquired, gesturing toward a burned-out husk of an old car that heralded the Mad Max spirit that dominated the week.

Before I continue on, let me just say that strange things happen out there on the playa. Things American science has yet to fully explain.

Everything was not altogether foreign, but strange nonetheless. Just driving onto the playa, one is witness to 30, 40-thousand encampments of various degrees of complexity and theme illuminated by the light of the endless, seemingly purposeless firing off of fireworks, and the ungodly lasers beaming clotheslines across the entire city, four miles in diameter. The sound of the place is no less overwhelming: The din of that many thousands of people all doing exactly and only what they want to provides too much information to effectively focus on.

“Exactly what they want to,” ah, there’s the rub. I don’t know that this is specific to Black Rock City (seventh largest city in Nevada, for that week), or unique to the American dream overlay the place had this year, but that spirit – radical individualism, I could call it – ruled the day out there.

As you can imagine, this lends itself to a mind-bending array of personage being represented. Naked and malformed people with what appear to be still-living animals wrapped around their midsections stumbling around on stilts, barely avoid hitting the bondage-freak couple tethered together (bikes and all), unlit in the new-moon blackness of the desert.

All the more fascinating to me, however, was what these people did outside of Black Rock, in the “real world,” a phrase uttered with a degree of sadness and aversion. At a campsite directly neighboring ours was a young man of East Indian descent from Washington D.C. who’d recently tossed off the shackles of his job, writing loan application software for Fannie Mae. He couldn’t be happier wandering the country. That was his American dream. Apparently, it had come to him in the wake of millions of other dreams destroyed by the credit crisis. I daresay he had a better idea of what the American dream wasn’t than most.

A quick word about the environment to any potential road warriors in my sphere of influence: The entire surface of Black Rock City is covered in a layer of what seems like sand, initially, but you soon discover it to be a much more horrible, evil substance entirely. It’s dust, which means that the regularly 30-plus mph winds create effective whiteout conditions. The official survival guide recommends goggles and a dust-mask. The dust alone, wind notwithstanding, is so salty and chock-full of alkali that it can strip the paint right off of your car and destroy delicate instruments like feet, hands and lips.

This place is no joke: Serious campers only, desperate freaks welcome. Have I discouraged you, in the casual camp? I hope so.

Every possible proclivity is represented out there, including – wait for it – a Thunderdome. Actual Thunderdome-sans Tina Turner where strangers beat each other to a pulp from hanging bungee-like contraptions. In the few minutes I was a part of the bloodthirsty mob clambering up the sides of the place, I saw a bloody nose and a shoulder dislocation. I was happy.

These are the things that make Black Rock City that last, great bastion of that most American of fascinations, the Wild West. Anything goes, everyone’s intoxicated and you need to mind survival at all times.

Maybe, all my snarky remarks aside, those are the defining traits of the American dream, certainly of the American West. Radical self expression and radical self reliance. I think I’ll do what I want, thank you very much, and I’ll get by just fine in so doing.

Cody Bishop can be reached at [email protected]