How our journey to Burning Man helped fuel Fernwood’s artistic transformation by John Threlfall

Look around Fernwood today and you’ll see a neighbourhood enlivened by community-engaged art: the wishing tree, little free libraries, so many murals and, of course, all those painted telephone poles. But while Fernwood has always been funky, it took a trip to Burning Man to bring one of the neighbourhood’s most defining creative features into being.

In early 1999, I was sharing one of Fernwood’s then-dilapidated/ now-gentrified Victorian houses with my then-girlfriend/now-wife Beth and a rotating crew of friends and roommates; back in those carefree raver days, this eclectic mix of workers and students always seemed up for a bit of mind-expanding partying. I had read an article in Wired about a relatively new festival called Burning Man that was quite literally lighting up Nevada’s Black Rock Desert with music, art and fire; around the same time, I also started hearing murmurs about it through the electronica community, this thing that was like a rave but based on a core principle of radical self-reliance.

Teetering on the cusp of the millennium, we were intrigued enough to take Prince’s advice and party like it was 1999 (because it was), so Beth and I each plunked down $65 USD and joined 23,000 other seekers making the trek to “the playa” that summer. (By way of comparison, 87,000 people paid $900 USD to attend Burning Man in 2025.) Now that Burning Man’s 30-year public history has been so heavily documented by mainstream and social media, it’s hard  to imagine a time when it was ever mysterious; but cell phones and the internet had yet to dominate in 1999, so we didn’t really know what to expect. But when we received our tickets and official “Survival Guide” in the mail — which came with the warning “YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING” — we knew we were in for more than just a desert rave.

With our accommodation arranged (1979 Dodge camper van), we readied ourselves to make the 2,600-kilometre round trip and survive a week in a 16-square-kilometre slice of the high-altitude Black Rock Desert, where temperatures range from 0 to 42 C. This meant being prepared for sun (SPF 50), cold (overcoat), dust (masks, goggles), wind (rebar, sledgehammer), dehydration (hydration backpacks, six 20-litre water jugs), distance (bikes) and dancing (a wide range of PVC, fun-fur and glittery spandex). But that was all just gear: the experience was something else again.

During our inaugural week, we lay on a bed of nails, got spray-dyed head-to-foot, checked out a sex-swing camp, watched a symphony of fire cannons, danced on the hull of a surfacing submarine, witnessed a man catch lightning from a truck-size tesla coil, came face-to-face with a 10-foot praying mantis, narrowly escaped being trapped in a wind-toppled bank of porta potties, rode our bikes with eyes closed across a desert so vast and flat that it showed the curvature of the earth and shed tears of cathartic joy as a 20-foot wooden effigy burned to glowing embers.

It’s a ridiculous understatement to say we were both changed by our first year at Black Rock City: while the dust, glitter and exhaustion we brought back with us came as no surprise, we never anticipated how our sense of art and community would be utterly transformed as well. (“Art” being the best term to apply to the innumerable hands-on installations and happenings we encountered, day and night.) Before going to Burning Man, art was something we generally saw in a gallery; now, we knew it could also be a creative experience that exponentially engaged a community.

Like many converted Burners, our one-time trip turned into a multiyear commitment which only stopped so we could start our family (our home-birthed kids were quite literally born and raised less than two blocks from the Belfry). And although we haven’t been back to Black Rock City since our playa marriage in 2001, our spirits have never stopped burning: we still strive to bring Burning Man’s creative lessons into our lives — and community — on a daily basis.

Having swapped roommates and raves for children and playdates, we started looking at our own post-burn community through the rose-coloured dust of our playa goggles and saw it shine with creative potential. Back in the early 2000s, Fernwood was suffering from a blight of unsightly graffiti, particularly on the telephone poles lining the main drag. Brandishing her artistic licence, Beth painted the pole outside our rental home, which intrigued our neighbours and led to another, then another, then . . . ka-boom! Having experienced first-hand how creativity could make a desert bloom with art, we realized we could apply those same skills: so it was that the Pole Painting Project was born and Fernwood (indeed, Victoria) would never look the same again.

From hands-on pole painting and community mural projects to cardboard castles, little free libraries, extravagant Halloween driveway installations, collaborations with both neighbourhood associations and the simple but still radical act of having conversations with strangers, the three years we spent at Burning Man have now fueled over 20 years of creative contributions to Fernwood. Ideas born in that crucible of dust and self-reliance have given us both the initiative and confidence to engage others in bringing our creative concepts to life. Some call it community building; to us, it’s just magic.

While Beth and I are intimately familiar with how Burning Man changed our own lives (we’re still finding traces of playa dust nearly 25 years later!), people are often surprised to discover how our time in Black Rock City also transformed Fernwood itself. And as long as our own creativity keeps burning bright, that’s a fire that will never die.

John Threlfall is a local writer and community builder who’d be a DJ if he were 30 years younger.