Burning Man and Bikes

This time of year, ecclectics from all over the world come to San Francisco with hopes and dreams of acquiring a bicycle for $100 or less and decorating it lavishly for the Burning Man Festival.

If you don't know what Burning Man is, read here.

Once said bicycles are acquired, you can expect the frames and wheels to become decorated brightly with colorful tapes, fabrics, streamers, plaster, and even encrusted in shiny jewels and mirrors.

Think "scraper bikes," but for white people.

As a pure outsider to the event, (I've never attended, nor will i ever. But working at a bicycle shop, its inevitable I'm tangentially related to the procurement process of said festival for out-of-towners.) I've noticed a change in the demographic in the 3 years I've lived in The City. (I capitalized "The City" because it shows my acquired San Fran-centric perspective. . . that happens when you live here for a few years. Oh look, now its capitalized AND in quotations. Cool!) OK, Sorry for the digression.

Burning Man has become an even larger scale attraction in its worldwide grasp. Just yesterday, we had "to-be Burners" floating in from such distant lands as Australia, England, Canada, etc. They were all dressed very differently, spoke differently and had different visions of their ideal Burning Man bike-to-be, but all had one thing in common. . . CREDIT CARDS. They had money to spend and were willing to buy buy buy.

However, despite the cost of flying across the world, lodging, food, a $300 admission fee for said festival, and the cost of decorating a bike for the cause, nobody wants to spend a large amount of money on the bikes for a good reason: they get ruined in the desert. The salinity of the sand and dust in "the playa" (playa means beach is Spanish, so I have no fucking idea why people call the desert flats a "playa") causes bicycle parts to rust FAST. One would never want to bring their daily rider bicycle to Burning Man because it causes all the moving parts to gunk up and fast forwards their life span to an unservicable state within a month or so. While it is possible to take a nice bike there, return home, and overhaul every single moving part of the bicycle and return it to a functional state- this is rarely done.

Why? Decompression parties. That means at least a month of after-parties to get you off of "Burning-Man Time." Who has time to overhaul their bikes when all these sweet decompression parties are going on in SF, Bro?!

Anyways, it makes no sense to bring a nice bike out there, since it would get ruined. Ideally, one acquires a barely functional bike at a garage sale or on craigslist for dirt cheap, and as PT says "just make at least one gear and one brake work and its good to go."

The last minute procrastinators can peruse every bike shop in the city and find nothing. Bike shops sell bikes that work. It costs time and money to make a used bike functional, and bike prices are inflated here. Its pretty rare to find a $100 bike in San Francisco, ESPECIALLY at a bike shop. And if/when that exists, its scooped up immediately. There aren't enough deals like that to supply every eccentric person's Burning Man needs.

Here is an interesting, yet slightly peeving, snippet of a conversation I had with some neo-hippy Australian Burners yesterday.

Woman Burner: "I bet you can guess what we are here looking for." (That was cool, because she was real about why a group of 4 oddly dressed eccentrics floated into our shop)

Me: "Haha. I'm sorry, we did have some cheap bikes, but they are all gone."

Woman: "WHERE IS THE NEAREST WAL-MART?"

Me: "There isn't one in The City. Nearest one is at least 15 miles South of The City." (there i go again, ha!)

Woman: "Hmm, bummer. Actually, thats kind of awesome."

Me: "EXACTLY. SF is a pretty cool place."

She was right. The conversation itself wasn't peeving, since the woman was pretty cool. But the idea that such a free-spirited person would travel transcontinentally, buy a product which supports the most evil of evil corporate stores, to attend a festival created to foster free thinking and non-commercialism. . . is just a sham.