Burning man's piano mover: turning ruined instruments into a desert spectacle.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

STEVE HECK IS a thick Grendel of a man, with a long beard he hacks with a knife and ties off at the bottom. He can move a piano over a foot merely by smacking it with one hand.

He lives in a warehouse in Oakland. Plato would be amazed at how the Perfect Idea of clutter has entered the phenomenal world down this dismal Oakland side street. Heck inhabits two stories and a huge yard, and every inch except for a narrow walkway is cluttered with vehicles and wood piles and clothes and boats and engine parts and sculptures and appliances and magazines and lathes, everything Heck ever got his hands on, except the things that burned when his old house caught fire many years ago.

That fire imbued him with a calling. Heck had been a piano mover. His house was filled with so many pianos you had to walk over them to get through the living room. Suddenly he had hundreds of burnt pianos. He was seized by a compulsion to make something of his tragedy: the notion that nothing can leave his care until he has transformed it into art.

He makes versions of famous images out of any material at home: cracked porcelain, burned wood scraps, chunks of old books. He proudly shows me his Marilyn Monroes and an image recreating that famous picture of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot in the head. He's been fighting for years with city officials and landlords over his junk-besotted lifestyle. He feigns complete irrationality, so cops and code officials throw up their hands and give up. You'd call him insane with no compunction, if not for the intelligent lucidity with which he details his own obsessions.

Late in the summer of 1996 Heck had a vision of his burnt pianos in the desert. He had never been to Burning Man, the temporary city and arts fest that arises and disappears every year on Nevada's Black Rock desert playa, but he knew a couple of the event's organizers. He asked if he could bring his pianos and was told sure, bring 'em out.

So he brought them, and he dumped them on the desert floor. Someone drove by in a truck with some guys and asked Heck if he wanted to come with them for a hot spring soak. He went, and afterward they stopped in the town of Gerlach for dinner. Then they wanted to reload the truck with supplies, and Heck, who was desperate to realize his vision, rebelled. He stalked angrily away, no goodbyes.

Heck had paid no attention to how far from Gerlach the encampment was. So he walked. He hadn't drunk anything but rum since hitting the desert. As...