A lady as old as my mother, wearing a tie-dyed wedding dress, had offered to paint me that morning, and she'd done a great job. I wasn't naked, but the parts of me that were showing were decorated with elaborate mandalas laid on with colored zinc. Everyone's supposed to be doing stuff and, yeah, also admiring everyone else's stuff (hence all the cameras).
"Spectator" is a vicious insult in Black Rock City. Fifty thousand people show up in this incredibly harsh, hot, dusty environment and build a huge city-Black Rock City-and participate. Everyone agrees that playa-foot sucks.īurning Man is a festival held every Labor Day weekend in the middle of Nevada's Black Rock Desert. They call it playa-foot, when the alkali dust dries out your skin so much that it starts to crack and peel. I understood that: playa dust is hard on your feet.
Also, the man holding the balloon was naked. I turned around slowly to get a panorama and saw that the man walking past me was holding the string for a gigantic helium balloon a hundred yards overhead, from which dangled a digital video camera. Everything was ruggedized for the fine, blowing dust, mostly through the simple expedient of sticking it in a ziplock bag, which is what I'd done with my phone. Pretty much everyone was holding a camera of some kind-mostly phones, of course, but also big SLRs and even old-fashioned film cameras, including a genuine antique plate camera whose operator hid out from the dust under a huge black cloth that made me hot just to look at it. But the wind had just kicked up, and there was a lot of playa dust-fine gypsum sand, deceptively soft and powdery, but alkali enough to make your eyes burn and your skin crack-and after two days in the desert, I had learned that it was better to be hot than to choke. The sun was high, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and breathing through the embroidered cotton scarf made it even more stifling. I adjusted my burnoose, covering up my nose and mouth and tucking its edge into place under the lower rim of my big, scratched goggles. Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.
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