Playa Works: The Myth Of The Empty

Rediscovery: An Afterword

Rediscovery: An Afterword 193 Rediscovery An Afterword 194 PlayaWorks Two weeks after Burning Man and I’m already back on the Black Rock, this time with the photographer Mark Klett to work on a small collaborative book about the playa for the University of Arizona Press. A series of prose and photographic meditations, it will offer us a chance to work beyond the confines of our trips taken with the Third View team each summer, which are a continuation of the Rephotographic Survey Project done by Mark and others in the 1970s. That “Second View” project retraced work done by the nineteenth-century exploration photographers a hundred years earlier; the Third View is exactly that, a third look, this time done after an interval of only twenty years. Mark works as the principal photographer for the team, which includes several other artists and myself as the writer of the field notes. In contrast, then, to the more clearly defined summer work, this is an opportunity to investigate a place where it’s only the terrain that’s been predetermined and not specific vantage points for photographs and text. We’ve convinced Alvin McLane, given his intimate knowledge of both the terrain and the history of the Black Rock, to join us for three of the four days we’ll spend out here. We roll through Gerlach early on a Sunday evening and drive up along the western edge of the playa looking for a small draw with a stream and some sheltering cottonwoods where Alvin and I have camped before. Turning off on the dirt road, we’re soon stopped by a new fence erected by a corporation, Bright-Holland, the name of which none of us recognizes. Fuming, we backtrack to a more exposed site, one with a trashed-out fire ring but that’s still open to the public. Our spirits recover somewhat over dinner as we watch the headlights of about fifty motorcycles advancing in a line up the far side of the playa,their motive a mystery.While a huge harvest moon is rising, fireworks explode silently in the sky to the east, and we later learn that the riders were conducting a wake for a fallen comrade. The next day, we drive out north in Alvin’s Jeep across the flats to the Black Rock itself,the four-hundred-foot-high outcropping of dark Rediscovery: An Afterword 195 sedimentary and volcanic rocks that was used as a landmark by every explorer and emigrant coming through since Frémont was the first Euro-American to cross the playa. Located about eighteen miles from the Burning Man camp, it had been just far enough away that we couldn’t see it, and I had felt peculiar about being in the middle of the playa without that specific reference point. Mark rides up front for his first trip across the playa, a 70-mph drive along the centermost of the three semi-established roads that cross the desert and are usable only in the summer and fall.Off to our right in the distance are two portable toilets, a forklift, and what appears to be a group of people standing in a line on the desert. It’s the forty-person cleanup crew from Burning Man working a grid, cleaning up the site of the city block-by-block. This year the blm will test random transects within the former city limits, as well as outside it. They’ll take soil samples from each, compare the contents, and even weigh them to determine the residual impacts of the event. It looks like Will Roger, the head of the Burning Man Department of Public Works who has moved to Gerlach to be in charge of the site full time, is taking the cleanup successfully to a new level of obsession. Soon we’re at the far edge of the playa, defined here by a maze formed of phreatophyte mounds. These formations, generally two or three feet high, are formed by windblown sand collecting around the base of salt-tolerant plants, which make them grow just a little taller each year, and the mounds to accumulate just a bit higher. The process eventually places the plants on such a high pedestal that their roots can no longer reach water, whereupon they die and the mounds slowly disintegrate back down to ground level...