Sunday, September 3
Stories are told about how difficult it can be to leave the playa, and we're talking traffic jam here, not just emotional attachment, but the stream of cars passing in front of us never seems to come to a halt. Individual vehicles do break out of line so people can deposit spare food and water for the Department of Public Works personnel, who will be out here cleaning up until October 2nd, the BLM deadline by which the playa most be restored as closely as possible to its original condition. Otherwise, it's an orderly exodus, and by the time we're packed up and ready to leave in early afternoon, there's no delay in getting out the gates. Tarn and I wave goodbye to Jonah, Walter, and Laurel, who turn left for Reno and the interstate back to the Bay Area. We head the other way, over to the Smoke Creek and Michael Moore's place for a shower, dinner, and a night's rest before driving up to Portland.

Michael and Linda have had a hectic summer, as it turns out, closing the deal on a building in Benecia, while Linda negotiated with the Neiman Marcus people for the large sculpture she'll build for their new downtown San Francisco store. Michael's painted 76 watercolors, which are pinned up in a grid on the high living room walls, as well as 13 larger acrylics. Many, many mirages on the Black Rock were done from memory while he was in Colorado, their doubled horizons hovering in that peculiar indeterminate space created by temperature discontinuities above the playa. "In order to depict particles suspended in dry air," Linda notes of his technique, "you actually use more water in the paint." Ever the teacher as well as the artist, she enjoys the mild irony.

I look at the mirages, those miracles of visual inversion that hover temporarily two or three miles out in front of us, and think about the ephemerality of Burning Man, about how the playas of the West form and reform their surfaces each year, about the burning of David's house that became a sculpture and then a templeäand then disappeared. I lean back on the couch facing the small paintings and daydream about Michael Heizer's "Nine Nevada Depressions," all of which have long since filled in, and the geoglyphs of the Indians, which are being picked apart by teenagers to be reformed as new messages.

The playas are equally about absence and presence, a visual field that almost demands that we re-create ourselves because out there, on the largest, flattest, and clearest places on land that we can find, there's no illusion of permanence, hence no reason to not do so. Nowhere else can we see the ground upon which we stand be swept so clean. It may take awhile -- there are still shell casings sitting out on surface at the far north end of the Black Rock playa, where fighter planes emptied machine gun clips at targets during WW II -- but the silts continue to accumulate each year, and the waters come and go, smoothing out the relics and the memories. Eventually the old munitions will sink into the earth along with everything else, just as the continent itself will someday be subsumed into the earth's mantle by larger tectonic forces.

And if the earth recreates itself on a regular basis, it would seem there might be reason for us to do so as well.

Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday

Excerpted from PLAYA WORKS: THE MYTH OF THE EMPTY by William L. Fox.
Copyright © 2002 by University of Nevada Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty William L. Fox
240 pages, 8 color photos, 22 black & white photos, 1 map, hardcover, 0-87417-523-2,
$24.95
Environmental Arts and Humanities Series

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