Nude in the desert

When she stopped holding the fires, attendees Larry Harvey and Jerry James kept them going, with a twist — in , the bonfire was an eight-foot-tall wooden man. After the man was ignited, a bystander ran forward and shook the burning man's hand. The wind had shifted slightly, blowing the flames so she was unharmed. The increasingly spectacular pyrotechnic event was halted in by park police as a fire hazard. The zone would feature dadaist performance art and free expression. Harvey and James packed up their now foot flammable giant and brought it to Black Rock Desert for the first gathering.

The desert taught me to be naked the fall I was 18, stepping nervously out of my shorts and sports bra on the tamarisk-choked banks of the San Juan. Above us, Mexican Hat rose tilted and precarious, looking less like a sombrero than a red cartoon anvil set to drop. Six of us stood barefoot in the mud: three women and three men. Nakedness seemed inextricable from rebellion. It had to do with drunkenness, with sex, which to me seemed both terrifying and wrong. More than that, I hated my body.

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