Burning Man

A chance question to my cousin, who called from New York, produced an interesting response.  I asked him what he was doing for his summer holidays and he replied he was going to Burning Man. What’s that I asked. He explained and I was fascinated. Every year, around Labor Day, a city is constructed in the desert in Nevada called Black Rock and then a week later totally destroyed. The buzz word is radical inclusiveness, one of ten principles of Burning Man. There is no money or sponsorship and the life style is the free and easy one of the hippy commune. The arts flourish. I asked my cousin what he contributed. He said he painted and adorned naked bodies, which did not sound too trying a vocation for a vacation.

It’s the sort of event that only the United States would put on. It started – where else – in San Francisco but found its new home, albeit for seven days, when numbers mushroomed to some 65,000. I asked my cousin where he stays. He rents a large camper and sleeps in it. The crucial thing, he says, is the burning of the place at the end, which must be – as they say – kinda funky.

I wonder if we would  ever a Burning  Man in the highlands. Somehow I think not.