national geographic

When I was a little kid my family used to travel to Kansas to visit my grandparents' farm. The farm was peppered with old stone outbuildings and dilapidated wooden sheds, as well as the occasional hayloft and railroad boxcar and whatnot. And all of these building were full of forgotten relics from bygone eras -- horse drawn sleighs; model-T era vehicles; ancient mechanical tabulators; half-buried stone slabs being slowly swallowed by vegetation, with the shadows of giant hand-carved letters still vaguely discernable. And the fortress in the center of this realm was my grandparents' house, an ancient stone mansion that had been vacant and slowly falling into ruin when my grandparents moved there.  

Like the rest of the realm, the mansion itself was full of odd corners and old chests full of strange artifacts. Beneath the fortress were two separate stone cellars -- catacombs full of the remnants of ages past. Among the dusty incunabula of the western cellar were scores of old issues of National Geographic. Superficially each issue looked the same, even across decades of issues. Each issue was exactly the same size and weight, and each had that same solid yellow band framing the cover photo, like some kind of gold standard of publishing dignity. But inside each different issue were windows to different worlds -- jungles and deserts and savannas inhabited by practically naked people with skin the color of dark rich soil, or golden wheat, or pitch black coal. And in half the photos the people were engaged in incomprehensible rituals, wielding unfathomable weapons or tools or talismans.

And now a quarter century has gone by, and my grandparents are dead and the artifacts of their realm are scattered far and wide. And I have slowly grown old and moved on to other interests in life, rarely taking time to spend a hot summer afternoon slowly pouring over the strange pages of National Geographic. But today was an exception. Today I went to the library, and drew down from the racks the August 2001 issue of National Geographic, and found a solitary corner to sit in, and reverently turned through the pages one by one until I was at page 6. And I sat there alone in quiet awe, studying the strange photo before me. The photo is of a naked woman, with skin the color of shimmering silver sardine scales, wielding a giant brass instrument, moving by the power of her own legs on a simple one-wheeled vehicle across a barren desert playa. Only this time I recognize the woman in the photo. It's my friend Erin, at Burning Man.

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Unfortunately the photo of Erin isn't included in the on-line version of National Geographic, but nonetheless here's the original article. 

And here's an amusing story from Salon.com -- "Burning Man culture clash: Is the National Geographic Society trying to wipe out an already-extinct tribe of revelers?"