Scenes from that fiery festival

ON the morning after this review hits the paper, some 40,000 people will be waking up in their tents and domes and recreational vehicles on the inhospitable alkaline soil of a prehistoric lake bed in northern Nevada. They will blow their bloody noses clear of dust, they will rub balm on their cracking feet, and they will stumble, most of them at least half naked, to a row of fetid portable toilets a few hundred feet away from where they slept.

They will fire up their propane stoves for coffee, brush silt off their wind-battered folding chairs and watch the dirty parade of striped knee-highs and stilts and neon wigs. And they will realize, many of them, that they have never been happier in their lives.

It has been said that describing the Burning Man Festival to the uninitiated is a little like describing a color to a blind person. I think it's more like describing a color to someone who's colorblind but just won't admit it. The person imagines that the city rising in the Black Rock Desert the week before Labor Day (the festival runs today through Sept. 3) fits into some preconfigured idea: It's Woodstock or a Grateful Dead show or an acid trip in Malibu, 20 years back.

If you've been to Black Rock, you try to correct these people, stammering defensively about generosity and cool art and dressing up in a jeweled cocktail dress to ride your bike across the "playa," as geologists call this flat expanse. You tell them about that one dark morning in 1999 when you mistook the rising moon for someone's art. You insist you weren't on drugs.

Now, thanks to Jessica Bruder, a reporter for the Oregonian, you can simply hand these people "Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man" and let them come up with their own descriptions. Of all the books, films and YouTube videos that have attempted to interpret Burning Man for the "default" world, Bruder's project is among the few that allows you to plant yourself at the scene and wallow in it, with your faculties and filters unclouded by an author's personal agenda.

Bruder writes little about herself in "Burning Book," although her personal website reveals her as a frequent playa visitor who has done time in Paris and New York (she was once a staff writer for the New York Observer). But instead of venting all her wild times in her book, she does something monumental: She reports the story.