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    How do you explain Burning Man to someone who's never gone? Writing about the festival tends to fall into two categories; the first is dry, scientific, an attempt not only to capture the ineffable but to render it lifeless. The second is a kind of hippie travelogue, a "what Burning Man means to me" that comes off as so much pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Language is inadequate to convey the experience…but the truth is, it's all we have.

    Where do you start? Perhaps with the fragrance of the earth itself, here in the alkali dust of the Black Rock Desert. It's creamy white, as fine as talcum, and studded with small black stones that give the desert its name. It smells a bit like clay, a bit like the heat of a steam iron. It's electrically conductive, slightly radioactive, gets into everything. Its extreme alkalinity makes it death to metal, electronics, fabric-nearly everything that makes life possible for the 21st century human. And most of us love it with the passion of religion or family.

    Of course, Burning Man didn't always take place on the Black Rock. It all started in San Francisco, when a jilted Larry Harvey built an 8-foot wooden man on the beach and torched it in an attempt at self-transformation. A friend clasped the effigy's hand as it burned, and an idea was born. This year's Burning Man attracted 28,000 participants from around the world.

    At its most basic, Burning Man is a temporary city. Through the winter, that fine, fantastic dust is covered by shallow water and ice, and the surface remembers its past as a prehistoric lakebed. In spring it dries, and the set-up crews filter out onto its expanse. Throughout the summer, they grade streets and build structures, laying out the horseshoe-shaped city. Finally they drive a gold-painted spike into the center where the Man will be built. The Department of Public Works, as they are called, are often a group of marginalized people, misfits-people who can take eight months off to build something out of nothing. They are also people with skills-carpentry, construction, wiring. Wisdom has it that anyone who stays out on the Black Rock for more than a few weeks loses their mind. As such the DPW the rarest of the rare, the craziest of us all.