Terminal Beach Party

Many moons ago, a crusty old Chinese anarchist wrote that "we shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want." Now I'm standing on clay, a blank 400 square-mile alkaline slab in northern Nevada know as the Black Rock Desert. I'm submerged in emptiness. Sixty thousand years ago, this parched playa was Lake Lahontan; twelve years ago its supremely flat surface helped some British racing nuts break the world land speed record. Nothing...