The World May Well Be Held Together by an Eyeglass Screw

My gaze swung languidly across the barren ground like a sauntering elephant’s trunk. I was scanning the playa surface for the umpteen-thousandth time, when my Zen reverie was disrupted by a pattern change. [It’s all about pattern changes, you see. You’re not really looking for Matter Out of Place (MOOP) per se, you’re actually just searching for other than beige, or not the shape of a playa crack].

This post is part of the Consider Your Impact series

When that metallic glint caught my eye, my heart ratcheted up for a quick beat. I dug down into the dark crevice with my chafed fingers and plucked out a single tiny eyeglass screw. I held it in front of my face and beamed at it, before reverently dropping it in my sawed-off plastic milk jug. I was ecstatic. Then I looked up.

You could say I came to … my brain made an almost audible click. It suddenly dawned on me that I was standing in the vast expanse of the Black Rock Desert, with no more than a few dozen or so people around me, and nothing else. For a good 20 miles in any direction, there was literally nothing except a vast expanse of nothing. And I was completely psyched having just collected a ridiculously small eyeglass screw.

How did I possibly end up in this situation?

Short answer: Burning Man.

DPW lines up for a line sweep (Photo by Aaron “Slim” Muszalski)

It was the Fall of 2003, and I’d been to Burning Man twice by then. I’d gotten bit by the bug (as happens), and when I found myself with some time to spare, I aimed myself at an intriguingly adventurous project to blow it on: playa restoration following that year’s Burning Man event. 

And so there I was, together with a small crew of misfits, in this barren, forbidding and vast expanse, picking up ridiculously small pieces of detritus left behind by tens of thousands (30,586 to be specific) of fully activated Burning Man participants. As it had been for years, our goal was to reduce the amount of trash in what had been Black Rock City to no more than one square foot of debris per acre – that’s the equivalent of a record album cover paper shredded and scattered across land the size of a football field. Which is to say, ridiculously clean.

MOOP’s gonna MOOP (Photo by Dominic “DA” Tinio)

In 2006, the BLM would formalize that measurement, locking it at a requirement of 99.998% cleanliness, and sometimes they’d do this inspection not just once but twice a year, once in the Fall and once in the Spring, to see what popped up over the winter freeze. This was no joke. The barren playa needed to stay barren.

Now’s probably a good time to drive the point home that we’ve successfully passed every BLM post-event inspection since its inception in 1999. You know this already though, since the stick backing up that insane requirement is that if we fail, no more Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert.

If you take nothing else away from this story, let it be this: there’s no way in hell this could be accomplished without every last person on playa doing their part to get everything down to what a small restoration crew can handle before the fall rains set in. Pack it in, pack it out. Line sweeps around your camping areas and art installations. Nabbing the tiny metal bits with magnet rakes. Picking up as you go. Picking up not only your shit, but any shit you find. All of the things.

Peep this amazing video about Playa Resto by Shalaco Sching. Srsly.

We each play our individual part, together with our neighbors, for the benefit of the whole community. Or to translate into 10 Principles-speak: Radical Self-reliance and Communal Effort, meet Civic Responsibility. Hang out for a while, maybe make out. Because that’s how we get it done. 

So I’m standing there on the empty playa, feeling kinda like an idiot with an eyeglass screw in my hand and a loopy grin on my face, wondering where things went wrong in my life, when it clicks in my head that while this seems incredibly stupid, this is incredibly important because the role I play and the ripples of my actions affect everybody else. We’re all interconnected, one way or another. We’re talking about Black Rock City here, but the same goes for the larger world — the sooner we realize that, the better off we’ll all be, right? Right.

Every action you take — reducing your packaging before you hit the road, picking stuff up, battening down your camp before a windstorm, talking to others about LNT, sharing your tips, or really (really) securing your load atop your vehicle before you head out — has an impact. So when you’re standing there holding whatever your version of an eyeglass screw is, wondering if it matters, know that it 100% does f*cking matter. And it’s worth it. 

[This post is part of our ‘Consider Your Impact’ series, where we’re telling stories that explore our community’s known and lesser-known effects on not just the Black Rock Desert itself, but the world around us as well. We hope it will raise awareness and inspire you to, well, consider your impact. Hence the name.]


Top photo: “Insanity” by Jessica Panuccio (Photo by )

About the author: Will Chase

Will Chase

Will Chase is Burning Man's former Minister of Propaganda, working on global communications strategy. He was the editor-in-chief for the Jackrabbit Speaks newsletter and the Burning Man Journal, and content manager for Burning Man’s web properties. He also oversaw the ePlaya BBS and Burning Man’s social media presence. Will first attended Burning Man in 2001. He volunteered as the Operations Manager for the ARTery (Black Rock City’s art HQ) and was on the Burning Man Art Council from 2003-2008. He was Web Team Project Manager and Webmaster from 2004 until he transitioned to the Communications Department in 2009.

14 Comments on “The World May Well Be Held Together by an Eyeglass Screw

  • Kiliee says:

    Just clean it up and stop pretending you’re doing something spiritual.

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  • Chris Hainsworth says:

    Paying that close attention to nature IS pretty fucking spiritual. It’s in the definition

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    • James says:

      Great. I feel closer to God now… Where do I put the trash?

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    • Burnerswillburnalive2019 says:

      Keep telling yourself that when there are thousands of bikes bought and left on the playa, tons of wood being burnt polluting the air, as well as all the trash you elitists throw out in Gerlach as well as on the side of the road. Yes, SOOOO environmentally friendly. This comment is an NPC meme for days….

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      • David Stellar says:

        Yes, there are bad burners. Don’t know what you mean by ‘elitists’ though or what that has to do with the small number that do dump trash by the side of the road.

        Don’t think it’s a small number? Imagine what the road would look like if all 70k attendees dumped trash. A different story.

        The reality is that you and most of Black Rock City are on the same side – none of us want that trash by the side of the road, and there will always be bad actors in any large enough society.

        But your handle.. “Burnerswillburnalive2019” – implies that you might be an example of a bad actor in your society – is that supposed to be some sort of threat? Either way it’s not particularly funny to attack people like that, just as it’s not funny to dump your trash along the side of the road.

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  • SK says:

    What’s a record album?

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  • MAGMA says:

    PLAYA~TIME CAPSULE CHECKLIST:

    (1) Pair plastic dayglo-pink sunglass with loose arm (missing screw)… [CHECK]

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  • Rio says:

    I’ve been looking for that screw!

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  • Honey Bee says:

    Thanks, Resto! You guys rock!

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  • RonL says:

    OMG!
    That eyeglass screw could have been mine. First day on the playa and a lens fell out of my glasses. Searched hard for that screw because there were many days on the playa ahead and I can’t see at all without that lens. Panicked, I check with others as to whether they have a repair kit. No, no, and no. Finally, Alan says that he has a solution. Pulls out one of those bag closers (paper with a wire through it that holds it shut when twisted), strips off the paper (carefully putting it in his pocket so as not to MOOP) and threads the wire through the glasses and secures the lens. It held for the rest of the Burn. Thanks, Alan, and thanks for the memory.

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  • Crissa Kentavr says:

    I’ve found blinkie lights, still working. Flashlights, even. The most common are bits of zip ties in our moop bin.

    But I’ve also found hammer-forged carriage bolts and square-headed hand-cut nails out in the deep playa, too. Things which probably were out there over fifty to a hundred years, and yet…

    When it came back up, we picked it up and plonked it into the recycling bin.

    What are the odds?

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  • Kenny Reff says:

    Nice to read your prose again, Will.

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  • I don’t think it’s only elitists that are dumping on society. We all need to do better with responsibly dealing with trash. It doesn’t belong on the road. We can do better.

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