Baker Beach. Turn around and look at the bridge from here. This is the view — the full span, both towers, the Marin headlands behind it. Every postcard you've ever seen of the Golden Gate Bridge was essentially taken from this angle. And you're standing on it.
There's a concrete bunker built into the cliff behind you. That's Battery Chamberlin, and it contains one of the last surviving disappearing guns in the United States. Built in nineteen oh four, this is a fifty-ton cannon mounted on a counterweight system so clever it borders on ridiculous. Here's how it works — the gun fires, and the recoil from its own shot pushes it backward and downward behind the concrete wall. It fires, and then it hides. The same force that kills you is the force that protects it. When the crew is ready to fire again, a counterweight lifts the gun back up over the wall. Twenty-five soldiers operated this thing. You can still see it — the Park Service demonstrates it on the first weekend of every month. Fi
fty tons of disappearing artillery, operated like a popup book.
Now. Something completely different happened on this beach, and it's the reason about seventy thousand people spend a week in the Nevada desert every August.
On the summer solstice of nineteen eighty-six, a man named Larry Harvey called his friend Jerry James and said — and I'm paraphrasing — let's build a wooden man and burn him on
