The Mausoleum at Burning Man 2001

Douglas Adams was remembered in the Mausoleum

I want to let you know about something very special that happened to us at the Burning Man festival (an art/radical self expression event held by 25,000 intelligent people in the Black Rock desert of Nevada each summer). Galen and I were walking on the "playa" as the flat lakebed is known and we came across this year's most poignant art installation, the Mausoleum, a two story jigsaw puzzle wooden pagoda created by an artist who lost both his wife and his artistic partner the previous year.

The artist explaining the meaning
of the Mausoleum for all present

This installation was swarming with people, some crying. The purpose of the installation was to allow people to inscribe names of loved ones lost on the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the structure or on wooden blocks. On the final night of the festival, this structure was to be burned, sending tens of thousands of messages to the spirits of those departed. In the very heart of the structure was an altar on which the main repository of signed wooden blocks was placed.