I would like to address the erroneous notion that this panel somehow depicts the extinction of Polyphylla elutus, a type of June bug, in the fires of Burning Man. Come on, people! This GLP comic was published more than a month before Yost’s first encounter* with the Burning Man event in late August, 1991.
Polyphylla elutus is more commonly known as the Asinnuya or Salty Salt Ghost Beetle, although I don’t know if one should say that it is commonly known at all, since it is a rare little beast. It is closely related to the Death Valley June beetle, and its native habitat was a type of grass known as Uyashegara that grew only in a few places near the playa in the Black Rock Desert. People recently noticed (in a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity, August 2019) that the Uyashegara grass has seemingly disappeared, along with the Salty Salt Ghost Beetle. It is not certain if the two species are now extinct; the beetle had been barely studied, and the grass not at all.
Yost became familiar with the playa landscape in both the wet and the dry seasons during visits to his Aunt Rhy as a boy. The woman Yost knew as Rhy MacChesney was born as Baliye Casutti in a repressive society governed by an authoritarian Fascistic regime that was not the United States. Yost’s father had accidently helped her escape to America before Yost was born. His aid had been mostly inadvertent and rather involuntary, yet Ralph Yost still felt partly responsible for her situation, so he helped her forge a new (and illegal) identity as his half-sister.
The woman became Rhy MacChesney, widow of a fictitious husband she would sometimes call “my dear Herbert” or “my dear Hank”. She disappeared into the wilds of the American West for many years, but one summer when Yost was six years old, she resumed contact with Yost’s father. She wrote him a letter bragging that she was now a “wealthy woman of property” and he should visit her and bring his family. She had somehow acquired the deeds to a ghost town and an old sulfur/opal mine, and she was living near the playa in an abandoned house, which she called “a quaint Victorian fixer-upper”.
Above is the face of a Salty Salt Ghost Beetle interpreted as a mask by Alice Aroumbeyski, then adapted as a part of a composition for a stained glass window. Aroumbeyski’s greatest fame as an artist was built on her designs for stained glass, masks, tattoos and printed fabrics.
*Yost’s first Burning Man experience was a positive one, but in subsequent years the joys of the event sharply declined. He attended a total of four festivals over five years, until his last Burning Man in 1996, which he described as “mostly tedious, occasionally horrific”.
Vraicking 