Wasted

The Uranium Springs Trilogy

By Mark Fernquest

I Left My Heart in Uranium Springs

When the sky burned and the cities of the old world imploded, spilling their starving millions out into the wasteland, the bikers seized the moment. In the midst of the Great Die Out, they formed roving cannibal bands and grew strong on human flesh. One by one the gangs merged, consolidating their power, until they alone prevailed. Now the dread motorcycle gang Machine Army rules the wasteland. And I, it.

At least that’s what I tell myself as I steer my stripped-down, 70 cc dirt bike through the orange sand of the Painted Desert. The sun blasts down, turning my leather battle jacket into a sweat-drenched inferno and my pupils into pinpoints. Thank God I’m wearing goggles, even if they’re caked with dirt and tropical on the inside. Wooden shacks pass by, doors creaking in the wind. Then the raw shriek of a muffler-free big block V8 splits the air, and an armored ‘77 Monte Carlo bounces into view, riding high on oversized, All Terrain tires and spitting black exhaust. A lone figure, swathed in rags and a leather cowboy hat, sits atop it. It’s the Rev’rend Lawless, on his infamous Rev Rod. Oh God, I think, skidding to a halt and raising my hand in cautious greeting: It has begun.

It isn’t every day I get to be General Car Killer, Maximum Leader of the cannibal biker gang known as Machine Army. Which is why once a year I drive the 15 hours from Santa Rosa, California to Uranium Springs, Arizona. Each May several hundred post-apocalyptic enthusiasts from across the United States gather there to indulge their end-of-the-world fantasies at a week-long festival known as Detonation. In an age where Burning Man represents the penultimate corporate desert party, Detonation provides revelers with a grittier, more personal experience.

We spend the week in post-apocalyptic attire, driving around dented off-road vehicles, conversing with tribemates and friends new and old, admiring the creativity of each others’ costumery, vehicles and campsites and—perhaps—occasionally breaking into insane soliloquies about the merits of eating cooked human flesh. It’s a small-enough event that a person can meet most everyone there in the course of a week.

This is why Uranium Springs may be my favorite town in the entire world.

I use the word “town” lightly, because Uranium Springs doesn’t officially exist. It’s 100 percent off-grid, located on 40 acres of private land deep in the Painted Desert in the northeast corner of Arizona, off Interstate 40 out past Meteor Crater. It feels more like a movie set than an actual town—a smattering of pallet shacks, gutted travel trailers, tents, wooden towers and bombed-out vehicles that arose out of the dust in the past eight years, hand-built by festival founders and attendees.

The origins of the post apocalyptic genre stretch back to the Mad Max movies of the late ’70s–early ’80s. In 2010, a Mad Max-themed event called Wasteland Weekend began in the Mojave desert outside California City, Calif. September, 2019 will mark Wasteland Weekend’s 10th year. In 2015, Fury Road, the fourth movie in the Mad Max series, reignited the franchise and introduced a new generation to the genre. Now, small PA events are popping up around the United States and the world. Detonation is my favorite.

The irony is that, in this age of real-life, slow-motion apocalypse—the plasticization of the oceans, increasingly destructive wildfires and the disintegration of political truth—pretend apocalypse in the form of old-fashioned marauders-in-the-desert escapist fantasy spells good times for so many. It’s the 21st century-version of the Wild West, where motorcycles replace horses and gasoline replaces gold.

The Machine Army camp is a 50×50 plot of weedy sand. Plopped in the middle of it is a tire fort constructed of 105 discarded tires I purchased on-site for one dollar each from Richard Kozac—neighbor to, caretaker of, and quite possibly the very soul of, Uranium Springs. He hauled them in from the nearby town of Holbrook, 20 miles away, in order to make an extra buck, or rather a buck and change, which I gladly paid him.

Every year I spend an hour toiling in the hot desert sun upon my crack-of-noon Monday arrival, rearranging those tires into a new configuration for the coming week. This year the wind is blowing hard, so I take apart last year’s three-sided cabin and build a single, curved windbreak that works out very nicely for the length of my stay. Then I throw on my battle jacket and a pair of repurposed, plastic umpire leg guards, kick-start my little dirt bike—the Death Dart—and go find friends to hug.

Hugs are fierce in the wasteland. Friendships are heartfelt. Many of us see each other only once a year—at this event. It’s a place where we let our hair down and roll in the dirt while drinking whiskey with each other, so to speak. Beetle and Captain Walker from the Bay Area made it out, as well as Chopps from Los Angeles and Yard Hobo from Indiana. Plus the Tucson crowd is here—the event founders. Their tribe is Turbulence and they live in a cluster of clapboard “hovels” at the western edge of town. They have a special place in my heart because when I first drove to this event six years ago, they welcomed me, the crazy Californian, with open arms.

Rev’rend Lawless is the de facto leader of Turbulence and the Detonation event as a whole. In addition to reigning over Uranium Springs from the roof of the Rev Rod, he presides over his very own church, the Church of Fuel. This year he brought his new puppy, Grub, a handsome, bright-eyed little fellow whose innocent antics charm all who meet him. Together, they are the pride of Uranium Springs.

Dammit, I love these people! In no time at all I’m sweaty, dirty and drinking beer. From there on, the week blurs.

Detonation attracts eclectic types from all walks of life. Think: artists, cosplayers, preppers, Ren Faire-participants and machineheads. Put them all together and creative shenanigans abound.

The Texas arm of Machine Army filters in over the next few days, along with other intrepid festival-goers from across the United States. Torque Nut, a new recruit, shows up Tuesday afternoon, followed by old-timers Freight Train and Krash ‘n’ Burn and their first-timer friends Ruby Rock-it and Wonder Bread on Thursday. They bring with them three additional motorcycles. T(h)readz and Bugtooth, the OG co-founders of Machine Army, can’t make it—they recently relocated from SoCal to Maryland and the drive is too far.

“We’re aiming for next year,” says T(h)readz, via a Machine Army group chat. In the meantime, I plant two rubber shrunken heads on posts in the center of camp in their stead and pour beer in front of them each day in their honor.

Fun things, called events, happen. Some of them, such as the Whiskey Tasting and the Explosive Bocce Ball tournament—in which designated team members move bocce balls around the court with, well, actual explosives—are hosted by tribes. Others, such as the Apocalympics and my favorite, the Death Rally Apocalypse Racing (DRAR) event, a balls-out mini dune buggy track race with flames, water balloon grenades and frequent rollovers, are festival events. Screeching live bands and pulsing electronic dance tunes rock the desert til the wee hours each night.

Burning Man, this isn’t. Beyond the obvious similarities between the two events—the desert locale, the devoted fanbases, the rampant creativity and the partying—differences run deep.

Detonation is an immersion, meaning everyone and everything must reflect apocalypse at all times, excepting people in their own camps (but not the camps themselves) and the isolated parking area. Glitter is positively frowned upon. In terms of aesthetic, think Grit vs Glam. Detonation is the punk/heavy metal version of a party, with a distinct Halloween vibe, while Burning Man is known for its high-end beauty. And while Burning Man, now decades old, has a rep for corporate glamping, eight-hour traffic jams and ticket lotteries, these things don’t exist at Detonation, which is still fundamentally a grassroots endeavor.

This is why it rocks.

In between the mayhem I take long rides up and down the nearby wash, exploring miles of remote desert country far from the tourist maps. Every evening before sundown I sneak down to my secret spot in the wash and, ever the introvert, luxuriate in the shadowy silence as the colors turn magnificently to dusk.

Back in town, vendors hawk everything from hides and pelts to beef jerky to burgers to replica weapons. Marauder vehicles roar around, belching flames, smoke and epic amounts of noise from their souped-up engines. Costumery ranges from Fury Road-inspired battle suits to mud-covered bare bodkins to straight-up S&M plastic and rubber.

My own battle jacket—encrusted with 20 pounds of metal weapons, armor and ornamentation—is so heavy I can only stand to wear it for short periods of time. Its excessive weight compresses my spine, making my arms go numb. But you can’t put a price on happiness, my ex-boss once told me. So, numb arms be damned. And, it’s not only a piece of art—the wasteland ladies love it. When I wear my battle jacket, I get the nods.

But the best thing about Uranium Springs is the breezy, lounge chair-bedecked Wreck Room. It’s the de facto hangout spot, the coolest place in the wasteland. Hosted by the ever-beautiful Auntie Virus and the enterprising McAwful, it’s an oasis where thirsty and overheated wastelanders grab cold beers, kick off their boots and relax in the shade, gratis. Yes, the two angelic proprietors host the lounge for free, out of the kindness of their huge hearts. And this year it features a new treat—music.

“Live music at the Wreck Room, who knew?” says McAwful. Unscheduled musicians Pipes and Silence—a solo singer and a soulful, guitar-playing vocalist—both prove to be consummate musicians and their performances are such roaring successes that they, and other solo musicians, are scheduled for later time slots throughout the week.

To me, the Wreck Room is the epicenter of Uranium Springs—the heart of the wasteland. Every wastelander passes through it at some point. It’s a hub of constant activity. Nobody knows it, but late one night I symbolically buried my heart under its floor, so when I die my happy ghost will return to claim it … and continue partying with my friends.

Camaraderie seems to be the fundamental appeal of Detonation.

“Det is about hanging out with friends,” says Turbulence member Corporal Punishment. And most would concur.

“I keep coming back because there’s time to sit around and actually socialize,” says Chopps, from Los Angeles. Other desert events are great, “but there’s so much to see that it’s hard to find a moment to just stop and sit down for an hour to really see how someone’s doing.”

It’s a universal love—and I do mean love—of the Mad Max franchise and everything post apocalyptic that binds us all together. An end-of-the-world ambience permeates everything at Detonation. Borrowing from all historic eras and all cultures, the post-apocalyptic genre makes for extreme artistic freedom.

Humor abounds, too. My own, kid-sized Honda CRF 70 wheeling around my 6-foot-3-inch, 200-pound frame is, in itself, a nod to absurdity. So is the motorized coffin I see putting around town all week. As is the Cundalini Handoff event at the Apocalympics, in which runners in a relay race pass rubber hands representing the paw the villainous Cundalini lost in Mad Max.

Detonation is not for the snowflake crowd. At 6,000 feet, the sun is scorching. Temperatures regularly rise into the 90s, sometimes exceeding 100 degrees. It also gets cold at night. The area is plagued by wind, dust devils and sand mites. Attendees need to pack in all their own water, food and beer, and must wear themed costumery whenever they leave their camps. While two-minute showers are sometimes available on site for a cash fee, no conveniences should be expected.

Detonation doesn’t have a strong sex-and-drugs culture. It is, however, a drinker’s paradise. Beer and wine are consumed, but the whiskey bottle is the most prominent alcoholic conveyance. That said, teetotalers successfully attend.

The event lasts seven days and tickets are sold online in tiered batches. My ticket cost me all of $65. Throw in the cost of my 4×4 rental truck, gas, food, beer and a hotel room, and I spent quite a few bucks-and-change, but like my ex-boss once said, you can’t put a price on happiness.

Our week of fun is intense, but so is the sun, the heat and the dust. By Sunday morning, we’re all cooked. Machine Army breaks down its army surplus camo netting and we take one last group photo, trade hugs and head home. I’ve much to contemplate as I bounce down the long dirt road towards Interstate 40 and my 15-hour drive back to Santa Rosa.

So, I go for the cannibal thing. I didn’t know I was one til the first time I arrived at Uranium Springs and put on my battle jacket. I looked around, realized I was in a real wasteland, surrounded by actual marauders without any decent, civilized restraint, and instantly devolved into a cannibal warlord. It was the lowest I could go, and I found my footing there. I’ve never left that place of strength since.

But cannibalism goes both ways.

Every year I tell my friends in Uranium Springs, “If I die here, don’t send my corpse back to the real world. Make a jacket and some tacos out of it. Enjoy me, for God’s sake!”

And I mean the hell out of it.

Because being eaten by the ones we love is one way we can remain with them, even unto the end of the world. Plus, if my heart is already buried in Uranium Springs, the rest of me may as well stay there, too.

To A Desert Place:

Return to Uranium Springs

Things aren’t always what they seem. Take the desert, for instance. Some people—most, perhaps—see it as ugly, barren and dangerous. But to me it is a place of intense beauty, adventure and freedom.

And so, where many people opt for annual vacations at “safe” luxury resorts or beach cabañas, I take my two weeks in the desert every year. Or, in the wasteland, as I call it. Because where I go is so far out there that it is way beyond the pale of civilization.

It’s a little over 80 degrees out, and at 6,000 feet in Arizona’s shadeless Painted Desert, the sun blazes down like a nuclear bomb at the white-hot moment of detonation. I’m melting inside my clothes. A slight figure in well-used work garb sits on a tractor ahead of me, slowly churning up the dust. Dozens upon dozens of tires lay all around in the sand. Slowly, the tractor scours out a shallow pit between them, pushing the sand into a pile at one end. I swing into action, piling the tires in tiers around the edge of the pit. Then the tractor begins scooping up sand and dumping it into the tires, filling the columns. I assist the process, shoveling the overflow back into the columns.

An hour later, I signal the tractor pilot, Richard Kozac. He turns off the engine and saunters over. Kozac, the caretaker of this desert place, lives a few miles down the road with his horses. He is a colorful character, as stand-up a man as I’ve ever met. At this moment, he may as well be made of desert dust. I hand him a cold beer and some cash, both of which he contemplates for several seconds. Then he nods, smiles, and cracks the beer. We stand there in the bright heat, drinking and gazing at the tire bunker we’ve built, and I’m pleased that my tribe, the cannibal biker gang Machine Army, finally has permanent headquarters.

We may as well be on the moon, Kozac and I. Or, more apropos, the set of a Mad Max movie. Wire fences, scrap-wood structures and walls made of tires and mud and stacked railroad ties cover the barren sand, which stretches out to all sides. Vehicles lay about the shanty town—my own outlaw Honda 70 dirt bike, a rusty ’77 Monte Carlo on oversized off-road tires and random, burned-out car bodies. I’m 16 hours from my home in Sebastopol, and this is my favorite place in the world.

Welcome to Uranium Springs—the town that doesn’t exist. My tribe and I have been coming here for years now. The freedom is unparalleled, as are the wind, the heat and the dust. There’s no other experience like it.

Uranium Springs is an artistic convergence. It draws a certain type of person. To get here is a feat in and of itself. Only those “mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage,” as we say, even contemplate coming. Are we hobbyists, a cult, a club, a sect? The answer is not that simple. We are an amalgam of artists, creatives, cosplayers, engineers, survivalists, loners, drinkers and “preenactors” who all like the post-apocalyptic genre. I’m not one for “scenes,” but a strong sense of brotherhood binds this group together.

My interest in towns that don’t exist began in 1988—the summer I hitchhiked to Alaska from UC Santa Cruz. I spent the month of July in a tiny fishing town, working in a cannery and living in a scrapwood shack in “the Cove,” a village of sorts, where all the seasonal workers lived. Trails, tents and odd structures filled the forest; about 90 people lived in various camps.

Six years later I happened upon the desert, while camping in Joshua Tree National Park’s highly magical and surreal topography. The barren landscape caught my Bay Area-raised self unawares, creeping up on me like a thief in the night. During the next 15 years, I traveled there more than 25 times. In Joshua Tree I had beautiful dreams and visions, so much so that I call it my cathedral. If spiritual “power spots” exist, surely it is mine.

Then came the wasteland.

I rediscovered my Mad Max roots while attending a post-apocalyptic event called Wasteland Weekend in the Mojave Desert in 2012, and followed the breadcrumbs to Uranium Springs, driving there in 2013 to attend my first on-site event with about 60 attendees camped in an empty meadow. In the years since, the event has grown to about 400 people, and the meadow has transformed into a hard-scrabble junktown.

Uranium Springs is an event space, but this year the official event—or “Detonation,” usually held over Memorial Day weekend—has been delayed until October, due to Covid. So, I’m instead attending a long “build weekend.”

What, exactly, is a build weekend? The owner of Uranium Springs, Rev’rend Lawless, of Tucson, is a most interesting man. By his decree, every post-apocalyptic tribe that attends Detonation may stake a claim to a 50-by-50-foot patch of ground on site, and build—within certain generous parameters—a permanent, post-apocalyptic-themed camp. As long as said tribe members attend Detonation every year and pay a modest fee which helps cover site maintenance, they can keep their claim. Year by year, the camps become more and more elaborate.

Except for Machine Army’s. Our members live so far away—from Maryland to California—that merely attending is the most we’ve ever been able to accomplish. Until now. Finally, no event—just time to work on our camp.

It’s a slow week. My Texan tribemates—Dr. Freight Train, Krash ’n’ Burn and Rocket—show up, along with 50 or so various other people. Without a mandatory costume-wearing requirement or throngs of partiers beckoning from surrounding camps, my tribemates and I work on the bunker, which turns into a spontaneous artistic endeavor. We add more tires to the walls, then find metal poles we stashed in the bushes years ago and drive them into the dirt inside the tire stacks. Then I find some abandoned pallets, and we drop them over the metal posts and shore them up with scrap wood and decking screws, to form a breezy palisade on top of the tires.

We discuss plans for our next build weekend. We need to set posts for a roof, but the clay beneath us is very dense. However, our neighbors, the Kult of Kazmodaa, dug multiple 3-foot-deep post holes by hand, so we have our work set out for us.

Out here we are impossibly far from the American Dream. But the American Dream was never my dream. Suburbia was never my home. By my estimation, America peaked about the time I was born, in 1968, when we put the first man on the moon. This circus has been a slow-motion riot ever since, swirling slowly down the drain. While I spend years scratching out an ever-more-meaningless existence on America’s dying streets, I dream of this, the wasteland—a freer life with community, adventure and actual value.

We have a new neighbor, Haylar Garcia—or “Mad Mex”—who hails from Denver. A screenwriter/film director/social media engineer in the real world, he single handedly built a movie-worthy camp called the Aftermath Theater—replete with a school bus projector room, an outdoor movie screen and a “make-out” car in the faux parking lot—on the plot adjacent ours.

The setup is stellar, but it is his outrageously post-apocalyptic car that steals my heart. The Interceptor Drag Special is a ’73 Mustang Grande which he took down to bare metal before widening the wheel wells, installing a roll cage and adding a positraction rear differential. He replaced the stock 351 with a 402 big block Chevy with a wet nitrous tunnel ram and two hollie carbs, then wasted the exterior and interior in the name of the apocalypse. It may be his pride and joy, but it makes me very, very happy. “I’ll never be able to open the nitrous,” he tells me. “The engine will blow through the hood!” But if he’s driving at 90 miles an hour down the Fury Road when nitrous is needed, will he have anything left to lose?

“After doing Wasteland Weekend for three years straight, I began to get the itch to be able to contribute to a PA [post-apocalyptic] community in a more meaningful way,” Garcia says. “Wasteland is an amazing event, but what Rev’rend Lawless, the EOD [End of Days, the group responsible for on-site events] staff and tribes and the Uranium Springs community at large have built is something very different and alluring to artists who want to express themselves through apocalyptic themes more than once a year. The people are incredible, the builds are permanent and there are opportunities for participating in build weekends throughout the year, which really gives you a chance to create something lasting. I found—and still find—that irresistible.”

What inspired the Aftermath Theater in particular? “Well, being a filmmaker, I loved the idea of having a visual attraction in the apocalypse; truly it was inspired by A Boy and His Dog, where people seem to mill in and out of the broken theater space, watching scraps of anything left over from the Old World,” he says. “So, after getting my idea and basic blueprint cleared for a spot at Uranium Springs by the powers that be, I started to come out for every build weekend I could. It’s been a lot of work in some very challenging conditions, from 100+ degrees to waking up shivering and finding it had snowed overnight out of nowhere. It took me about 9 trips, which averaged from 9 days to 22 days at a time, to get the drive[-in] into a working state.”

One must be careful out here in the wasteland. The sun sears down mercilessly through the rarified atmosphere. It burns electrolytes and it burns skin. Countless weeks spent out here collectively caused permanent sun damage on my neck. What can I do, but wear the discoloration like a badge of honor? Radiation is what made Uranium Springs great.

But the winters are harsh, too. So harsh that homesteaders move to this region and leave within months, unable to withstand the intense cold, the high winds or the deep mud that leaves them stranded for days on end.

Another neighbor, Annelise Williamson, 49, hails from Santa Fe. After five years, she has yet to acquire a wasteland name. A silversmith for the past 30+ years, she recently transitioned into costuming in the film industry. She and her partner, Haydn Ford, have attended Detonation for five years. Their tribe, the LZRDFKKRS, has a wonderfully deep-desert, Western vibe to it. Williamson and I perform a wasteland trade, in which I barter some of my customized leather wasteland pouches for a set of her handmade, film industry-grade metal wasteland “sand” goggles. They are one the highest quality items I have ever owned. Her work is showcased via @annelisewilliamsonmakes on Instagram.

In the evenings we hit up a gathering at the Rev’s Church of Fuel at the Turbulence camp, or walk or drive over to the Wreck Room, a lounge on the far edge of town where the proprietors, McAwful and Auntie Virus, wine and dine the entire encampment to the tune of “Pipes” and other attending musicians.

One evening, buzzing off a few beers, I take off on my Outlaw 70 for a twilight ride. A quarter-mile down the track I hit a corner too fast, slide, hit the underbrush and go down. It’s a pitch-perfect crash, choreographed to perfection, almost a gentle roll. First my leg hits the dirt, then my hips and ribs, then, as if an afterthought, my head. Boink! I lay there in the shrubbery, staring at the sky, wondering if I’m OK. Of course I am. I’m cautious, and I’m at Uranium Springs, where crashing on my toy-like kid’s dirt bike is part of the novelty.

And yet, the next morning I have a black eye, my hip is bruised and several of my ribs are out of alignment. While pulling on my shirt, I feel an odd, grinding movement in my chest. It feels weird, like a bruise, but doesn’t hurt. Now I belong to the wasteland.

All is good. The long weekend ends, I say goodbye to my wasteland friends, and we scatter to the four corners of the Old World. Sixteen hours later, I’m back in Sebastopol. Ten days after that, my bruises heal. But the wasteland stays with me. Haylar Garcia’s last words resonate in my ears: “I find Uranium Springs inspiring every time I go there. And I cannot wait for Detonation 6.5, which is coming up on us fast this October. I encourage anyone who loves PA [the post-apocalyptic genre] to get a ticket, it’s unlike anything else in the country.”

Live From Uranium SPrings —

The Town that Doesn’t Exist

My fascination with towns that don’t exist began when I hitchhiked to Alaska in 1988 and spent that summer living feral in a place called the “Cove”—a patch of forest outside the town of Cordova. About 80 people squatted there—college students, hitchhikers, a drunken gold miner, a legendary survivalist named Gene who hadn’t washed himself in years—in a smattering of tents, trailers and scrap-wood cabins. There were no utilities or services of any kind. It was a crude and difficult life filled with almost limitless freedom. We worked long hours in the canneries and spent our off-time kicking it in camp around smoky fires, exploring back roads and eating hot meals at the restaurants in town. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

Shortly after that adventure I dreamt about an imaginary town that lay beyond the Cove, farther out in the Alaskan wilderness—an abandoned logging camp, only accessible by long trek through uncharted forest. It had no name and appeared on no map. Somehow, an assortment of people—travelers, mountain men, hunters, outlaws—found their way there and shored up the decaying structures and lived in them for a season, far from the land of men and machines. The sense of mystery and freedom that dream evoked haunts me to this day.

So I suppose it’s no accident that 25 years later, in the spring of 2013, I wound up at Uranium Springs.

The ruins at the end of the world

People are drawn to Uranium Springs for their individual reasons, though everyone arrives for the same event: Detonation, the annual week-long post-apocalyptic festival usually held there in May. What is a post-apocalyptic festival? Think: a heavy metal Burning Man … for the Mad Max set.

Gage Laykin bought his first ticket to Det on impulse, because he needed a change in his life. The Yard Hobo was invited by site-owner and event-founder Rev’rend Lawless, a gaming friend. Mayonegative heard about it through her friend, Tumbelina, via the Santa Fe underground grapevine. Many people catch wind of it through their association with Wasteland Weekend, the Hollywood-sized post-apocalyptic mega-event held in Southern California’s Mojave desert each fall.

I discovered Uranium Springs, and Det, by googling “post apocalyptic events” back in 2013. Something about the event website—something besides the name Uranium Springs—grabbed my attention: the $10 portage fee for crossing the “possibly flooded wash” on the drive in. Really, in the middle of the desert? Was that a lark? The question gnawed at me. I had to know.

I took a chance on the 16-hour drive from the Bay Area and encountered a group of uniquely talented creatives gathered on a 40-acre spread of privately owned land in Arizona’s Painted Desert. A mutual love for the Mad Max movies and the Fallout games formed the basis for our shared post-apocalyptic passion.

The experience was so fun and inspiring that I and others kept going back, and more people arrived every year, and what began as a small annual festival evolved into something more. The number of attendees grew from 60 my first year, to 400-plus last October. The number of festival events kept increasing, too, and now includes mini-dune buggy races, burlesque shows by the Molotov Mollies, vehicle parades of Road Warrior-esque cars and trucks, nightly feasts, karaoke, costume contests, talent shows and more.

Attendees earn “wasteland” names, and whatsmore, tribes develop naturally, among friends and associates who meet at Uranium Springs and sometimes only ever see each other there. The kicker: Each tribe may claim a 50-foot-by-50-foot piece of vacant land on site and build a permanent, theme-appropriate camp on it. In this way Uranium Springs continues to evolve from a bare meadow into a town—a town of shotgun shacks, rickety walls, stick fences and flimsy tents all made from, in Laykin’s words, “scavenged or reclaimed building material, or upcycled objects that would have otherwise headed to the scrap yard.”

The remote town, located 40 minutes from pavement and not found on any map, has a distinctly Wild West feel to it … in spite of the presence of black leather, dune buggies and smoke-spitting feral hot rods.

Some attendees, including 9 Yards, who hails from Colorado, love it for its isolation. “It really lets you believe you’re living in an apocalypse,” he says. “You start to get to know everyone, and it truly feels like a gathering of family.”

Mayonegative keeps coming back for logistical reasons. “I and my tribemates have a permanent camp there, so it’s easy for me to just jump in my truck with some food, water and my kit, and head out,” she says. “I have made some very close friends who are also Uranium Springs regulars, and I know that I will be in good company.” In fact, her musically gifted child, Pipes, is a well-loved regular at the festival.

For me, the draw is in the freedom the place exudes, as presaged by my dream back in ’88. At Uranium Springs I show up, hug my fellow tribemates at the Machine Army camp—we are the friendliest cannibal biker gang ever to grace the wastes—and spend the week fraternizing with friends old and new, drinking cold beer in the dust, riding my Outlaw 70 dirt bike on exploratory missions down the wash and hanging out at the free lounge, the Wreck Room.

What a cannibal general wears

Another dream, this one from 11 years ago, shortly before I first heard about post-apocalyptic festivals: I was in the forest in Santa Cruz. A “tribe” of young people were camped there, milling around cooking fires. I felt a strong sense of belonging as I walked among them. Their clothing caught my attention—it seemed leathery and vaguely Ren Faire, but more modern, perhaps a bit dangerous. Some people wore black biker jackets. Some carried knives.

A portent, that dream, for costumery is of the utmost importance at Uranium Springs, and not just because festival rules require it. In a landscape as stark as the desert, clothing tells a story.

Laykin’s outfit, consisting of patched clothing and a leather helmet with handmade aluminum goggles, oozes a distinct future-tribal air, while 9 Yards’ well-weathered Eastern European battle suit evokes his retro-future Slavic wasteland persona. The good Rev’rend Lawless, draped in a duster and leather cowboy hat, exudes the countenance of a mythical gunfighter.

My own battle jacket—a 50-cent yard-sale score—is festooned with 20 pounds of knives, bullets, beads, hooks, ammo pouches, V8-can grenades, a coyote skull, a Grateful Dead patch, a replica World War II-era Liberator pistol and my mother’s tarnished, circa-1937 Christening cup. The exceedingly heavy war garment clanks dreadfully and commands the undivided attention of all who encounter it. I once walked into my parent’s family-packed living room wearing it and after several moments of pin-drop silence, my 4-year-old nephew simply shouted, “NO!” But wasteland reactions are more positive. Fellow revelers often stop to ogle it, and, to be blunt, the ladies like it.

And yet, more is not always better. Beetle wears thong underwear—exclusively—at Uranium Springs. The Yard Hobo often wears only a thick coating of mud. And many a young—or old, I don’t mean to be ageist—damsel—or mansel, I don’t mean to be genderist—leaves large-ish quantities of bare flesh exposed while sporting minimalist punk garments.

The ferals

This past year, Det was postponed due to Covid, and took place over Halloween weekend. One day during the revelries, General Car Killer—that is, myself—crossed paths with young first-timer Bradley Messmer, of Denver. I invited him on a desert run and we set off down the wash, he on his out-of-the-box Kawasaki 110 and me on my Outlaw 70. I took the lead, and for 40 minutes we wound our way between bushes and over sandy berms at top speed—25mph—in a loop down to the Interstate and back.

On the way back, young Messmer hit a large bump and crashed in a spectacular shower of sand. My God, I thought. What have I done? After removing his helmet and checking his skull and torn clothes for blood and protruding bones, we rode back to camp, where Medical kept him under observation until they deemed him healthy. Messmer’s crash gained him immediate celebrity, and earned him a wasteland name, Sandbar, as well as honorary membership in my tribe, Machine Army.

Thus is notoriety achieved in the wastes.

Another day, while talking to Laykin about this very article, he seized upon the idea of setting me up as a gonzo reporter in an office at his camp, replete with my own typewriter. An electric typewriter. “I’ll have to hook it up to a generator to get you power,” he mused. The creative genius of writing daily wasteland missives on an antique, generator-powered typewriter, from a quonset hut in the Annex, and then nailing the hardcopies to a pole for public viewing while also uploading digital photographs of the originals to social media, was not lost on me.

Thus are ideas hatched in the wastes.

EndgamE

Every Det brings with it new excitement in the town that doesn’t exist. Our wasteland family plans for it for months, and some of us make the trek from as far away as Texas or California. Some adventures are written for the world to know, while others stay hush-hush in the wastes.

I always leave Uranium Springs with mixed emotions—eager to return to my home in the North Bay; but already missing my dirt family. There’s nothing mixed about my exhaustion, however. The trek wrecks me for a week.

And the portage fee for crossing the “possibly flooded wash” into Uranium Springs? It’s real. The wash can—and does—flood. But to my knowledge no one’s ever paid the fee. People just plow through the water in their 4x4s … or sit back and enjoy the wasteland until the water recedes.

For information about Detonation, visit www.detonation.us.

Mark Fernquest lives and dreams in Northern California. He imagines he is a writer.