My Beautiful Post-nuclear Vacation

It’s all the rage to vacay at fancy resorts these days, but that’s not how I escape the rigors of late-capitalist dystopic existence. I choose instead to get the fuck away from Dodge the only way I know how, by going off-grid. Since 2013 I’ve been vacationing at a post-apocalyptic festival on 80 acres in northeastern Arizona’s remote Painted Desert. Each May I drive 15 hours to get to Uranium Springs, and it’s worth every minute.

The event, called Detonation, is small when compared to Burning Man—I was one of only 60 participants my first year. Per the event rules, we each dressed like characters in a Mad Max movie, in costumes fashioned from black leather scraps and upcycled metal bits and various colored rags. We camped in two tribes in a pristine, high-desert meadow, drinking copiously, waving rusty weapons, exploring the surrounding rocky badlands, and hiding in tarp caves during the heat and glare of each day. Our lonely bonfires flickered beneath the pinwheeling Milky Way late into the ink-dark nights.

I had a stripped-down Honda 70 off-road motorcycle with license-plate fenders, a kid’s bike that could reach 40 mph on a straightway. I named it the Death Dart. I took that bad boy on long rides up and down the dry wash at max speed each afternoon, exploring, bogging in the deep sand, speeding down the gravel flats, losing myself in remote side canyons for hours at a time. When I crashed it didn’t matter—my boots and helmet and homemade armor made me impervious. Once in a while I’d stop in the shade of a bush or boulder to drink a beer or smoke a cigarette and thank my lucky stars I’d found paradise.

One night at the campfire, Sam Lawless, the landowner and event mastermind, told us how he wanted to expand the event every year, how he envisioned us all forming tribes and maybe even building a post-apocalyptic town. I glanced away from the stars in his eyes towards the darkness and thought, This meadow isn’t going to last forever.

Eleven years later the meadow is gone, disappeared beneath a winding maze of dirt roads that section off several acres of tribe-built metal-roofed shanties, ragged tents and dented RVs. A scrapyard movie theater called the Aftermath Drive-In takes up one corner. The Annex’s free ramen kiosk sits at another. The LZRD FKRZ camp oozes Santa Fe desert outlaw charm, from the cow-skull-adorned stick-fences to the metal yurt to the vintage dune buggy spitting angry exhaust out back. At any given moment, flamethrowers belch fire and black smoke from afar, and errant motorcycles and marauder vehicles kick up clouds of dust as they slew down desert tracks.

Four hundred people attended Det 8 in 2023, the largest number yet. Most of the old faces showed—Yard Hobo, Mad Mex, Nine Yards, Pipes, Auntie Virus, McAwful, Ghostline, Krash ’n’ Burn, Corporal Punishment, Freight Train and so many more—along with new ones. Some camps, once thriving, sat empty, their lonely fence posts sandblasted by the relentless wind. Where did their tribes disappear to? No one knew for sure. New camps sprang up elsewhere overnight, groups of first-timers working like mad to erect tire walls, towers and tent-tops, and claim their tribe’s place in the sun.

One night we threw molotov cocktails at metal posts, watching them shatter into blazing orange fireballs that showered onto the sand. Another night, during a romantic tryst, I lay in the dust on a hilltop and a rocket exploded in the sky behind my partner’s head, illuminating the stark landscape and silhouetting her wild hair against a mizzle of falling sparks, in what was the most absurdly romantic moment I’ve ever experienced.

And there was the morning when, while working a volunteer shift checking in new arrivals at the main gate, I watched a cloud of dust approach from down the road. At length the LZRD FKRZ dune buggy appeared around a corner, towing by chain a homemade, broken-down Annex roadster loaded with people madly waving spears and guns. As the convoy approached the gate, I heard someone in the lead dune buggy yell, “Should we stop and show our wristbands?” to which someone in the roadster behind responded, “No, No! Keep going, keep going! Once we stop we can’t start!” The procession rattled by and disappeared up the trail into town, to my great amusement. I knew—and loved—them all.

Somewhere along the way I earned a wasteland name and founded a tribe of my own and now my alter-ego, General Car Killer of the cannibal biker gang Machine Army, presides over six tribemates and a command bunker constructed of dirt, tires, pallets and a camouflage canopy. We’ve decorated the place with screaming skulls impaled high on long metal spikes, bright-red fuel barrels, mounds of bullet casings and, of course, a line of diminutive, battered motorcycles including my beloved Death Dart. But for all our ghoulish fanfare, we’re a mellow bunch who prefer to swing in hammocks and do crafts under the awning rather than actually go break tourist heads on the highway and eat raw brains for fun. We are, in fact, the friendliest cannibals you will never meet.

Things change. Last fall Sam Lawless moved to Uranium Springs full time where he’s now building a desert dome to live in. The venue is steadily winding up, with “build” weekends and mini-fests throughout much of the year. The Death Dart doesn’t run so well any more, though, and my bad-ass off-road truck is too old to make the drive to Arizona, so I drive a rental car to each Det.

These days, when I’m there, I trudge dusty streets through the meadow I once knew, past bright, grinning faces new and old, clad in my dreadfully heavy, clanking battle jacket from which dangle far too many metal keepsakes and knives. Wielding a pointy, wood-handled battle KLAW over one shoulder, I might pass the tall railroad-tie walls surrounding Kult of Kozmodo’s camp, and then the hovel-cluster known as Turbulence, then cut through the Yard Hobo’s abandoned RV squats and nod to some frolicking friends, all the while smelling the sweet desert air and vibing on the oddly industrial feel the mixture of detritus and dirt around me elicits. Ah! I might think. Freedom! Never has it felt so good.

And I’d be right. Because sometimes I am.

Everything at Uranium Springs is dirty and battered, even the people. This is what makes it special. Out in the baking heat, far from pavement or telephone poles, without running water or electricity, beyond any creature comforts save the odd bottle of grog or a five-dollar cold shower at Whiskey & Water or a dusty seat under a flapping tarp, we find only each other and ourselves. We make friends, and friends become dirt family. There is nothing each of us wouldn’t do for our dirt fam. We wear our hearts on our sleeves in the wasteland.

I’m growing old and I’m growing wise. I’m biding my time as I barely scrape by in this NorCal millionaire’s paradise called Sonoma County. These wintry atmospheric rivers will soon roll by and spring’s brisk bluster will give way to early May and my precious, precious week off. Just a few months now till I make the long drive and hit the glowing desert sands of Uranium Springs to see my once-was-a-meadow and my fabulous dirt fam again.

— Lord General Car Killer, Cannibal and Maximum Leader of the dread biker horde known as Machine Army, Sebastopol, February 2024 C.E.