Wasteland Weekend, An Immersive Post-Apocalyptic Experience

Entrance to Wasteland City. | Photo: Tyler Stallings

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Much of Southern California has been built on real estate speculation. California City, or Cal City, 60 miles north of Los Angeles, was one such dream by Nat Mendelsohn during post-World War II's economic exuberance. Touted as a city that would rival Los Angeles itself, Mendelsohn assumed that expansion into the desert would continue when he laid out plans for the community. It was located in proximity to Edwards Air Force Base, Palmdale, and Lancaster after all - cities where aerospace marvels such as the Space Shuttle were to be built later. Mendelsohn graded the desert for streets and created pipeline infrastructure. Some plots did sell, but the dream did not catch on. Defined by geography, it is California's third largest city, yet it has only 14,000 residents. Consequently, Cal City is often nicknamed the city of streets to nowhere.

As if drawing on this bottled energy and the tinge of an environmental apocalypse that wafts across the town on hot winds, Wasteland Weekend is a Mad Max -inspired festival that has occurred since 2010 on Cal City's fringes. Today, co-owned and directed by Jared Butler and Adam Chilson, it is a temporary tent-city situated in the desert about a 30-minute drive northeast of Cal City. Wasteland Weekend is intended as an immersive experience that blurs the boundaries of being on a movie set and preparing for survival in a world where gasoline and oil have become gold, myrrh, and frankincense. They fuel the leftover machines of a pre-apocalyptic world that once took gas-guzzling for granted.

Satellite view of California City. | Image: Courtesy of Google Maps

Seen via satellite imagery, the graded desert roads suggest a complicated geometry of incisions, perhaps imparting secret knowledge only attained when viewed aerially, like Peru's Nazca Lines. Or, alternatively, the landscape appears to be scraped of buildings, as if an apocalypse did occur, devastating the desert town in the vein of a B-movie, sci-fi thriller.

Human-built towns absent of humans are real, though. The Ukrainian town of Pripyat is a still life of a post-nuclear disaster ghost town: the result of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant meltdown. But, in Cal City, the only day or reckoning that befell it was the flop of a real estate developer's blueprint for a master planned community. However, the town feels less in decline and in limbo instead, as there is a sense of pent up energy from decades of hope and belief in the possibilities of what can be done with so much land at hand.

A dust cloud signals that Wasteland is just ahead. | Photo: Tyler Stallings

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On a map, Wasteland is at the intersection of Rice Avenue and Tulane Street, and would appear to be surrounded by a dense community based on the other numerous, named streets. However, once outside the populated center of Cal City, the street names are nearly meaningless, as you are driving through a barely demarcated desert in reality. My two companions, Naida and Archer, and I have directions but the only markers along the way are low-lying wooden stakes with optimistically planned street names inscribed on them. We know when we are getting close because of the sand clouds kicked up by the other Wasters descending on the temp-tent city too.

Upon entering through the campsite's main gate, and then driving along The Road, it is evident that Wasteland is divided into tribes, such as The Rain Dogs, Blood Ravens, and The Rust Bunnies, and is where, as stated on the website all factions, gangs, and fractured remnants of society come together on neutral ground to trade, barter, party, and make new alliances. Like medieval times, most of the tribes are stationed outside the walls of the official Wasteland City. The names of the makeshift streets that create tribal quadrants reference the latest Mad Max: Fury Road film, such as Valhalla Highway.

The author in his post-apocalyptic Dickies, along with Naida Osline and Archer Altstaetter. | Photo: Courtesy of Naida Osline

The three of us wear our best attempts at post-apocalypse costumes, which are required of everyone, even if from the media, in order to maintain an immersive experience. I am wearing an altered navy-blue, Dickies coverall suit, on which I spray-painted a stenciled motif of a hand all over, topped off with a spray-painted blue dot at the center of each palm. My hope is to suggest that I am a member of a mysterious, post-apocalyptic cult. The Dickies are ripped in a manner that suggests numerous struggles through years of self-reliance and acts of violence that I would rather not have to recount. I did have a hard time manipulating the durable Dickies fabric. Despite my fantasies, I bear resemblance, more than likely, to an auto repair mechanic than a near-future, cultish, survivalist. Nonetheless, my friends and I aim to fit into this future. In order to maintain a collective fantasy, the Wasteland Weekend website has a strongly worded FAQ on costume guidelines:

We hope we're not destroying any fantasies here, but zombies and mutants are not real. Therefore, zombie and mutant costumes are not welcome at the event. However, radiation burns and radiation sickness ARE real, so you certainly could lean toward that type of look if you're so inclined Nearly any franchise that would be recognizable as something outside of the post-apocalyptic genre needs to be avoided. Star Wars, Batman, Disney, etc.

Two weeks after Burning Man, northerly located in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, the mid-September timing of Wasteland Weekend is also just one month before Cal City's

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/wasteland-weekend-california-city-...
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