My apocalypse, which I’m confident is also your apocalypse, is one where survivors in rags and improvised footwear roam the dry, smoky earth, scouring devastated architecture and broken-car-choked roads for various life-or-death resources while hiding from armed cannibals. In preparation for this apocalypse, which I continue to believe is imminent, I collect self-sufficient men and women suited to frontiers and risks and the edges most of us avoid—people impelled and acting on it; individuals who, unlike myself, are not debilitated by a hypersensitive self-awareness—to act as guides so that I’ll be ready when the day comes. I’m talking about pioneers unafraid of becoming marginalized and forgotten and irrelevant in the eyes of us, the mainstream world: men and women with true survival talents.
Steve Fassbinder, also known as “Doctor Doom,” is a rangy, hairy, weathered-but-handsome ectomorph living in Durango, Colorado. For three years now, he’s been sending me links to galleries featuring images of feral-looking vagabonds covered in dirt, sunscreen and sunburn, carrying pistols and rifles, using drugs and alcohol and riding oversized mountain bikes off the proverbial edge of the mapped world into a desert on no discernible trail or road, some of it legal, some of it not. And I think, after the third or fourth e-mail in as many years, They’re practicing for the apocalypse. I need to see this. No, I need to do this.
I’ve called Steve and we’re talking on the phone, and he says, “Yeah, sure. Call it the apocalypse or whatever you want, but if you come this year it’s three days in Canyonlands, so be sure to bring a bike with gears and a snake-bite kit.”
A few days later, I receive the following e-mail:
From: Steve Fassbinder
Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 9:21 PM
To: Daniel Wakefield Pasley and 13 others
Subject:
ok gang this is going to be so rad!!i know this is not a complete list of people coming please forward this to the others if you can. People, first and foremost darren(alltime)stankeclaw, will be having his 40th birthday on the 11th! that’s the day we leave, so we are going to party him into the ground! i’ve buried some supplies out in the sand at our first camp site for this purpose, but don’t skimp on all things hydrating or dehydrating. water and beer bring plenty. daniel wakefield pasley will be attending from portland OR, and he will be shooting alot of FILM for Surly and Icebreaker and his personal portfolio, so look tufff out there! Rachel and Damien also hailing from portland will be along for the ride, lets make sure they receive plenty of hazing! and then there are the usual suspects, that’s the rest of us guys………
a few important details. snakes they are out there, don’t get bitten! driving out there….i know we all want to get there fast but, do not for any reason SPEED in utah! if you/we get pulled over and searched we will be fucked!! DON’T DO IT. just bringing beer into the state of utah will get you totally fucked with by the man. they don’t take kindly to our types. they just like to take our money and throw us in jail, and they will do it! guns; we will be on blm and national forest lands during the first two days, so shooting is no problem. day three we will be entering a national park, there will be NO shooting! bring your guns folks but they must be 100% invisible, and unloaded when we enter the park. i don’t plan on having any interaction with rangers, but if we do, passing through the park on the route we are taking is perfectly legal and cool, and they will be loving us for doing it!
1 p.m. May 11, 2010: We drive in four cars from Durango. The trip takes three hours, the highlight of which is a trampoline in a front yard next to an uneven, poorly made wooden fence. We head north and west past Newspaper Rock into the park, where it’s sunny and, because this is a desert in bloom in a wet year and most of us have only ever seen brown, red and red-brown deserts, surprisingly verdant. Gradually, we swing around south and east to face a wide, adventurous dirt road ramping up and off into the distance, disappearing several thousand feet above the valley floor into the horizon, which is a solid-black meteorological event steadily advancing behind a curtain of wind and sand. We park and unload.
Including Steve, I know four of these 15 people. The rest I’ve met in the last 24 hours or am meeting for the first time here in the dirt. We’re unloading mountain bikes with ridiculously oversized tires designed to excel at riding in snow and sand; slathering hairy knees and ears and backs of the necks with basically white paint from a tube of SPF-40 sunscreen. Hopping from one foot to the next, crushed shoe to crushed shoe, some of us undress, throwing cutoff cords with thready hems, stretch-woven cargo shorts and Levis into piles of brightly colored and garishly logoed Lycra and wool. We’re holstering Smith & Wesson Magnum .44s; starting, finishing and starting one-more-for-the-road Pabst tallboys; relocating bootlegged Ray-Bans and various yellow and orange interchangeable polarized lenses; filling up reservoirs, bladders and water bags; attaching fully overloaded panniers; and, because it’s the high desert in spring, bungeeing down denim outerwear and dodgy fleece hats.
With everything on it that I need to eat and drink and provide shelter, my borrowed bike, a battleship-gray Pugsley, weighs 104 pounds. As I do my own last-minute preparations—loading, fastening, unloading and reloading—I remind myself that Steve has ridden most of this route several times before and flown over as recently as last week the sections he hasn’t. Beer has been buried in the sand next to the tree by the rock miles ahead and is waiting this very minute for our thirsty arrival—an inspired, cold-blooded act illustrating a commitment to getting fucked up like I’ve literally never seen or experienced before. Water from rivers and springs will be available along the way to filter and safely drink. We have a map. And we have bikes and guns and one another. I’m not worried exactly, but I’m anxious. These people are practiced in the art of apocalypse. I can tell from their eccentric costumery—their cowboy-buckle amulets, their secondhand talismans and their less-ness, their can-do-just-fine-without-it-ness—that these are next-level, though infinitely humble, outdoorspeople.
Lining up shoulder to shoulder across the road and straddling our bikes, the path and the next three days trundling off behind us, we take a photograph. It’s the kind of photograph, I think as it’s taken, meant to accompany a story concerning the missing. Heels on the edge of nowhere, eager and expectant faces looking back at the camera, a final moment to be captured for the record, to be clutched in the hand of someone’s sobbing mother. But we’re pumped and steezy and I hear, I actually hear someone out loud and without apparent irony, say, “It’s time to shred, yeeeeeeaaaaah!”
