Last night I couldn’t sleep. My monkey-mind latched onto the
worry list of the day and wouldn’t let go. When I can’t quiet my
mind enough to allow sleep to get the upper hand, I often go
downstairs and grab a book.
Last night I couldn’t sleep. My monkey-mind latched onto the worry list of the day and wouldn’t let go. When I can’t quiet my mind enough to allow sleep to get the upper hand, I often go downstairs and grab a book.
This time, I read from one of my half-dozen volumes of Edward Abbey’s essays called “Down the River.” Not only was I reminded what a gift he was, but I was struck by how rare it is these days to hear a voice as fiercely independent as his.
Ed Abbey is a legend in an obscure corner of the literary world. He reached that status with the publication of the cult classic “Desert Solitaire” that has not been out of print since its release in 1968. The book tells of his two seasons in the early 1960s as an unusual park ranger at Arches National Park. It has been some time since I last read “Desert Solitaire,” but I remember that during his tenure there as a ranger, he pulled up all the survey stakes he could find for new roads being laid out by the Park Service, his employer.
Abbey’s work was often classified as nature writing, a label he refuted and hated, but neither Desert Solitaire nor any of his writing about the Southwest desert he loved is touchy-feely nature stuff. He was a proud beer-swilling, monkey-wrenching redneck. His novels and many essays, exude a raging passion for the land and a similar anger at how we treat it.
So, be forewarned. Ed Abbey will make you furious when he runs roughshod, but he will delight you with his boldness and enrich you with his insights.
Abbey hated passive indifference. He responded to the sins he saw with anger, indignation and protest. In his writing, he was always stirring the pot, hoping no doubt, to stir his readers to give a damn. His writing reminds me of a very old commercial for an after-shave, I think it was. Unexpectedly, a hand gives a freshly shaved man a hard slap across the face. He looks at the camera and says, “Thanks, I needed that.” Reading Abbey is like that.
Ed Abbey died in 1989 at the age of 62 in part due to hard living and contempt for the medical profession. According to his instructions, Abbey’s wife and a friend promptly placed his body in a sleeping bag, put it in the back of a truck and drove him deep into his beloved southern Arizona desert and buried him, against state laws (he would have loved that), in an unmarked grave at a secret, never-to-be-disclosed location. He did not believe in any afterlife mumbo jumbo, whether traditional or New Age. “If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that’s immortality enough for me.”
But of course, his legacy is his words. Read him. You will alternately dismiss him as a crackpot and embrace him a visionary. He is nothing if not controversial. Nearly as many words have been written about him as have been written by him. In an age of herd mentality, political correctness and ultra-sensitivity, Abbey was a brash and unapologetic voice of irreverent honesty and insight.
We need more irreverence. We need some one to remind all of us in the herd that we can have something to say about where the herd goes. We need Edward Abbey’s passion. Fortunately, he saved a lot of it for us in the pages of his books.
If you are interested in Ed Abbey’s life, death and writings, visit www.abbeyweb.net.
