Nature’s Bookshelf

By Ray Zimmerman

Edward Abbey

            “Let us throw metaphysics to the dogs. I never heard a Mountain Lion bawling about the fate of his soul.” Edward Abbey wrote those words in the introduction to the final (1986) edition of his classic book Desert Solitaire. These words are an appropriate introduction to the author. His books are set in the world of sandstone under foot, a cowboy on his horse, a raft on a wild river, and the embrace of two lovers in the night.

            Abbey was born January 29, 1927 near the town of Home, Pennsylvania. He died March 14, 1989 in Tucson, Arizona. Between those two dates he served in World War II, received a master’s degree in philosophy, authored twenty books, and married five times. Three marriages ended in divorce. His third marriage, to Judy Pepper, ended when she died of leukemia. Her death inspired the book Black Sun.  His final marriage, to Clarke Cartwright, ended with his death in 1989.

Abbey worked as a park ranger, a fire tower lookout, a journalist, a newspaper editor, a bus driver, and finally as a university professor. The years with the Park Service and the Forest Service provided much of his source material. The land itself not only provides the setting for his works, but emerges as a major character. Abbey loved the red rock sandstone mesas and canyons, and especially the rivers. His connection to the rivers is perhaps best stated in “Down the River,” a chapter of Desert Solitaire. In this chapter he traveled down the Glen Canyon portion of the Colorado with his friend Ralph Newsome. That trip was just before completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, nemesis of all that Abbey held sacred in nature, and the creation of Lake Powell, termed a sewage lagoon in Abbey’s writings.

The phrase Down the River emerged again a few years later as the title of a book. In this work Abbey employed several meanings of the phrase, including rivers as symbolic of the passage of time, descriptions of float trips physically going down several rivers, and a statement that both man and nature have been sold down the river.

This last sentiment is reiterated in his novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which he is said to have initiated the term eco-defense. It may have inspired environmental activism through direct action. It certainly gave us the monkey wrench as a symbol for direct intervention. Some of Abbey’s detractors claim that it is a fictionalized account of actions that the author encouraged if not actually participated in. Although Abbey was known to remove a few survey stakes from development projects, he himself maintained that The Monkey Wrench Gang was a strictly fictional work written solely for the entertainment of his readers.

This statement has since been supported by Ingrid Eisenstadt. She was the real life woman whom the character Mizz (sic) Bonnie Abbzug “not related to the senator” was almost certainly modeled after. Her verbal portrait of Abbey and their sometime life together was published in “Abbey’s Picnic,” Sierra magazine, 2002.

Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where wilderness continues to be eroded by the work of man. His most prophetic passage however was perhaps the final paragraph in a chapter of Desert Solitaire titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he records his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”

A few books by and about Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire (Final Edition)

Edward Abbey

University of Arizona Press, 1986

Desert Solitaire was drawn from the author’s journal entries written during two years when he served as a park ranger at Arches National Monument. It was first published by McGraw-Hill, 1968. Previous editions went through several printings.

Down the River

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982

This book includes four sets of journal entries written while running rivers on white water rafts. It also includes essays on natural history, politics, people and places he has known, and two book reviews.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Edward Abbey

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000

Four environmental activists meet on a rafting trip on the Colorado River. They hatch a plot to sabotage projects they deem to be environmentally harmful.  Avon Books, 1976        

Black Sun

Edward Abbey

Simon and Shuster, 1971

In this book a park ranger falls in love with a beautiful woman.

Slumgullion Stew, an Edward Abbey Reader

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1984

This work contains excerpts from several of Abbey’s books.

Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist:

The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey

James Bishop, Jr.

Athenium, New York, 1994

This work is a biography. The author had access to Abbey’s personal papers.

Edward Abbey, a Life

James M. Cahalan

The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2001

This is a biography.