Pondering the desert, and Ed Abbey

Saguaro Lines. Sabino Canyon, Arizona, 2011

Yes, when the daytime highs around here don’t get much above freezing, if at all, my thoughts will often turn to the deserts where I spent many wonderful years of my youth.

And thinking about the warm(er) desert Southwest stimulates a few stray neurons to bounce and echo throughout my brain the name of that crusty, bearded, anarchist, Edward Abbey, one of my favorite authors. He loved the desert and all things natural. On the subject of human beings, he had very, very mixed feelings.

Phoenix, Arizona (before it rose from the ashes to become a suburb of Los Angeles) lost not a few billboards around it’s rapidly bulging perimeter thanks to Edward Abbey’s inspiration. Or perhaps more accurately, thanks to the example set by Ed’s creations: George Hayduke, “Seldom Seen” Smith, Bonnie Abbzug and Doc Sarvis. I understood the fearsome four of The Monkey Wrench Gang completely and viscerally because I, too, watched my desert playground disappear under a carpet of green golf courses, brown condos and subdivisions, and black asphalt.

Ed’s body was buried by friends in March of 1989 in a dirty sleeping bag (at his request) in some unknown location in the vast desert west of Tucson amid the rock and cactus, just as he wanted. Presumably, at his burial, there was bagpipe music, beer, singing, dancing, lovemaking, laughing, and gunfire (also at his request). Sounds pretty good to me–even if I don’t drink.

Just a very few of his many words:

–“‎If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture–that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”

–“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.  May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” 

–“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

–“The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth – with a capital G. ‘Progress’ in our nation has for too long been confused with ‘Growth’; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better – toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.” 

–“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.” 

–“Perhaps I shouldn’t call it shit. That’s a bit crude. I don’t really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I’ve always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .”

–“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”  

For a good sample of his musings and philosophy, try Desert Solitaire.

For a rousing fictional novel with an anarchist streak, try The Monkey Wrench Gang.