The Monkey Wrench Gang

by Edward Abbey

  They were not alone. Occasional motor traffic buzzed by on the road a hundred yards away: tourists, boaters, anglers bound for the marina a short distance beyond.

  The small and solitary campfire on the far-off headland to the west had flickered out. In the gloom that way Smith could see no sign of friend or enemy. He retreated into the bushes to urinate, staring at the gleam of the darkened river, thinking of nothing much. His mind was still. Tonight he and his friend would sleep on the shore by the boats and gear. Tomorrow morning, while he rigged the boats for the voyage down the river, the girl would drive back to Page to pick up the paying passengers scheduled to arrive by air, from Albuquerque, at eleven.

  New customers for Back of Beyond. A Dr. Alexander K. Sarvis, M.D. And one Miss—or Mrs.?—or Mr.?—B. Abbzug.

  4

  Origins IV: Ms. B. Abbzug

  No relation to the Senator, she always said. Which was mostly true. Her first name was Bonnie and she came from the Bronx, not Brooklyn. Furthermore, she was half Wasp (white anglo sexy Protestant); her mother’s maiden name was McComb. That strain perhaps accounted for the copper glints in Ms. Abbzug’s long, rich, molasses-colored hair, draped in glossy splendor from crown of head to swell of rump. Abbzug was twenty-eight years old. A dancer by training, she had first come to the Southwest seven years earlier, member of a college troupe. She fell in love—at first sight—with mountains and desert, deserted her troupe in Albuquerque and continued at the university there, graduating with honors and distinction into the world of unemployment offices, food stamps and basement apartments. She worked as a waitress, as a teller trainee in a bank, as a go-go dancer, as a receptionist in doctors’ offices. First for a psychiatrist named Evilsizer, then for a urologist named Glasscock, then for a general surgeon named Sarvis.

  Sarvis was the best of a sorry lot. She had stayed with him and after three years was still with him in the multiple capacities of office clerk, nurse-aide and chauffeur (he was incapable of driving a car in city traffic, though perfectly at home with scalpel and forceps slashing about in another man’s gallbladder or excising a chalazion from someone’s inner eyelid). When the doctor’s wife died in a meaningless accident—plane crash during takeoff from O’Hare Field—she watched him stumble like a sleepwalker through office, ward and eight days until he turned to her with a question. In his eyes. He was twenty-one years older than she. His children were grown up and gone.

  Ms. Abbzug offered him what consolation she could, which was much, but refused the offer of marriage that followed a year after the accident.

  She preferred (she said) the relative independence (she thought) of female bachelorhood. Though she often stayed with the doctor in his home and accompanied him on his travels, she also retained her own quarters, in a humbler part of Albuquerque. Her “quarters” was a hemisphere of petrified polyurethane supported by a geodetic frame of cheap aluminum, the whole resting like an overgrown and pallid fungus on a lot with tomato patch in the wrong or southwestern sector of the city.

  The interior of Abbzug’s dome glittered like the heart of a geode, with dangling silvery mobiles and electric lanterns made of multiperforated No. 8 tin cans hanging from the ceiling, and crystalline clusters of mirrors and baubles attached at random to the curved interior. On sunny days the translucent single wall admitted a general glow, filling her inner space with pleasure. Beside her princess-size water bed stood a bookshelf loaded with the teenybopper intellectual’s standard library of the period: the collected works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Carlos Castaneda, Hermann Hesse, Richard Brautigan, The Whole Earth Catalog, the I Ching, The Old Farmer’s Almanack and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Spiders crawled upon the wisdom of Fritz Perls and Prof. Richard (“Baba Ram Dass”) Alpert, Ph.D. Lonesome earwigs explored the irrational knots of R. D. Laing. Silverfish ate their way through the cold sludge of R. Buckminster Fuller. She never opened any of them anymore.

  The brightest thing in Abbzug’s dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.

  Dr. Sarvis detested geodesic domes. Too much of the American countryside, he thought, was being encysted with these giant sunken golf balls. He despised them as fungoid, abstract, alien and inorganic structures, symptom and symbol of the Plastic Plague, the Age of Junk. But he loved Bonnie Abbzug despite her dome. The loose and partial relationship which was all she would give him he accepted with gratitude. Not only was it much better than nothing but in many ways it was much better than everything.

  Likewise, she thought. The fabric, she said, of our social structure is being unraveled by too many desperately interdependent people. Agreed, said Dr. Sarvis; our only hope is catastrophe. So they lingered together, the small dark arrogant slip of a girl and the huge pink paunchy bear of a man, for weeks, months, a year…. Periodically he repeated his marriage proposal, as much for form’s sake as out of love. Is one more important than the other? And regularly she turned him down, firmly and tenderly, with open arms, with prolonged kisses, with her mild and moderate love.

  Love me little, love me long….

  Other men were such obscene idiots. The doctor was an aging adolescent but he was kind and generous and he needed her and when he was with her he was really there, with her. Most of the time. It seemed to her that he withheld nothing. When he was with her.

  For two years she had lived and loved, off and on, with Dr. Sarvis. There was this tendency simply to drift. Millions were doing it. It irritated Abbzug a bit that she, with her degree in French, her good healthy strong young body, her restless and irritable mind, was fulfilling no function more demanding than that of office flunky and lonely widower’s part-time mistress. And yet, when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing—the dance—because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art. She could certainly never go back to the night world of the cabaret, where all those vice squad detectives, claims adjusters and fraternity boys sat in the murk with their blues, their beers, their limp lusts, straining their eyeballs, ruining their eyesight for a glimpse of her crotch.

  What then? The maternal instinct seemed to be failing to function so far as she was concerned, except for her role as mother to the doctor. Playing mother to a man old enough to be her father. The generation gap, or vice versa? The cradle robber? Who’s a cradle robber? I’m the cradle robber; he’s in his second childhood.

  She had built most of the dome herself, buying assistance only for the plumbing and wiring. The night before she moved into the thing she held a ceremony, a consecration of the house, a “chant.” She and her friends formed a circle round a small and burning coal-oil lamp. They twisted their long, awkward American legs into overhand knots—the lotus posture. Then the six middle-class college-educated Americans sitting under an inflated twenty-first-century marshmallow of plastic foam intoned a series of antique Oriental chants which had long ago been abandoned by educated people in the nations of their origin.

  “Om,” they chanted. “Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Om mani padma ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….”

  Or as Doc Sarvis liked to say, “Om sweet om: be it ever so humble …” and he hung a needlework sampler on the curvispatial wall: God Bless Our Happy Dome.

  But he seldom entered there. When she was not with him, at his place or on their frequent travels, she lived alone in her fungus. Alone with her cat, tending her potted plants, her tomato patch in the backyard, playing her recorder, dusting her unread and unreadable books, brushing her marvelous hair, meditating, exercising, lifting her lovely and longing face toward the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through all the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You’re twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug.

  For diversion s
he joined the good doctor on his nighttime highway beautification projects, assisting him in the beginning as driver and lookout. When they tired of fire she learned to hold her own at one end of a crosscut saw. She learned how to swing an ax and how to notch the upright posts of a billboard so as to fell it in any desired direction.

  When the doctor acquired a lightweight McCulloch chain saw she learned how to operate that too, how to start it, how to oil and refuel it, how to adjust the chain when it became too tight or too loose. With this handy tool they were able to accomplish much more work in limited time although it did raise the ecological question, whatever that meant, of noise and air pollution, the excessive consumption of metal and energy. Endless ramifications….

  “No,” the doctor said. “Forget all that. Our duty is to destroy billboards.”

  They proceeded, furtive figures in the night, the sinister black Lincoln with the silvery caduceus on the license tag, the big car parked with motor running on obscure side roads near major highways, the huge man, the short woman, climbing fences, shuffling through the weeds lugging their chain saw and fuel can. They became familiar shapes and smells to the ground squirrels and hoot owls, a major and irritating mystery to the outdoor advertising agencies and the Special Investigation Squad of the Bernalillo County sheriff’s department.

  Somebody had to do it.

  The local press spoke first of meaningless vandalism. Later, for a time, reports of such incidents were suppressed on the theory that publicity might only encourage the vandals. But as the advertising men, the highway patrolmen and the county sheriffs became aware of the repetition of these attacks on private property and the singularity of the targets, comment arose.

  Pictures and stories began to appear in the Albuquerque Journal, the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Taos News, the Belen Bugle. The Bernalillo County Sheriff denied a report that he had assigned a full-time detective detail to the problem. The outdoor advertising executives, interviewed and quoted, spoke of “common criminals.”

  Anonymous letters appeared in the mail of city and county officials, all claiming credit for the crimes. The newspaper stories mentioned “organized bands of environmental activists,” a phrase soon shortened to the much handier and more dramatic “eco-raiders.” The county attorneys warned that the perpetrators of these illegal acts, when caught, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Nasty letters, pro and con, appeared in the Letters-to-the-Editor columns.

  Doc Sarvis chuckled within his mask, stitching up a stranger’s yellow belly. The kid smiled as she read the papers by the evening fire. It was like celebrating Hallowe’en all year round. It was something to do. For the first time in years Ms. Abbzug felt the emotion called delight in her cold Bronx heart. She was learning anew the solid satisfaction of good work properly done.

  The billboard men schemed, measured costs, drafted new designs, ordered new materials. There was talk of electrifying the uprights, of set guns, of armed watchmen, of rewards to vigilantes. But the billboards followed the highways for hundreds of miles across New Mexico. Where and when the criminals would attack next no one could guess; you’d need a guard for every billboard. There was a phased changeover to steel. The extra costs, of course, could be passed on to the consumers.

  One night they went out, Bonnie and Doc, far to the north of the city, to level a target they had chosen weeks earlier. They parked the car out of sight of the highway, on a turnoff, and walked the half mile back to their objective. The usual precautions. As usual he carried the chain saw, she led the way (she had better night vision). They stumbled through the dark, using no other light than that of the stars, following the right-of-way fence. Traffic hissed by on the four-lane freeway, frantic and fast as always, following private tunnels of light through the darkness, oblivious to all but the need to make haste, to get there, somewhere, wherever.

  Bonnie and Doc ignored the fanatic engines, disregarded the human minds and bodies hurtling by, paid them no attention at all; why should they? They were working.

  They came to the target. It looked the same as before.

  MOUNTAIN VIEW RANCHETTE ESTATES

  TOMORROW’S NEW WAY OF LIVING TODAY!

  Horizon Land & Development Corp.

  “Beautiful,” she said, leaning against the panting Doc.

  “Beautiful,” he agreed. After resting a moment he put down his McCulloch, knelt, turned on the switch, set the choke, grasped the throttle and gave a good pull on the starter cord. The snappy little motor buzzed into life; the wicked chain danced forward in its groove. He stood up, the machine vibrating in his hands, eager for destruction. He pushed the oiler button, revved the engine and stepped to the nearest upright post of the billboard.

  “Wait,” Bonnie said. She was leaning against the center post, tapping it with her knuckles. “Wait a minute.”

  He didn’t hear her. Squeezing the throttle, he set the blade against the post. The saw bounced off with a shriek of steel, a spray of sparks. Doc was dumbfounded for a moment, unable to accept what he saw and heard. Then he shut off the motor.

  A blessed quiet in the night. Faces pale in the gloom, they stared at each other.

  “Doc,” she said, “I told you to wait.”

  “Steel,” he said. Wonderingly he passed a hand over the post, bonged on it with his big fist.

  “That’s what it is.”

  They waited. They thought.

  After a pause she said, “You know what I want for my birthday?”

  “What?”

  “I want an acetylene torch. With safety goggles.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s not your birthday.”

  “So?”

  The very next night they were back, same place, same sign, this time adequately equipped. The torch functioned perfectly, the intense blue flame licking silently and furiously at the steel, making an ugly red-hot wound. But in the dark the glare seemed dangerously conspicuous. Doc lowered the torch to the base of the center post, down where it emerged from the stony desert ground, down among the tumbleweed and rabbit brush. Even then the light of the flame seemed much too bold. Bonnie squatted down and opened her coat wide, trying to shield the flame from sight of the passing traffic. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody stopped. The heedless autos, the bellowing trucks, all swept past with vicious hiss of rubber, mad roar of engines, rushing into the black oblivion of the night. Maybe nobody cared.

  The torch was deadly but it was slow. The molecules of steel released their bonds with one another most painfully, reluctantly, loath to part. The red wound widened slowly, slowly, even though, as expected, the post was hollow.

  The torch was slow but it was deadly. Doc and the girl worked steadily, one relieving the other from time to time. Patience, patience. The heavy-gauge alloy yielded to the flame. Progress became discernible. Obvious. Conclusive.

  Doc shut off the torch, removed the goggles, wiped his sweating brow. The welcome darkness closed around them.

  “She’ll go now,” he said.

  The center post was cut all the way through. The outer posts were each cut more than two thirds through. The great sign rested mostly on its own weight, precariously balanced. A south breeze would make it totter. A child could push it over. Within its gravitational time-space continuum, the billboard’s destiny was predetermined, beyond appeal. The arc of its return to earth could have been computed to within a tolerance of three millimeters.

  They savored the moment. The intrinsic virtues of free and worthy enterprise. The ghost of Sam Gompers smiled upon their labors.

  “Push it over,” he said.

  “You,” she said. “You did most of the work.”

  “It’s your birthday.”

  Bonnie placed her small brown hands against the lower edge of the sign, above her head, barely within her reach, and leaned. The billboard—some five tons of steel, wood, paint, bolts and nuts—gave a little groan of protest and began to heel over. A rush of air, then the
thundering collision of billboard with earth, the boom of metal, the rack and wrench of ruptured bolts, a mushroom cloud of dust, nothing more. The indifferent traffic raced by, unseeing, uncaring, untouched.

  They celebrated at the revolving Skyroom Grill.

  “I want a Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.

  “It’s not Thanksgiving.”

  “If I want a Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.

  “It’s not Thanksgiving.”

  “If I want a Thanksgiving dinner it’s got to be Thanksgiving.”

  “That sounds logical.”

  “Call the waiter.”

  “He won’t believe us.”

  “We’ll try to reason with him.”

  They reasoned. Food appeared, and wine. They ate, he poured, they drank, the hour slouched by into eternity. Doc spoke.

  “Abbzug,” the doctor said, “I love you.”

  “How much?”

  “Too much.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  Charlie Ray or Ray Charles or somebody at the ivories, playing “Love Gets in Your Eyes,” pianissimo. The circular room, ten stories above the ground, revolved at 0.5 kilometer per hour. All the night lights of Greater Albuquerque New Mex. pop. 300,000 souls lay about them below, the kingdom of neon, electric gardens of baby-Ionic splendor surrounded by the bleak, black, slovenly wilderness that never would shape up. Where the lean and hungry coyote skulked, unwilling to extinct. The skunk. The snake. The bug. The worm.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I like ceremony.”

  “Why spoil a perfectly good relationship?”

  “I’m a lonely old middle-aged meatcutter. I require security. I like the idea of commitment.”

  “That’s what they do to crazy people. Are you crazy, Doc?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go to bed. I’m tired.”