All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

by David Gessner

  He continues:

  Am I saying that the writer should be—I hesitate before the horror of it—political? Yes sir, I am. . . . By “political” I mean involvement, responsibility, commitment: the writer’s duty to speak the truth—especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental.

  IN THE 1950S, Bernard DeVoto insisted that it was Wallace Stegner’s responsibility to fight off the plunderers, and in saying this DeVoto knew his man: that was just the right word to do the trick. Stegner responded by writing a series of articles about the way that the Eisenhower administration was violating the sanctity of the national parks, with plans to build dams within their boundaries. These culminated with the publication of “We Are Destroying Our National Parks” in Sports Illustrated in 1955, the same year DeVoto died.

  These articles would be the ones noticed by David Brower and would lead to Stegner and Brower’s historic fight to save Dinosaur. Of course, Dinosaur would be followed by that worst of defeats: the drowning of Glen Canyon. Many people blame Brower, and by implication Stegner, for selling out Glen Canyon. The most common telling of the story is that Brower, who had never seen Glen Canyon, made a deal with the Eisenhower administration. If they agreed not to put the dam in Dinosaur, the Sierra Club and the other environmental groups would not oppose a dam in Glen Canyon. Others say that the story was simpler and less sinister: Brower, exhausted and overextended from the first fight for Dinosaur, failed to adequately respond to the second. One problem was that Brower had never been to Glen Canyon, though Stegner had described it for him, extolling its beauty. It wasn’t until later, when Brower rafted down the canyon with Stegner right before it was flooded by the dam, that he realized what a great mistake he’d made. Stegner’s biographer Jackson Benson is rarely critical of his subject, but at this point in the story he writes: “In hindsight, it would seem that Stegner should have in this instance shaken off his moderation and more vociferously acted as advocate for Glen Canyon. If he had, Brower would not have failed to act in the clutch.” In recent years, this story has been revised, with Bureau of Reclamation officials, including former bureau chief Floyd Dominy, saying that there never was a deal, that in fact the Glen Canyon Dam had long been planned and would have proceeded no matter what happened in Dinosaur. But if this made Stegner less culpable, it did nothing to stop the pain of the loss. He would return to Glen Canyon after construction of the dam had begun, and so had a front-row seat at the damnation that haunted both him and Ed Abbey, bearing witness as the great bathtub of Lake Powell filled up and Glen Canyon was flooded. With that, John Wesley Powell’s journey could never be repeated.

  Perhaps Stegner’s biographer was right; perhaps Stegner’s “excess of moderation” doomed him when it came to saving Glen Canyon. Perhaps, but of all the individuals who fought to preserve land during those years, few fought as hard or as well as Stegner. If he had his lapses, so did everyone else, most obviously the Archdruid himself, David Brower. Looked at from our distance, it is hard for anyone to throw stones at Stegner for his environmental record. Even Ed Abbey, who may not have even liked Stegner that much, said of him: “Wallace Stegner is the only American writer who deserves the Nobel Prize.”

  That these words did not come from a student trying to butter up a teacher—who could be more antithetical to wild Ed than the older, buttoned-down, conservative, hippie hater?—make them carry even more weight. Abbey admired Stegner’s work and his commitment to making art, but perhaps admired more his teacher’s commitment to fighting for the land.

  There would be other losses, painful losses, but also more victories. In 1960, Stegner published his soon-to-be-famous “Wilderness Letter,” which argued that wilderness was vital to the American soul, and that undeveloped land was deeply valuable, even when that value was not obvious and monetary. One influential reader of the letter was the new secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, who thought so highly of it that he read it out loud at a Sierra Club gathering in April of 1961. By then he had also read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, and he was determined to get Stegner to come to Washington with him. Stegner was reluctant; he was a writer with work to do, not a politician, but eventually he gave in. In DC, he worked on the beginnings of legislation that would become 1964’s groundbreaking Wilderness Bill and attended meetings with Udall, during which, according to the secretary, Stegner was “never bashful.” The eventual bill was in fact an almost perfect practical embodiment of the “Wilderness Letter”—a massive setting aside of lands never to be developed. For Stegner it was a heady experience, and he got “an inside look at parts of the Kennedy administration during its first energetic year” as well as “a good lesson in how long ideas that on their face seemed to me self-evident and self-justifying could take to be translated into law.” He also went on a vital reconnaissance mission to Utah for Udall, scouting the land that the secretary would eventually save as Canyonlands National Park.

  But the truth is Stegner lasted only four months in Washington. He might play at being Major Powell for a while, but he wasn’t Powell. He was a writer and teacher, not a politician. Mary Stegner found DC cold and lonely, and by the beginning of the spring term they were back at Stanford. His relationship with Udall would continue, however, and he would help the politician write the early drafts of what was to become Udall’s bestselling conservation manifesto, The Quiet Crisis. And for the rest of his life Stegner would keep fighting in the environmental wars despite the fact that these obligations “constantly prevented the kind of extended concentration a novel demands.” It would have been nice to have turned his back on these extra obligations, but of course, being who he was, he couldn’t.

  For Stegner, who always valued results above mere theory, efficacy was a great virtue. Or maybe it is best to say that he valued real-world effectiveness along with theory, broad ideas applied to the practical Earth.

  Stegner’s could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: “I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save redwoods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators.”

  He went to those meetings because it was the right thing to do. An obligation, yes, but one he valued.

  “The highest thing I can think of doing is literary,” he wrote a friend. “But literature does not exist in a vacuum, or even in a partial vacuum. We are neither detached nor semi-detached, but linked to the world by a million interdependencies. To deny the interdependencies, while living on the comforts and services they make possible, is adolescent when it isn’t downright dishonest.”

  Which meant sitting in at those boring meetings where he saw no mystical dropouts or meditators. And giving talks, writing articles, and even creating propaganda when he would have rather been immersing himself deeply in a novel. He sometimes grumbled about this, of course he did. It was extra work, yet another thing to do in a life full of responsibilities. But he had signed on and he wouldn’t ever really sign off. Like Major Powell, he knew the despoilers, the extractors, would never rest. You never really “won” an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future. Since the boomers never rested he knew that meant he could do very little resting himself. Unlike many of us today, he did not take environmentalism for granted, since when he had begun to fight it barely existed. Stegner concludes his “A Capsule History of Conservation” this way: “Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.”

  So he did his job.

  DURING MY MAY trip to study the Abbey pa
pers at the library in Tucson, I’d driven up to the Glen Canyon Dam and taken a raft trip that started at the base of the dam seven hundred feet below where I now stood. The Colorado River, while overregulated and overdammed and definitely overstressed, had still looked beautiful that day. A peregrine falcon swooped into its nest five hundred feet up the canyon wall. When I looked back at the dam that loomed behind and above us, it seemed to grow out of the roseate canyon, which of course it had in a manner. The section we were paddling was a remnant of Glen Canyon, the section that Powell, not to mention Abbey and Stegner, considered the most beautiful of all the canyons. What was left was this, “a small and imperfect sampling” according to Abbey, of the great wild that was gone.

  Above us, as we paddled, loomed reddish walls splashed with hundred-foot black stains of desert varnish, a dark patina created by water seepage from great cracks. The white lines of ancient lakebeds sliced through panels of orange and pink. Bighorns grazed and great blue herons roosted; a lone tree grew out of the side of a cliff a thousand or so feet up. Green tamarisk—which most people think of as native but is an invasive species that took over the Colorado system in the 1880s—covered the banks, or those parts of the banks that were not sheer cliff. The walls of Navajo sandstone climbed claustrophobically, seven hundred feet high at the dam but rising to two thousand by our trip’s end at Lees Ferry. The river cleaved through the walls, and we—tiny we—followed the river.

  To call the Colorado River the lifeblood of the West is no exaggeration: it is the only truly major river in the mountain West and seven western states could not exist in their present fashion without it. What will be interesting, or more likely tragic, in the coming years will be to see if they can exist with a whole lot less of it. When the river was divvied up between the states in 1922 it was based on the optimistic number of 20 million acre-feet (an acre-foot is the amount of water made up by an acre of surface volume at the depth of one foot). What those who did the divvying didn’t know then was that the West was in the midst of one of the wettest centuries in the last thousand years. The estimate of total flow that they came up with has not been approached in recent years, and in fact the water supply continues to dwindle. This dwindling is the result of a drought over a decade long, but climate-change experts warn that we should not ever expect the water to return to old levels; in fact, they have predicted that the flow will be reduced dramatically, by as much as 35 percent, in years to come. Meanwhile whole cities and mini societies have grown up around their negotiated share of this particular river, including the 3 million–plus citizens of Phoenix, who, with their watered lawns and golf courses, like to pretend they do not live in the desert. A full fifth of the river’s water is delivered to that city via a three-hundred-mile canal. Then there is the electric hive of Vegas, and the greatest water slurpers of them all, the residents of California. For almost a century now they have been living the illusion of plenty, but as Stegner liked to point out, in this land “aridity still calls the tune.”

  My raft trip that day was a planned, well-practiced affair, hardly wild, and other than getting splashed in the rapids and running into a headwind that briefly made progress close to impossible, there was nothing to it. We would sometimes hear the rumble of rapids as we rounded the canyon corners, which might have sent a tingle of excitement down the spines of some in the boat. Of course, to Powell that same noise meant something entirely different, something terrifying. Our own guide, gray-bearded, jovial Paul, was born in 1956, the same year construction began on the dam, and so never knew this as a wild river. Few people have these days. He seemed like a good man, happy enough with his job, and he spouted facts about dam and river, toeing the company line. Lake Powell may have drowned some beautiful places, he told us, but it was now a playland for 3 million people, and provided water resources for 31 million people. (Three-quarters of the water would end up in California’s Imperial Valley for agribusiness, but I didn’t bring this up.) We passed the Mile Four Dam site, where the walls rise 1,800 feet high and where a dam was almost built that would have dwarfed the one in Glen Canyon. (It was this potential dam site that inspired the Sierra Club to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times showing a drowned Sistine Chapel.)

  When we pulled over at the Ferry Swale campground to look at petroglyphs, Paul and I talked Abbey for a while. Both Paul’s shaggy hairstyle and his profession suggested he would be well versed. Sure enough, he was familiar with the Abbey scriptures and became slightly apologetic about his complicit role in showcasing the new, improved, regulated river. As well as the more pleasant facts he had been spouting, he knew that the ecosystems we had been traveling through had been vastly altered by the dam, and that the ecosystems upstream had all been ruined. He knew too that Lake Powell was gradually silting and drying up, its bathtub ring left by its high point now fifty feet up on the canyon walls. And certainly as a Grand Canyon river rafter Paul knew that the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell symbolized everything that Ed Abbey most despised about the modern American West.

  “He sure hated that dam,” Paul admitted.

  He sure did, I agreed. But I loved the way he had turned that hate into a kind of artistic fuel.

  If Desert Solitaire was Abbey’s best book, then The Monkey Wrench Gang was his most popular, and at the heart of the novel is a plan to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam and send the Colorado flowing back into the Grand Canyon. At the heart of that heart is a caricature of a man, George Washington Hayduke—a wild, hairy, passionate, deranged primitive who spoke in caveman phrases and said the word fuck a lot. Based on Abbey’s friend, Doug Peacock, Hayduke was a Vietnam vet with a background in field medicine and explosives, a force of nature who would do whatever it took to try to restore the West to the way it was. As Hayduke himself put it: “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. That’s simple, right?”

  Hayduke did not work alone, of course, but was just one, as the title implies, of a gang, a gang that included Seldom Seen Smith (the Ken Sleight character), Doc Sarvis (the closest thing to a stand-in for Abbey), and Bonnie Abzug (a kind of sexpot caricature of a woman who was based loosely on Abbey’s friend Ingrid Eisenstadter). Together they fought the powers that be, the forces of progress, the forces of pillage. Together they lived out an Abbey fantasy of taking on the modern industrial state by dismantling and disabling construction equipment, running tractors over canyon walls, blowing up bridges, and doing whatever else it took to slow down the demon progress.

  “One brave act is worth a thousand books,” Abbey wrote.

  This might seem like an odd sentiment for a writer, especially for a writer whose words led to so much action. But throughout his life, Abbey chastised himself for not doing more. Not just more on the page, not mere words.

  No doubt he underestimated how much of a difference his words actually made. True, sane writers should be skeptical about believing their words make a great difference in the world. But to a surprising degree, Abbey’s words did. For all his own forays into monkeywrenching and protest, the most important environmental work he did was in the seeds he planted on the page.

  The remarkable thing is that his fantasy of a gang of eco-fighters would be translated into reality by some of the book’s readers. Even more remarkable is how many people not only took the book seriously but began to see it as a kind of training manual or how-to guide for eco-sabotage. The book, which sold more than a million copies, was read by every western environmentalist with even the vaguest of literary inclinations. As late as 1991, when I arrived in Colorado, sixteen years after the book was published, I had among my own small circle of friends a man who made it his business to smash the lightbulbs that were annually set up for Christmas display on Flagstaff Mountain (how environmental this protest was is another question); another who’d had the course of his life determined by Abbey’s books and would soon begin a career as the director of a land trust; and more mysteriously another who kept the book Eco Defense on his bedside shelf and received the Earth First! n
ewsletter but refused to talk at all about monkeywrenching, no doubt, we assumed, for fear of implicating himself or his fellow saboteurs.

  Then there’s Dave Foreman, who was still in the midst of eight years working as the Southwest representative for the Wilderness Society and as a Washington lobbyist when he first read the book. During those years, he had become frustrated with the traditional ways that environmental groups tried to create change. He felt that there was far too much compromise, and began to wonder if there were more creative, personal, and radical ways he could fight for the land. Soon after reading Abbey he found himself getting together with some like-minded young environmentalists who worked for both the Wilderness Society and the Friends of the Earth. The group retreated to the desert to talk about what was to be done and how to do it. When they emerged, they were committed to creating an uncompromising unit that would put the defense of the Earth above all else.

  They called themselves Earth First!, a nontraditional non-organization that would use weapons similar to Abbey’s gang in defense of Mother Earth. The Monkey Wrench Gang was their central text. The group began by fighting logging in the Oregon National Forest, where they took nonviolent action, in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, standing in front of bulldozers and literally hugging trees. Foreman always stressed the nonviolent aspect of the protests, and he continued to do so in his book, Eco Defense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenchers, for which Abbey wrote the introduction. The book detailed the basics of how to take environmental protest into your own hands, describing techniques for pulling up surveyors’ stakes and disabling machines.

  Earth First! learned from Abbey the importance of symbol, and one of the group’s high points was the unfurling of a great black sheet down the front of the Glen Canyon Dam that made it appear the dam was cracked, an event which Abbey gleefully attended. But a group that had romantic beginnings had paranoid endings (think Goodfellas), with the FBI infiltrating the organization and bursting into Foreman’s home to arrest him. The FBI did a good job of painting the activists as terrorists, an accusation that became all that much more common against environmental groups in the climate after 9/11.