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

by David Gessner

  IF ABBEY WAS Mr. Outside, Stegner was Mr. Inside, fighting within the proper channels. The objectives of the two men often overlapped, but their tones couldn’t have been more different. For instance, during the writing and editing of This Is Dinosaur, both David Brower and the book’s publisher, Alfred Knopf, pushed for a more combative style, but Stegner insisted that a more moderate and temperate book, with the focus on what would be lost rather than on who the villains were, would be more effective. Abbey would have scoffed.

  Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: “I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.” Against the myths of rugged individualism, he put forth community. Against irrationality, he put forth reason. Meanwhile, though Abbey might like to mock both cow and cowboy, that didn’t stop him from occasionally putting on the romantic spurs and chaps of a western hero. Abbey, and to some extent the group that grew out of his ideas, Earth First!, used the cowboy image to battle the cowboy myth, and one of the reasons Abbey is still relevant today was that he took this do-gooding, dorky thing called environmentalism—he hated the passionless, scientific sound of the word—and made it exciting, the province of the outlaw. He also made it fun. In today’s political climate, it is almost impossible to imagine the Robin Hood feel of Abbey’s day. Abbey relished the fight and, reading him, others started relishing it too.

  In my own life, for instance, one of Abbey’s roles was that he was a gateway drug to Stegner, and perhaps this is true for many others, too. Like Stegner, Abbey thought about the West as a whole and connected many a dot, but he was never quite the global thinker his old teacher was. At first glance he might seem to have less to offer us in these more circumscribed times. Yet the funny thing is that some of his more extreme ideas have come to seem less radical. As the years have gone by Lake Powell has continued to silt up, losing more than 100,000 acre-feet per year at last count, and hydrologists believe—as Abbey did—that silting will eventually lead to a pool of mud, not water. Michael Kellett is the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996 with the help of David Brower with the goal of one day witnessing the Colorado flowing freely through the old Glen Canyon. At a time when western dams are actually being decommissioned so that rivers can flow, experts are wondering whether it is really viable to have two enormous evaporative and silting reservoirs, Powell and Mead.

  Kellett wrote in the summer of 2012:

  The trends of the last decade have dramatically changed the situation. Rising public water demand, relentless drought, and climate change have significantly reduced the flow of the Colorado River from that of the past century. Scientific studies have predicted that this situation will continue. Lake Powell reservoir, and Lake Mead reservoir downstream, are half empty. Most scientists believe that there will never again be enough water to fill both reservoirs.

  Which had led to proposals like the Fill Lake Mead First project, the idea being to keep the downstream reservoir, Mead, full while releasing the upstream Glen Canyon. In other words, for the first time Abbey’s wild fantasies are being considered as serious policy.

  And for the first time the dream of what would occur when the dam was removed might come true. Abbey writes of that fantasy at the end of his essay “The Damnation of a Canyon”:

  The inevitable floods will soon remove all that does not belong within the canyons. Fresh green willow, box elder and redbud will appear; and the ancient drowned cottonwoods (noble monuments to themselves) will be replaced by young of their own kind. With the renewal of plant life will come the insects, the birds, the lizards and snakes, the mammals. Within a generation—thirty years—I predict the river and canyons will bear a decent resemblance to their former selves. Within the lifetime of our children Glen Canyon and the living river, heart of the canyonlands, will be restored to us. The wilderness will again belong to God, the people and the wild things that call it home.

  FROM THE DAM I pushed it all the way to Albuquerque and spent the night in a dive hotel. The next morning I was up early, heading up to the Santa Fe airport to pick up my friend Mark Honerkamp, or Hones as I’ve always call him. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the role that male bonding played in the lives of Stegner and, especially, Abbey. As it turns out, it played a role in my life too, and as much as I’d enjoyed my solo trip so far, I was ready for company. Hones and I had been friends since 1983, when we played together on an Ultimate Frisbee team called the Hostages. Not only had he been part of my life since then, he had also gone on almost every adventure (and appeared in almost every book). By the summer of 2012, Hones had been out of work for a while, focusing most of his energies on fishing and living cheaply so that he could keep on fishing. When Kristen McKinnon of Wild Rivers Expeditions offered to comp me for an eight-day river trip on the San Juan River in exchange for writing about my experience, I asked her if she could comp two paddlers. Kristen, always generous, said sure.

  I was late to pick him up due to a chemical spill on the highway—the whole road closed off by yellow police tape—that forced me to detour up through the mountains before cutting back to the tiny Santa Fe airport. Hones didn’t seem to mind. He was armed, for the first time in his life, with a cell phone, the temporary grocery-store kind, which allowed me to call him when I made my detour. When I finally greeted him at the airport he could turn off the phone for the rest of the trip, it having served its one purpose.

  Hones is a big man, 6'4", and he folded himself into my small car, squeezing in among all my belongings. In daily life, Hones can be moody, but he loves vacations, trips especially, and has traveled with me to Venezuela, Hawk Mountain (PA), New Orleans, Cape Cod, Colorado, Utah, and Belize.

  We had to make a stop before we headed to the river. Jack Loeffler, one of Edward Abbey’s closest friends, lived in the hills outside of Santa Fe. We dropped by and spoke with Loeffler in the open, book-filled study of his single-story adobe home.

  “What Ed and I knew, on some fundamental level, is that once you’ve been out in it long enough, it becomes the top priority,” he told us as we settled into the study. “When you’re out in it fully, you recognize it’s where you belong. We concluded that it took a good ten days in the wilderness until you began to change. You need to live in the spirit of nature, so that it’s totally and intuitively in your system. Then you don’t have any choice but to defend it.”

  If the words verged on the New Age, the delivery was pure Broadway. A handsome, fit, seventy-four-year-old man with a big smile and white beard, Loeffler was innately theatrical. He wore an open western shirt, kerchief, and khaki shorts. His whole demeanor was what I can only describe as oddly joyful.

  “Ed was a tortured man,” he told us at one point. “He was no stranger to despair.”

  That jibed with what I had read and thought. Though Loeffler spoke those melancholic words with a beaming smile.

  “I think that is one of the reasons we got along so well,” he continued. “I am a stranger to despair.”

  He exploded in a wild burst of a laugh after he said this, a noise we would grow used to by the end of the interview. His laugh sounded like the upward yodeling of a pileated woodpecker.

  I agreed that he seemed to be a sunnier spirit than his friend.

  “I’m a happy dude, man,” he said.

  I confessed to him that I was feeling guilty about all the driving I had been doing.

  “Ed and I drove all over the Southwest,” he said. “And worse, we took both of our trucks. I don’t think we had a single trip when we didn’t get stuck. As a matter of fact, we even got stuck when he was dead. We had made a vow to each other that whoever went first, the other wouldn’t let them die in a hospital bed. Ed died well but when I went to bury him in the desert, with his body in the back of the truck, we got stuck
in the sand. It was inevitable, I guess.”

  Dead bodies in the back of the truck were just one way that their camping trips were not like yours or mine. I mentioned this.

  “Not only did we take two vehicles much of the time we camped, but we always brought matching .357 Magnums. So we were ready.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Well, I have to be careful here. For Ed the statute of limitations has run out. Not necessarily for me. Let’s just say that one of the reasons we had them—not that I would really use it for this—is that ostensibly a .357 can crack an engine block in a big piece of machinery.”

  This was what I wanted to know. How much of Abbey’s monkeywrenching was real, how much legend or fiction? Was he just good with words or did he get his hands dirty?

  “Ed did his nachtwerke,” Loeffler told me. “That’s what he called it: night work. It started with cutting down billboards in college. What you’ve got to understand is that rebellion was part of him, in his blood. Look, his father, Paul Revere Abbey, named one of Ed’s brothers William Tell Abbey. Paul had met Eugene Debbs, who was a huge influence on him. From his father’s side Ed got that strong, individualistic point of view.”

  What became clear to me, as Loeffler kept talking, was that Ed Abbey did a lot more than pay lip service to monkeywrenching. Loeffler described the early fights of the Black Mesa Defense Fund and the battles against the Peabody Coal Company.

  “We had a rule of three,” he said. They did their work in small groups, preferably two but three at most, and never confided in anyone else about what they’d done.

  Both men had come to believe that American culture was “lodged completely in an economically dominated paradigm” and that those who opposed it would be punished.

  “Law is created to define and defend the economic system,” Loeffler said. But fighting was a moral imperative, the two friends came to agree: as obvious a case of self-defense as repelling someone who has broken into your home. That said, they would only push it so far. Abbey and Loeffler made vows of nonviolence. Doing harm to machines was one thing, human beings another.

  Loeffler believed that too many people underplayed his friend’s belief in anarchy, which Abbey called “democracy taken seriously.” Government, any government, should be rightly feared: “Like a bulldozer, government serves the caprice of any man or group who succeeds in seizing the controls.” For this reason Abbey was adamantly opposed to any control of guns. (One wonders if recent events might have led to a softening of this position, though softening, as a rule, was not in Abbey’s nature.)

  And there is something else in Abbey that Jack Loeffler was suggesting we not take lightly. Abbey fought the prevailing power, but he also knew why most people didn’t fight the prevailing power. Comfort was a large part of it. For most of us there is a lot to lose. It was, and is, Abbey’s job to make us feel uncomfortable in our comfort. He wrote: “Never before in history have slaves been so well fed, thoroughly medicated, lavishly entertained—but we are slaves nonetheless.” And this was even before we slaves were given our cell phones and computers.

  Right before Hones and I were ready to say good-bye, a huge crack of thunder got us jumping out of our seats. The rain pounded on the roof, a significant percentage of the rain that Santa Fe would see that year. When it stopped, Jack walked us out to the car. We hugged good-bye, which seemed in no way unnatural. I had read Jack’s book, the king of all of the “I Was Ed’s Chum” genre, and to be honest it had made me a little uneasy. The language was stilted in places, the dialogue between the two buddies almost Shakespearian, the portrayal of chumminess over the top. That said, no other book I’d read had brought Abbey alive to the degree it did, which was Jack’s stated goal. And its description of Abbey’s “good death” hit like a punch in the gut.

  There was something a little groovy about Jack Loeffler, the kind of grooviness that usually sets off my bullshit detector. But the detector stayed quiet during our visit. If his book had been slightly tone deaf, Jack Loeffler in person was anything but. I was both charmed and impressed by the man. He was a force: voluble, smart, dynamic.

  We left reluctantly and when we finally did, after knowing him for three hours, we felt we were leaving a friend.

  The last thing he said to me was a directive regarding Abbey.

  “Bring him alive,” he said as we climbed in the car. “Farewell!”

  8

  DOWN THE RIVER WITH ED AND WALLY

  On November 4, 1980, Edward Abbey began a ten-day rafting trip on the Green River in Utah. With him he carried “a worn and greasy paperback copy of a book called Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. Out of that trip came one of his very best essays, “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” the piece patched together out of journal entries of river observations and a running conversation, which sometimes grows heated enough to call an argument, with Henry David Thoreau. All his life Abbey had wrestled with Thoreau’s ghost, but in this essay he did so most directly, admiring Henry as a great resister of conformity while teasing him about his sexless, preacherly persona, laughing at the man who said “all nature is my bride.”

  On July 24, 2012, Hones and I began our own river trip, paddling down the San Juan River, whose waters would eventually mix with the Colorado’s, which in turn had already mixed with the Green’s. Like Abbey, I was not traveling alone. In my dry bag, along with my field guide to western birds, were Abbey’s Down the River, which contained the Thoreau essay, and Desert Solitaire, as well as an essay collection of Wallace Stegner’s, The Sound of Mountain Water.

  I spent my first afternoon on the river lying back in my inflatable kayak doing nothing. I was feeling joyous, though that is not the word exactly. Not joyous, but supremely relaxed, something that most adults, or at least the adult I am, rarely get to feel. The current was pulling me and I was staring up at eight-hundred-foot-high walls that were a similar red to that I saw on the screen of my inner eyelids when I closed my eyes, which I was also doing quite a lot of. We had been told the first rapids were a ways off, and at that moment the strong current was handling most of the work, though I dipped in a paddle occasionally to help. The river wasn’t red really, but more like chocolate pudding with a shot or two of henna. A raven croaked, echoing in the canyon, and I saw signs of beaver in a side channel, and then, happily, the beaver itself. My peace was interrupted only by Hones, who was paddling along the opposite bank and who had begun to gesture wildly as if trying to bring in a wayward airplane. I finally managed to see what all the fuss was about, and noticed the half dozen bighorn sheep picking their way along the steep riverbank. I gave Hones a thumbs-up.

  Part of the appeal of Ed Abbey, I’ve come to believe, is that he understood the lost art of lounging. Here he is in Desert Solitaire: “I was sitting out back on my 33,000 acre terrace, shoeless and shirtless, scratching my toes in the sand and sipping on a tall iced drink, watching the flow of the evening over the desert.”

  Stegner liked to suggest that the rest of us are jealous of workaholics, but certainly the opposite is true. We envy the true blow-off artists. We all like to think we could kick back in a hammock and whittle away the afternoon, but it is in fact a rare gift. And when we see someone doing nothing, even if it is doing nothing on the page, we dream that that could be us. The dream is not just that we have the time and the space, but the mind for it.

  Virtue, outside of the virtue of saving wild places, doesn’t have much of a role in Ed Abbey’s work, and do-gooders are frowned upon. Meanwhile, sensual pleasure, which plays such a large role in Abbey’s life and writing, goes virtually unmentioned in Stegner’s.

  It may be overstatement, but let’s try this one on: We read Wallace Stegner for his virtues, but we read Edward Abbey for his flaws. Stegner the sheriff, Abbey the outlaw.

  I remember an essay written by the editor and essayist Rust Hills about Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau. “Montaigne is somehow marvelously humanly indolent; Thoreau had an exceptional, almost
inhuman, vitality,” he wrote. “Thoreau kept in shape . . .” What does he mean by this? He means that Thoreau, though famous as someone who retired from the active world, worked vigorously on himself and his art, walked hard (four hours) each day, and wrote in his journal, striving for a higher, better life. Montaigne, by contrast, accepted his sloppy self. The song he sang was: “This is me. Take me as I am. I do.”

  Abbey, of course, plays the Montaigne role here, and while Stegner may at first seem miscast in the Thoreau role, this particular aspect of Thoreau fits well. With Stegner, there is always a sense of vigor, fitness, striving to be more.

  One way to illustrate the difference between the two men is to compare their different reactions on separate river trips like this one. Abbey, near the end of a ten-day paddling trip on the Colorado, wondered if he could just stop and live there forever, roaming the side canyons, wandering naked, shooting deer and drinking river water, seeing no one. Stegner, on a similar trip, also fantasized about an extended stay in the canyon, but with one telling addition: he thought it would be a great place to roll up his sleeves and write a book.

  With Stegner there is no talk of ecstasy, euphoria, bliss. Maybe that is because there is no such thing as a steady blissful state. These states come in moments and the moments can’t be pre-planned. If consistency is Stegner’s realm, then Abbey’s way offers an openness to and a chronicling of moods and contradictions, of the ebb and flow of mind and self, of the dangers and difficulties of existing inside our human skin. Abbey has been accused of being adolescent, but there is a joy to this kind of honesty. A joy that might not be attained without an openness to all moods.