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

by David Gessner

  THOUGH WE HAD signed on to spend the next eight days happily floating down the muddy San Juan, ours was also a business trip of sorts. We had come to eradicate foreigners. Our purpose was to try to fight back—through poison, it needs to be added—the proliferation of non-native species, like Russian olive, that grow along the sandy banks of the San Juan River. Russian olive, a native of western and central Asia, is particularly adept at colonizing the poor rocky soil along rivers in the American West, muscling out native plants. Helping us in this noble task of repelling invaders were five Navajos between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, three rangers, and four river guides. It went without saying that it was poetically apt that native people were doing most of this eradicating and repelling of the non-native.

  Thanks to the generosity of my old friend Kristen, the owner of Wild Rivers Expeditions, we were allowed to partake of the food, equipment, and expertise of the guides while also hewing to our own less-than-rigorous agenda. We would mostly paddle the little one-man inflatable kayaks, though we were welcome to hitch rides on the big blue rafts when we liked.

  About an hour downstream on our second morning we came upon a particularly verdant (or, take your pick, virulent) patch of Russian olive, green and tall as trees and seemingly growing straight out of the combination of sand and rock that made up the shoreline. The rest of the crew pulled over to do their work of poisoning, while we were given permission to paddle ahead by Ralph, the young man who was serving as the lead guide.

  So we did, paddling alone, or alone together, through the afternoon.

  “Do you think they’ll start to resent us?” Hones asked after a while.

  “They might,” I said, though at the moment I was too happy to care.

  We pulled over at what we decided must be the designated campground that Ralph had described to us, and I grabbed two beers out of my dry bag. It was technically a dry trip, which meant that Hones and I had to smuggle in our alcohol. This, too, was part of our agreement with Kristen, and on the first morning the guides had helped us quietly distribute about a case’s worth of beer deep in the ice chests on the big rafts.

  We decided to hike up one of the side canyons. The river was beautiful, the main canyon walls impressive, but we would soon discover that it was the side canyons that were the true stars of the trip. We walked into a great ascending chamber of varying stone, climbing up the pockmarked terraces of limestone, shale, and sandstone that the water ran down during storms. Which meant what we were really walking up was a dry, gradual waterfall that had been carved into the stone by rushing water over the eons. Not entirely dry though. A series of small pools, each about the size of a plastic kiddie pool, appeared in the indented rock and within those pools, miraculously, tiny tadpoles squiggled. Talk about life filling every niche. Every puddle.

  We entered the final great chamber. It was like a church, a cathedral, but that didn’t do it justice. We stared up at a huge limestone chute, fifty feet above us, which, during the rains, served as a water slide. At the foot of the chute was a slimy pool from remnant rains. Ferns bearded the edge of the chute, hanging down, green against red. The acoustics in the place were perfect and I stood below the falls and recited the beginning of the Gettysburg Address.

  If this were a church, it was missing its central sacrament, and I found myself wishing for rain. Water was the absent ingredient, the thing that would bring this, and all the rest of the side canyons, alive. Then the church would really be in session, the place would be “activated.” In minutes there would be a hundred spontaneous waterfalls up and down the river, and those falls would form temporary streams, tributaries to feed the mother San Juan. That would be something to see.

  Water, precious water. In the West it is always the missing ingredient. Wallace Stegner wrote that “the primary unity of the West is the shortage of water.”

  We drank our beers, Santa Fe IPAs, by the pool, and after a while we heard the others start showing up and made our way back down to the canyon. By the time we got out of the canyon’s mouth, everyone else had arrived and were spreading out over the sand, in search of their night’s real estate. While this was a relaxing trip for us, our relaxation hinged on the guides’ preparedness and effort, and they were already unpacking the rafts and setting up the dinner area. When we found out that we were having steaks, Hones and I offered to cook, seeing as we had been the only ones lazing about all day.

  We cooked the steaks to specifications—from rare to well-done—and received many compliments to the chefs. Then, after cleaning our plates, we wandered off to our campsite, high up on the hill. The bats came out and so did a half dozen quail-like birds, called chukars, that made a gurgly racket on the opposite bank. The slice of sky above the canyon walls gradually filled with stars.

  After Hones wandered off to his tent, I stayed up for a while. I rolled out my Paco, a white pad that served both as a comfortable seat on the rafts and a fantastic mattress at night, and lay back on it, staring up at the stars.

  “STAND NAKED BEFORE them,” Michel de Montaigne wrote in his note to the reader that preceded his famous essays. But for our first essayist this was just a metaphor. Not for Ed Abbey. Camping with Loeffler, Abbey sometimes took Montaigne one step further, never putting his clothes on. “It’s such a nice day I think I’ll leave it out,” he said.

  Elsewhere he confirms his preference for wandering around naked, for jerking off up in his solitary fire station, for throwing beer cans out of his truck, for smoking cigars, for toting guns. He drinks too much. He tends to be lazy, likes to blow things off. He argues strongly for the right to bear arms, believes in decentralized government, is against illegal immigration. He is openly lustful and sometimes writes of his desire to copulate with every woman he sees. In other words, if you are going to accept him warts and all, then you have to accept a whole lot of warts.

  One appeal of tackling Abbey and Stegner together is that they tug me in opposite directions. I love the idea of Abbey, his wildness, but in my own life I have been saved—no other word will do, religious connotations be damned—by the way of Stegner. The way of the tough-minded, the workaholic. In fact, I wonder how much Abbey’s life can offer me, a man of fifty. The standard trope would be that you’re Abbey when you’re young, and Stegner when you’re old. But I’m not sure I buy it, at least not entirely.

  If you read Ed Abbey long enough his temperament edges into your mind like weather. You sense a chronic melancholy, but also sparks of joy. Slouchy sensuality, and bursts of courage. His is a restless mind, always jumping to the next thought, the next idea, the next dream. Stegner’s mind is restless too, energetic, moving briskly, fighting off a hundred mind weeds and temptations. There is a hard-nosed notion of the world as strife, a toughness, and a bristling energy. And also something Abbey lacked: a fondness for and a reliance on routine. For checking things off his daily list.

  Work is always a touchstone for Stegner. Work as pleasure and work as salvation. Work fills the mind, makes chaos orderly. Work controls the uncontrollable. This is admirable but there are problems with turning to workaholism as your default setting. There can be a sense of avoidance, of running from the world. It is here, perhaps, that Abbey offers a kind of counterweight, an alternative.

  Because there’s bravery in Abbey’s apparent slothfulness. A willingness to accept the cycles of depression and pleasure, up and down, without racing toward a solution or an ism. It is not always a happy acceptance but it is an acceptance, and that, too, is one of the pleasures of reading Abbey. A workaholic might find this quality adolescent. But there is something freeing about reading a writer who offers us something beyond the bounds and bonds of our normal lives.

  In elevating Abbey I don’t want to bury Stegner. Wallace Stegner knew depression and real loss, and was far too psychologically astute to hide life’s messiness under a monolith called work. While he loved to quote Henry James that “order is the dream of man,” he never did so without the second thought that “chao
s is the law of nature.” Furthermore, he was a kind and generous man, and teacher, so the portrait of the artist as an old drudge does not quite work.

  At first the river seemed more of an Abbey place than a Stegner place, but then I reminded myself that Stegner was no stranger to western rivers, that in fact he paddled down this one with the legendary river guide Norman Nevills. Stegner might have had a buttoned-up side, but he also got to experience many nights looking up at the stars through the canyons, sleeping to the sound of rushing water, exhausted after a day in the southwestern sun. While these two men are different, that doesn’t mean I should oversimplify, turning them into caricatures of themselves. They are complicated—and if they weren’t we would no longer be interested in them. They contain parts of each other.

  THE THIRD MORNING we woke to watch the sun rise, or at least show itself on the western rock wall of the canyon. The top of the wall caught fire first, turning the Navajo sandstone a bright orange. Light spread on the western rim like an incoming tide.

  A quarter mile up, two bighorns made their own trails as they gamboled down the impossibly steep terrain. The sheep startled when Ralph banged a metal spoon on a pot to signal that coffee was on. I kept writing but after a while Hones appeared with two cups. I joked that he was my manservant and as it turned out we were on the same comic page. He told me what he’d said when one of the guides asked who he was bringing the second cup for: “Lord Dave.”

  We pushed onward. Abbey wrote about “a hard day of watching cloud formations.” Our days were more strenuous than that—we paddled and cleaned and helped the rangers unpack their poisons—but there was plenty of ease, too. The little kayaks, duckies they were called, were built for napping, or at least for reclining and staring up at the red walls that loomed above us. We prayed for rain, just to see the side-canyon spectacle, and saw signs of it upstream when the color red flowed in from side canyons joining our chocolate river. Over the next couple of days Hones and I also saw plenty more bighorn and watched birds through our binoculars: hawks, turkey vultures, chukars, swallows, and a little blue bird called a Brewer’s wren. Each afternoon we pulled over at some equally beautiful campground and everyone sought out the best spots for the tents in the thorny dunelike sandbars. “It’s like buying a new house every day,” Hones said. We looked for spots on the edge of town, when possible, and celebrated cocktail hour, though our supply kept dwindling. We also hiked up every side canyon we could find, and each night Hones slept out under the stars on his Paco Pad, though I mostly opted for my tent. Each morning he brought Lord Dave his coffee while I scribbled down my notes from the day before.

  We fought for our freedom, since it seemed that too often our day’s schedule was determined not just by the need to poison Russian olive but by the apparent whims of our tour leader. Ralph clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that we were to be granted plenty of slack, and I, steeped in Abbey, began to bristle under his rule, wondering if we’d made a mistake signing on with a tour instead of just pushing off on our own. But the food was fantastic and we were learning a lot about the canyon. And the truth was that Ralph was a perfectly competent young man, all of twenty-three, who had the unfortunate responsibility of bossing around men many years his senior.

  On the third day I lent Ralph a copy of Wallace Stegner’s essays and he mistakenly dropped it over the side of the boat. He handed it back to me, waterlogged but still readable. I didn’t really mind that much, it was just an accident, and I also understood that ordering us around was simply part of his job. What I minded was the way he ordered us around. He yelled, he pushed, he grated. On a modern river trip, safety and organization are paramount, but a good leader can take care of these things while still maintaining the illusion of freedom. Of course, if I had really wanted to be free, Hones and I would have paddled off on our own and taken our chances.

  Gradually we got to know the rest of the group. There was Sierra, she of the beautiful smile and earnest sunny manner, who borrowed my inflatable mattress each night (I used my Paco Pad). She was one of the leaders of the Navajo group Rethink Diné Power, (Diné means “The People” in Navajo) that sought to combat the poverty, depression, and alcoholism so prominent on the reservations by relearning the old Navajo traditions and, most important, the language. Another of that group’s leaders was Michael, a slight young man who fancied himself a shaman and who did actually seem to know the names of things and had a knack for finding arrowheads.

  “The prophets came through these waters,” he told me one evening. “They came through these waters and got their stories. How can we learn the traditions without knowing the place? All the ceremonies are directly connected to the landscape. Without the landscape you can’t have the ceremonies.”

  Michael spoke only Navajo when talking with the others. He felt he had perspective on the importance of our trip, in part because of the two years he’d spent in San Diego “getting to know American culture” before returning to the reservation with a mission.

  He told me the name of the San Juan River goddess was Toasdza.

  He was a confident kid, though quiet.

  Jordan was another kind of quiet, a proud quiet. He was Navajo too, though he was not part of the Diné group but a ranger who worked for the National Park Service in Flagstaff. Each morning he took great care washing his long black hair in the river, then flipping it in front of his head and back over his shoulders like he was in a shampoo commercial. Each night he went exploring barefoot up the side canyons in the dark and then let out war whoops, hoots and coyote howls that echoed back down to us through the chambers of the stone cathedrals.

  At first he had been the hardest of the group for me to get to know, but we eventually formed a bond, thanks to our similar reactions to the tour leader.

  If I was annoyed by being bossed around, Jordan was enraged.

  He didn’t say anything, but you could see his eyes smolder with fury every time Ralph told him not to pick up the bacon with his fingers or where to tie his kayak.

  Things were brought to a head one night over dinner at a campsite called False John’s. Greg, a guide who was also Navajo, joined Hones and me for cocktail hour and everyone seemed in good spirits. We had become a real group and we were sitting in one big circle. Hones broke out his Serrano peppers and put them out on the camp table for all. When people asked about them, he explained that he grew hundreds of pepper plants at his apartment in Boston, starting them under artificial light and getting them strong before replanting them outside in summer.

  We had barely seen any other rafters on the trip, but while we were eating, another boat landed a quarter mile upstream and a man came walking toward us. He seemed irritated that we were there, taking the main campsite. It was the usual thing, something the Navajos had all heard before: the man wanted our land. He explained that they had been planning on staying at the camp where we were, that it was “a tradition” with their group. But we insisted they stay upstream. After all, it was a time-honored law: we got there first. The man walked off grumbling.

  “Let them try and fight us for it,” someone said.

  I liked that idea. I suggested that we should walk down to their campsite in waves to intimidate them. First Hones and I would head down, the two big middle-aged white guys. Then the three rangers wearing their uniforms, representatives of the Park Service, would stroll down and have a little talk with them. And if that didn’t do it, we would send a war party of a half dozen Navajos.

  We were all laughing, in good spirits. But then it happened. Jordan was walking down to the boat while Ralph was sitting with a small group of us up on the beach.

  “Jordan!” he yelled.

  I understood that Ralph, like the rest of us, was feeling good. His yell was an attempt at jocularity, and all he really wanted to do, it would turn out, was ask Jordan to guide us on the next day’s hike. But the way he yelled didn’t sound like that. It sounded instead like an order. A sharp command.

  Jordan glared at Ralph and s
aid nothing.

  It would have been best to let it lie, but Ralph yelled again: “Come over here!”

  Jordan looked at Ralph as if he were a bug he wanted to step on.

  “No,” he said quietly.

  A while later I sought out Jordan at his tent. I told him that Ralph and the other guides just wanted to have him lead the hike, but also confided that all the scolding and controlling was getting to me, too.

  “Fuck them,” he said before heading off on one of his barefoot nighttime hikes.

  EVEN WALLACE STEGNER’S and Ed Abbey’s utopias were different.

  Stegner’s dream was of a western community where good people worked together toward a common good. Abbey’s dream was a solitary one, a dream of retreat. In Crossing to Safety, the Stegner character dismisses his best friend’s vision of pastoral retreat, and offers in its stead a vision of a jail cell, an orderly day with no visitors and with time allotted for work, exercise, sleep. We romanticize nature, the realist says, because we don’t have to live in it.

  For most people the pastoral is fantasy, but Abbey made the fantasy real on many occasions. The most famous example is his sojourn into Havasu Canyon in 1949, which he then wrote up as a chapter of Desert Solitaire. The chapter begins with Abbey’s story of a drive to Los Angeles with friends, during which they stopped at the Grand Canyon and overheard a park ranger talking about a placed called Havasu or Havasupai, a canyon with waterfalls down below. “My friends said they would wait,” Abbey writes. “So I went down to Havasu—fourteen miles by trail—and looked things over. When I returned five weeks later I discovered that the others had gone on to Los Angeles without me.”

  I can testify that those fourteen miles are not easy ones, since I had descended them from the rim of the Grand Canyon on a hot day in May, two months before my summer trip, wearing an ill-fitting backpack bought the day before at Play It Again Sports in Tucson. I remember a lot of misery and two great joys. One joy was finally taking the pack off my shoulders, and the other was, after hours trudging through the orange, dusty, dry land, coming upon a stream of blue-green water surging through the desert dryness. It was that water, Havasu Creek, that Abbey had followed into the tiny Indian village of Havasupai, or Supai, “where unshod ponies ambled down the street and the children laughed not maliciously at the sight of the wet white man.” The village is still there, still small, looking like the oasis it is—green fields and ramshackle buildings appearing suddenly, like the river, out of the desert. Abbey relates with pleasure the fact that when he arrived the Indians had just voted down the paved road that the government had proposed. There was still no road when I got there, but there had been other changes. For one, my hike down was marred by the constant metallic whirring of blades, helicopters that seemingly made the trip from the canyon rim to the little town every twenty minutes, delivering mail, goods, and tourists. The other change since 1949 had to do with the religion of the couple hundred native people who still lived in Supai. Most of them had converted since Abbey’s day. They were now almost all committed Rastafarians.