Abbey had pushed right through the village to make his camp near one of the canyon’s three spectacular waterfalls. For thirty-five days he lived there alone. “The first thing I did was take off my pants,” he writes. Of course. And next? “I did nothing. Or nearly nothing. I caught a few rainbow trout, which grew big if not numerous in Havasu Creek. About once a week I put on my pants and walked up to the Indian village to buy bacon, canned beans and Argentine beef in the little store.” Other than that his days were filled with long walks and plenty of lazing about, maybe some note-taking in his journal. He originally had thought to sleep in one of the old, deserted mining cabins, but the mosquitoes attacked, so he dragged the cabin’s old cot to within about five feet of where the creek tumbled over the edge and became a waterfall, and there he slept for the next month or so, the “continuous turbulence of the air” keeping the bugs away.
Part of Abbey’s appeal to readers has always been the temptation of ease, real ease. Whether it is fantasy or not, we are attracted to the idea of Eden, a place where humans don’t want to be elsewhere but wander naked and sleep next to waterfalls. Where people are happy with things just as they are. This has always been the lure of the pastoral, going back to the shepherds, or at least to the poets who wrote about the shepherds. Here is a way of life, an unambitious, unconventional, and uncelebrated way of life, that provides unexpected rewards. Here is another possible way of being, and it is hard to read about this other way without thinking, Hey, shit, maybe I could live that way too. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote of Thoreau that one of the reasons his book was so joyous was that at Walden Pond Henry was a finder, not a seeker. We imagine that Thoreau, and Abbey, have stumbled upon something that we ourselves, mired in our complicated grown-up lives, will never find.
It is a fantasy about the shedding of responsibilities and reverting to a kind of romantic savage state, and so we must imagine Mr. Stegner scoffing. But the beauty of Abbey is that he scoffed a little too. Abbey, like Stegner, had a wide realist streak, and in fact it is the dialogue of his inner realist and inner romantic that helps make reading him so enlivening. He might have extolled the delights of solitude, but he also knew the dangers. As time went by in Havasu Canyon, he noticed that his mind started turning on itself: “The days became wild, strange, ambiguous—a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. . . . I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguish between what was and was not myself . . .”
Abbey combatted his demons in Havasu in a realist’s fashion: by walking and jostling his agitated brain. Part of him knew that it isn’t through the mind that we solve the mind’s riddles. Abbey’s final walk in the canyon makes up the inspired ending of the Havasu chapter, and brought him a kind of salvation, not through idleness but through action. It is perhaps the most dramatic moment in all of Desert Solitaire. Not a car chase, perhaps (that would have to wait for The Monkey Wrench Gang), but a real life-and-death drama, a literal cliffhanger. It starts when Abbey takes a long hike into an unfamiliar side canyon and drops down over the edge of a rock slide like the one Hones and I saw. He sees no way back up so he drops down again, a longer drop this time. His hope is that he can work his way downward to the canyon floor, but when he looks over the next ledge he sees “an overhanging cliff to a rubble pile of broken rocks eighty feet below.” There is no way down or, seemingly, back up. So what does our bold explorer do? “I began to cry. It was easy. All alone, I didn’t have to be brave.” After many failures, Abbey manages to escape the first little canyon by balancing atop his walking stick and getting his fingers over the edge, and then climbs the next by shimmying up a rock chute. He cries again at this point, “the hot delicious tears of victory,” knowing he might just get out of the canyon alive. Still, there are many miles to go to return to his cot by the waterfall and he is overtaken by darkness and soaked by rains. He seeks refuge in a shallow cave, three feet high, a “little hole littered with the droppings of birds, rats, jackrabbits and coyotes.”
He builds a small fire but runs out of fuel and when the rain doesn’t let up decides to sleep there.
The chapter ends:
I stretched out in the coyote den, pillowed my head on my arm and suffered through the long night, wet, cold, aching, hungry, wretched, dreaming claustrophobic nightmares. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.
HONES SLEPT LIKE a baby each night on his Paco Pad out under the stars, and you got the sense he could do the same for months. Not me. I slept poorly and lived encased in a film of red-brown dirt. I also grew tired of the Groover, the metal box toilet that was the first thing to be set up when we made camp, and that had been given its name years before because of the indentations it had once left in butts (before the innovation of adding a seat).
Each day the group tended to our central task of trying to eradicate the “invaders,” but the whole native-species debate made me uneasy. We had a friend back home who liked to go on about how the swans that nested behind our house, animals that we had grown to love, were “not native.” It got to the point where I wanted to ask him exactly where his own family came from.
There is always the whiff of eugenics to all this talk of the native purity, or foreignness, of plants and animals, and the funny part is that it often comes from liberals who would rather choke to death than talk the same way about humans. The history of this country, from at least 1492 on, has been the history of invasives, and that goes for plants, too. It may be a fine thing to eradicate Russian olive—it’s Russian, after all—but I noticed that we were leaving the tamarisk alone, left perhaps for the next poisoning mission. For many people, tamarisk is the virtual symbol of these banks—at least for those who don’t know that it, too, is an invasive and that it replaced the native cottonwoods after scientists who thought they knew what they were doing introduced it to battle erosion. The fact is that both tamarisk and Russian olive look quite beautiful when shaken by the river winds, though for those of us who know too much it’s hard to think fondly of these plants. We see them through prejudiced eyes. And to be fair: we see them that way because we know the damage they do to ecosystems.
It isn’t much of a leap from botanical purity to some of Edward Abbey’s less appealing ideas. Abbey, too, was dead set against foreign invasives, though the kind he was worried about were usually illegal immigrants from Mexico.
Here is the thing: if you are a fan of Abbey’s work, you often find yourself apologizing for him. It’s an interesting difference: people approach Stegner with an assumption of virtue, but those who love Abbey are always saying, “I’m sorry he said that.” Wallace might have been a good boy, but there was something essentially disobedient about Ed. He had consistently bad manners, at least on the page. And he liked to tweak liberals every bit as much as conservatives, which is what he did famously in his essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos.” In it he describes a litany of our country’s problems, including overpopulation, poverty, and the destruction of our wild places and then argues for “calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically impoverished people. At least until we have brought our own affairs in order.”
He continues:
How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? (Howls of “Racism! Elitism! Xenophobia!” from the Marx brothers and documented liberals.) Harsh words: but somebody has to say them. We cannot play “let’s pretend” much longer, not in the present world.
His solution? Close the border. Or “if we must meddle,” as he says in his final paragraph, let’s give “every campesino” a gun and point them back homewards: “He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.”
What to make of this? Should we react as Abbey predicted and call him a racist? We could, certainly. Or we could try to justify his behavior, though Abbey does not seem to want to be justified. He lets it lie ther
e, as it is.
As I chewed over these things, I thought of an old friend of mine, the writer Luis Alberto Urrea. Luis and I went to school together in Colorado and got the Abbey bug at about the same time. But Luis would carry it a step further: an acquaintance of his would purchase Ed Abbey’s ’75 Eldorado Cadillac convertible from a man in Tucson, and Luis himself would drive and deliver the car to his friend back in Denver. First reading Abbey, Luis once wrote, had a “massive, perhaps catastrophic effect on me.” He continued: “I went mad for Ed, but more important, and a major reasons others fell in love with him too, was the aching love he ignited in me for the land. The world. The tierra.”
Which was why reading Abbey’s essay on immigration was so brutal for him. “Ed Abbey once stuck a knife in my heart,” he wrote. What was Luis, whose mother was born in Mexico, to make of sentences that attacked the culture, the morals, even the genes of his people?
What he made of it, eventually, was an essay called “Down the Highway with Edward Abbey,” in which he vents his rage. “Ed Abbey—Aryan,” he writes at one point in that essay, and then wrestles with the fact that so many who love Abbey because he is a gadfly also feel the gadfly’s sting. Luis continues: “I’m trying hard not to do backflips here just to defend my favorite writer. Consider: where many writers have a pitiable need to be loved, Ed seemed to have a puzzling need to be reviled.”
In the essay Luis carefully makes his way through the Abbey minefield, admitting that “writers carry the baggage of their times, their origins, and their own spiritual and intellectual laziness.”
He concludes:
I admire Ed Abbey. I enjoy his books . . .
I also decry his ignorance and duplicity.
Guess what: Ed Abbey had feet of clay.
Just like me.
Not a backflip exactly. But a lot of work to circle back to the original love. It is a common enough pattern with Abbey fans of all stripes. Native American readers have to do it. Women readers have to do it. Almost everyone has to find a way to work through what they don’t like to get back to what they do.
Many of us make allowances and forgive him. The funny thing is that, as Luis says, Abbey does not ask to be forgiven.
ON THE LAST evening we camped on a spot with a broad, sloping beach, a dry creek on one side and the river on the other. Our moods stayed high even after the usual conflict with the boss, who told us we couldn’t sleep on the beach after we had all rolled out our pads. We didn’t let him get us down. We all waded into the water and started throwing a Frisbee around, ignoring the vague rumbling in the sky and occasional spitting of rain. Pretty soon I started jonesing for a cocktail, and Hones and I climbed up on a sand bank, where we drank ginger ale and whiskey. We listened as a canyon wren went through its notes, up and down the glissading scale. Sam, the oldest of the Navajos, and his friend whom we had taken to calling “the other Michael” (as opposed to Shaman Michael) joined us. Earlier, during lunch at the Grand Gulch pull-off, I kept feeling a little bug on the back of my neck and kept swatting it. I hit it and scratched at it and scratched at it again. But it kept coming back. I might have gone on like that forever if Sam and the other Navajos had been able to refrain from laughing. But they couldn’t stop cracking up. Sam had been using a long stalk of Russian olive to tickle my neck.
“My stomach hurts from holding it in,” he said.
Now he told me that, even though he lived nearby in Shiprock, he had never set foot in Utah before.
“If you live in the Four Corners you are supposed to know the Four Corners,” he said. “But this is a new world for me. I had no idea this was here.”
Michael told us that the name of the canyon we were in was Moon Water and said that the San Juan was known as the Old Age River.
I thought of Ed Abbey and his relationship with the Navajo. Capable of spasms of bigotry, he wasn’t above a few lazy drunk-Indian jokes. On the other hand, Desert Solitaire contains one of the best concise summaries of the brutal challenges of reservation life for the modern Navajo.
We were all having a nice time until I managed to slide off the bank, soak my last dry clothes, and impale my thigh on a beaver-chewed stick. By the time I was bandaged and back, the wind had picked up substantially, and we thought it a good idea to head back to our tents and secure the stakes.
We heard the cry of “dinner” from the crew about a second before the sky exploded. Greg and another guide fought to hold umbrellas over the food, which was delicious if soggy: refried beans, chicken, rice, the last of Hones’s peppers. Thunder boomed and the sky fulgurated: one bolt of lightning appeared to split the camp in half. Almost everyone fled back to the tent but I ate my wet meal under the umbrella with Greg. I wondered where Hones was and looked back up the canyon, upstream. And then I saw it.
A waterfall. A beautiful silver-white strand, or strands, gushing down the red rock. This was what I’d been waiting for and with my plate still in hand I ran toward it. I yelled for Hones, who turned out to be eating under a cliff and had already seen the fall. Then, like an excited kid, I ran back toward camp, where other falls could be seen. One, across the river from us, started at about eight hundred feet but then turned to mist halfway down.
The rain passed through, heading downstream, but left behind the waterfalls and a strange slanting light. I grabbed my journal from the tent and made my way back to the first waterfall. Water landed on rock with a ferocious splatter, shaking the maidenhair ferns and hackberry and buffalo-berry plants, and splashing between a white oak and gambol oak, a whole tiny oasis that had grown up here just for, and from, occasions like this. I ducked my head under the water and soaked myself.
A little farther up-canyon I stood below another falls and watched it die out. The drops came from four hundred feet up, falling toward me in slow motion, and I could count individual drops like snowflakes. I stood below it as the slow, fat drops exploded on my face.
Darkness descended and with it came another miracle. The datura, the flowering night plants, began to open, their petals white and radiant.
Back at the first waterfall I ran into Shaman Michael, Jordan, and Sierra, who had decided to camp on the beach by the creek despite the law laid down by Ralph. Michael invited me to smoke some rolled mountain tobacco and I did, sitting on a rock not fifteen feet from the still-splattering falls. He told me to blow the smoke east, west, north, south, and then in front of me. I followed orders. Why not? After a while we said good night and walked out of the canyon in the pitch-dark. It wasn’t until I was a hundred yards away that I realized I’d left my journal on the waterfall rock. My words! I stumbled back in the darkness to find them.
When I returned to camp, Hones and Greg were sitting on Paco Pads by the river. Greg told us that he had seen two sure signs of rain earlier. The first was a fat toad where he hadn’t expected it (it knew rain was near) and the other was the tilted, straight-up moon, like a ladle, which Navajos say means rain is coming. We nodded. These were not signs to be taken lightly in a land where each rainfall is a sort of miracle.
Finally, Hones and Greg headed back to the tents, while I unrolled my bag right on the beach, a final minor rebellion in the spirit of Jordan. I fell asleep to the song of cicadas and woke the next morning to the call of the canyon wren, again working its scales. The plan was to get going fairly early, but the creek was running now, its red flowing into the San Juan’s chocolate in a sort of minor confluence. Without telling anyone, I decided a hike up the canyon was necessary.
I hadn’t gone two hundred yards when I saw that Shaman Michael had had the same idea. He was wearing a bandana over his mouth and nose but invited me over to watch as he cut into the poisonous roots of a datura, the same plant I’d watched bloom the night before. He called it a chohajilla, or sacred datura, “the moon-flowering plant.” He incanted in Navajo and when I asked what he was saying he told me he was assuring the plant that he was using it for medicine.
“It was a poison plant used by the people before the
people. The moth people or butterfly people.”
The moth people apparently liked to party, favoring the datura for its hallucinogenic characteristics. But according to Michael they also, counterintuitively, used it to treat mental illness. Mention of the old people, the Anasazi, reminded me that even my new Navajo friends weren’t immune to the games of “who belongs here” and “who was here first.” They might have been seeking their old traditions here, and I was glad for it, since this is where many of their myths came from. But the Navajos had been considered intruders in this land by the earlier peoples, the very same old ones who liked the taste of datura.
THE DATURA CEREMONY.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 21
