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

by David Gessner

  Michael invited me to stay longer, and I thanked him but told him I needed to hike on. The stream was running after all, and I had my own ceremonies to attend to.

  So much of the week had been spent speculating, “What would these canyons be like with water?” Now I knew. The tadpoles, previously trapped in their puddles, were liberated. The ever-thirsty trees and ferns and flowers all drank deeply. As beautiful as the canyons had been—and they had been the highlight of the trip—it had been a little like seeing a body with the blood missing. Now I got to see the canyons in use. Serving their purpose. A deep orange-red like Tabasco sauce flowed down the stairways and terraces of rock.

  To live in this particular landscape is to be, whether you like it or not, a water worshipper. One can imagine that this worshipping will become more fervent in the dry years ahead.

  I studied the water’s temple. The stairs that the stream flowed down looked made for it, and of course they were, but also made by it (or its watery predecessors). “I look for the forms things want to come as,” wrote the poet A. R. Ammons.

  I briefly worried about what was going on back at camp, but the canyon wren was up ahead, beckoning, and I decided to turn just one more corner, then another, hoping to get to the deep pool and waterfall that had to be at canyon’s end. A cool wind blew downcanyon as I walked through new mud, red and wet but flaky on top, with the look of peeling skin.

  I entered into one of the amphitheaters, a great carved cathedral that, after long standing empty, could finally serve its purpose. These rock caverns had been the vessels, empty and useless until now.

  The canyon wren was still up ahead, trying to pull me in deeper, but I knew I had to get back to camp and not keep everyone else waiting. The previous night’s baptism under the waterfall would have to do. Independence and freedom were one thing. Being a prima donna another.

  Reluctantly, pulled by the world, or at least by Ralph, I turned back. I walked quickly, afraid that I was holding up the others. But about halfway down I saw Jordan, washing his hair in the red water. It seemed as surely a ritual as Michael cutting out the roots of a plant.

  I asked him how he was doing. He smiled at me and said:

  “I’m psyched to be done with that asshole. But I’m sad to leave this place.”

  I left Jordan in peace. My feelings were similar, though perhaps I would not have put them as bluntly. The truth is I no longer felt irritated or constrained. Ralph was simply doing his job, and it just so happened that his job conflicted with Jordan’s and my ideas of freedom.

  But I knew how memory worked. Knew how it would edit out all the dross from the trip and leave the essence, the thing itself. Later that day we would emerge from the river at the Clay Hills take-out spot and the vans would drive us back to the rafting shop, where we would linger and drink beers with the guides, basking in that feeling of having been on a great adventure together.

  What I would take away from the trip were not the petty squabbles. I would take away instead the vision of the miraculous side canyons, the form they gave to red water. I would take away finding the function that fit the form, seeing the red blood flow back through the rock veins. Seeing the whole place come to life thanks to the sacred and precious fact of water.

  9

  THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MONKEYWRENCHING

  During Stegner’s and Abbey’s heydays as environmental activists many of their battles crystalized in their fight against dams—concrete walls that blocked flow, those perfect symbols of human hubris and the destruction of the natural world. It’s enough to make today’s environmentalists nostalgic. These days it is not evil dams we are most often doing battle with but our own natures. This is particularly true when the “enemy” is that vague thing known as climate change. William deBuys, one of the best big-picture thinkers in the modern West, puts it well in his book A Great Aridness:

  Whether you are breaking prairie sod in the nineteenth century or raising a family and scrambling to make ends meet in the twenty-first, it is hard to get worked up over abstract possibilities. There is too much that needs doing, right here, right now. Even knowing the odds, people still live in earthquake zones, hurricane alleys, and the unprotected floodplains of mighty rivers. . . . Generally speaking, it is hard for any of us to get seriously concerned about what might happen until it does happen. That’s why the politics of climate change are so difficult. The measurements and observation that convince scientists about the warming of the Earth are invisible to the rest of us.

  If we continue down this logical road it is hard not to reach a doubly pessimistic conclusion: not only is the world warming, but there is little we can do about it, since human nature is not built for the fight. In fact, many of us respond by shrugging and returning to our sod-busting.

  There is also another way that the environmental times have changed. Back in Abbey’s day, the idea of blowing up dams might have sounded romantic, but in our post-9/11 world that sort of talk sounds like the fast track to jail.

  Earlier in the trip I had been wondering aloud about these issues during a phone call with Rob Bleiberg when he suggested I speak to a friend of his, Jane Quimby, who’d been an FBI agent in the Grand Junction office for twenty-five years.

  Jane agreed to meet me in a bagel shop in downtown Grand Junction, where Hones and I drove the day after our river trip. We arrived a little late, so Hones dropped me at the corner and headed off to park. He would occupy himself for an hour or so while I interviewed Jane.

  Jane and I hit it off right away, aided by Rob, who had already drawn a caricatured portrait of me for Jane, a portrait taken more from the old days involving much beer drunk and silly things said. As for caricaturing, Jane didn’t exactly fit mine of an FBI agent. She was a vibrant woman not much older than me with a shock of white hair and a great laugh. There was no creepy cop vibe. When I asked her if I could turn on the tape recorder, she said sure.

  “I’m retired,” she told me. I took this to mean that, within reason, she could say whatever she wanted.

  After we ordered coffee, I asked her about the state of monkeywrenching. She shook her head.

  “I think there is still monkeywrenching out there, but it’s mostly local now,” she said. “People love their own little neck of the woods and then some oil company moves in and they say, ‘This can’t happen here.’ So they make some sort of protest. But it is more individualized.”

  “‘Not in my backyard,’” I said.

  “Exactly. But a chill has fallen over the larger radical movements.”

  By this I knew she meant organizations like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front, ELF, a kind of natural descendant of Earth First! that had been founded in the United Kingdom in 1994.

  “People joining these groups would once think, ‘Hey, this is good for Mother Earth. It’s going to protect the environment. And the means are justified by the greater purpose.’

  “Which is all well and good until someone gets arrested. And not only gets arrested but goes to prison for a long time. Then all of a sudden it’s like, Whoa, this isn’t so fun after all. Maybe we’ve got to really think about what we’re doing here or be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

  Jane had been the primary investigator in the famous Vail fire case, the case that would end up sending the biggest chill of all through the environmental movement. The fire was set by ELF members in October of 1998, as a protest against Vail Mountain Ski Resort’s expansion into neighboring wilderness, wilderness that also happened to be habitat for the Canadian lynx. The fire destroyed a lodge and a restaurant, damaged four ski lifts, and caused $12 million in damage, though no people were hurt. The activists behind the fire were committed environmental warriors who had done their share of sitting in trees and chaining themselves to tractors. It was a point of honor within the group that, if caught, no one would snitch, and for a long time no one did; in fact, there were almost no leads at all. By the time the FBI held a coordinated meeting of agents from California, Col
orado, Oregon, and Washington in 2004, the fire was almost a cold case. But it was at that meeting that the FBI committed to an aggressive policy of “shaking the trees,” of knocking on doors and questioning people even when they had nothing definite.

  “What came out of the meeting was this: don’t underestimate the power you have when you go knock on doors.”

  “The power to freak people out,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Jane said. “Let’s all start knocking on doors and see what falls out. We were kind of bluffing. We’d say we need to talk to you because we have some information. And some people would say, ‘Screw you.’ And others would say, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’”

  “But not everyone?”

  “Not everyone. Someone came forward and flipped. It was partly a timing thing because he had a kid. His kid was growing up and he’s looking at his kid and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? This is not the kind of life I should be leading. I could lose my kid.”

  There were other factors involved as well. ELF members had just torched an SUV dealership in the Northwest. They had meant to burn a couple of vehicles, a symbolic gesture against gas guzzlers, but it turned into a huge conflagration, leading to more arson charges. People who usually would have been sympathetic turned against the group.

  “And the suspect realized, ‘We’re not playing around here anymore.’”

  “And by then 9/11 had happened.”

  “Right,” Jane said. “It was huge. Nobody wanted to be called a terrorist. And now they were all domestic terrorists.”

  I asked her about this wide definition of terrorism and terrorists.

  “Personally, I don’t know that it is a fair comparison. I don’t think it’s apples to apples. That was a big philosophical consideration when we were going to trial with the Vail case. We were deciding whether we would label them with a terrorism tag. And this was a calculated legal strategy because if you labeled them that way it of course leads to higher penalties.

  “But it was also a feather in our cap: ‘Hey, look at us, we’re stopping terrorism.’ Whether or not you really think letting a bunch of horses out of a horse pasture and lighting a barn on fire is terrorism in the same sense of the word. That’s up to people’s individual interpretations. But there is political pressure within the FBI to label it terrorism.

  “We decided to apply ‘terrorism enhancement’ to the two leaders in the case and to one other suspect. We could use it as a chip in plea bargaining.”

  It had been gospel that no one in the movement would rat out any other member. But once the first one turned the rest went down like dominoes.

  “They had always said nobody would snitch, but they hadn’t been tested since no one was caught. When push came to shove, and some got caught, they rolled on each other. Not all of them but enough.

  “It was a real awakening for the movement. There was a lot of backlash. They said, ‘Hey, when you’re caught you’re supposed to shut up and go to prison and not turn in your buddies.’ But those who got caught argued, ‘We’ve always said that, but now I’m going to prison for ten years and I have a three-year-old, and I’m not going to see her grow up because of the foolish decisions I made.’”

  These were, of course, the more hard-core people, but Jane believed that this had also had an effect on those on the edge of the movement—that is, on the casual monkeywrencher.

  “That kind of environmental protest has always been very generational-driven. Typically your profile would be your twentysomething kid at a sort of offbeat college like Evergreen or Naropa, where they’re being exposed to a lot of offbeat things. Not to discredit those things, but they’re in an academic, educational, and social environment where people are thinking outside of the box. And people are young.”

  Remembering my own days in that sort of school environment, I added, “There’s also the sense that you can’t really get in trouble if you are doing a good, moral thing.”

  “Exactly. But all of a sudden those same kids grow up and get married and have a kid and need a job. It’s not to say people really lose their environmental conscience, but they do lose the desire to do something that is not only not mainstream but potentially criminal.”

  Further undermining old-school monkeywrenching was the fact that counterterrorism of almost any stripe had become the top priority within the FBI. Which meant that the allocation of resources, manpower, budget, and space depended on nailing terrorists.

  “Someone would fly out from Washington to the Grand Junction office and ask, ‘What are you guys doing about the Middle Eastern terrorism problem?’ The local agent would just stare back, and finally say, ‘We don’t have that here.’ And the Washington guy would say, ‘Well, how many international terrorists do you have?’ And the local guy would say, ‘None.’ So the Washington guy would say, ‘How many domestic terrorists do you have?’ and again the local would answer, ‘None.’”

  That wouldn’t do.

  “The logical response to this would be that maybe we should reassess and reallocate our resources,” Jane continued. “Instead it was: ‘Gee, you guys must not be able to articulate your crime problem.’”

  Of course, the local agents could articulate the actual problems—they knew they had a meth problem and plenty of burglaries and some domestic violence—but what they did not have was a population that would typically produce the kind of criminal activity the Bureau was looking for. And not just the Bureau, of course, but Congress, where the Bureau had to go to justify their funding.

  “We had to be able to say, ‘Hey, we initiated x number of terrorism investigations.’ And it became mind-boggling in terms of separating the legitimate cases from the not-so-legitimate cases. You could take something that was not a big deal and make it a big deal. Since the number-one priority is counterterrorism, everyone needs to be in the game. You could have this simple little stuff that is really nothing and suddenly you are generating interest from headquarters because they have to justify themselves. So anytime there is something that might rise to the level of worth-a-shit, they jump on it. And once the wagon starts rolling you can’t stop it. You’re given directives and you kind of shake your head. The tail is wagging the dog.”

  And so environmentalists become branded as terrorists.

  “By the time we were arresting people in the 2000s it was like, ‘Those people are terrorists.’ Call them terrorists and pretty soon they are terrorists. And their refrain was, ‘We didn’t hurt anybody, we didn’t kill anyone.’ And that was true.

  “But by then the Bureau had come out with a definition of terrorism so wide it probably fits what Rob is doing over at the Land Trust.”

  ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading.

  The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes
: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.”

  The files contain interviews with fellow students and teachers at the University of New Mexico, who talk of Abbey’s “instability and poor judgment,” with one interviewee saying that as an editor he showed “a stubborn ego, a taste for shocking the reader, a lack of maturity.” Abbey, according to another colleague, was “indiscreet in his individualism ” and was a poor risk “from the point of view of maturity and stability.” He “demonstrated a somewhat radical rebellious quality, indulging in literary immaturities.” Though the interviews are mildly damning, no one questioned the subject’s loyalty to his country.

  One wonders how Abbey would have fared these days. Would the FBI, or the NSA, have simply kept tabs on him or actually called him in for questioning? So many of his views, and so much of his personality, match just the sort of profile we have come to associate with domestic terrorism, particularly with our new, broader definition of who a terrorist might be. It isn’t just his gun advocacy, or his monkeywrenching. It’s his belief that wilderness is a place where free men can retreat when the tyrants take over. Wilderness as the home of the last free people. He wrote:

  Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution in human history. . . . As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country . . . there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element—always present in our history—to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance (not excluding torture of course) in order to preserve—not wilderness!—but the status quo, the privileged positions of those who so largely control the economic and governmental institutions of the United States.

  It’s a type of language, and sentiment, that anticipates our government’s reaction to 9/11, and that also could have, along with his other hobbies, landed Abbey in a world of trouble in our post-9/11 world. Thoreau said that under a government that unjustly imprisons its own, “the true place for the just man is also a prison.” Prison is exactly where Abbey’s monkeywrenching and FBI record might have landed him today.