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

by David Gessner

  The more you read Ed Abbey, the more you start to see him as a creature of his particular time, a time as distant from ours as Daniel Boone’s from his. He came on the literary stage at just the right moment: his personal beliefs in freedom and resistance were perfect for the ’60s and that remnant ’60s known as the ’70s. His message of aggressive nonconformity, of screw-you freedom, fit the times. It’s hard to imagine that the same message would get a similar reaction today.

  So is Abbey passé, as dated as bad ’70s hair? Obviously I wouldn’t be out here tracking his spoor if I thought so. But it is difficult, at least at first, to see how his spirit might be adapted to fit our times. For instance, isn’t monkeywrenching dead, not just in an FBI agent’s eyes, but as a legitimate possibility for the environmental movement? I must admit that in my own grown-up life as a professor and father I don’t blow a lot of things up. For most of us who care about the environment, Stegner provides a much more sensible model.

  But I don’t want to be so quick to toss Abbey on the scrap heap. Looked at in a different way, Abbey’s ideas about freedom are exactly what is needed today. If the times have changed, the essence of what he offered has in some ways never been more relevant. Many of the things that he foresaw have come to pass: we currently live in an age of unprecedented surveillance, where the government regularly reads our letters (now called e-mails) and monitors our movements. Abbey offers resistance to this. Resistance to the worst of our times, the constant encroaching on freedom and wildness. He says to us: Question them, question their authority. Don’t be so quick to give up the things you know are vital, no matter what others say.

  Before we left Grand Junction, I asked Jane one last question.

  “So, let’s say you were on the other team. Say you were a creative young environmentalist—a monkeywrencher, even. How would you go about fighting in the present atmosphere? How would you start a movement?”

  She laughed long and loud.

  “No comment,” she said finally. “I refuse to answer that on the advice of my attorney.”

  “That seems reasonable,” I said.

  But as we talked for a while more about ways that monkeywrenching has persisted in different forms, we gradually circled around to a couple of possible answers to my question.

  We both laughed when she brought up the reality show Whale Wars, but if the times demand new forms, here was one: monkeywrenching reborn as reality TV. In fact, the show’s star, Paul Watson, broke from Greenpeace in 1977 to form a more radical organization called Earth Force and then the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, in part because he favored direct-action environmentalism. Direct action means confronting the party involved in environmental wrongdoing—in the case of the show this means Japanese whalers who claim to be using whales for research—for the purpose of both blocking the activity and highlighting the activity’s moral wrongness or illegality.

  Imagine Ed Abbey with a camera on him as he tries to stop the destruction of wilderness. It is not so farfetched. Why not take direct action with the cameras on? The essence of the old monkeywrenching was secrecy, but now it could become openness.

  The story of Tim DeChristopher highlights the new possibilities of environmental protest as public spectacle. “What DeChristopher has done is the epitome of modern monkeywrenching,” Jack Loeffler said to me back in Santa Fe. “Because he fooled them at their own game.”

  What DeChristopher had done was walk into an auction where public land was being leased to oil companies and, posing as bidder number 70, held up his paddle and bid on 116 parcels of public land. DeChristopher’s protest had been a brilliant combination of the symbolic and the actual. It was entirely nonviolent and he didn’t hurt anyone, except the oil companies’ feelings, and though he had no way of paying for what he bid on, it effectively took the land off the books for a while, long enough in fact for the new administration to declare the leases illegal. But while it might seem like it would have been hard to paint DeChristopher with the terrorism brush, he still ended up in a prison in Littleton, Colorado, for two years.

  In contrast to the secrecy of old-time monkeywrenchers, DeChristopher has called for a more public form of environmental protest, getting people out into the streets, with public displays of civil disobedience.

  “I wouldn’t say that environmental protest has died out,” he told me during an interview. “There are still certain direct-action type of events where people are locking down equipment. But now it’s done in a lot more public way than the monkeywrenching of old. One of the things we have learned from the last generation of activists is the importance of telling our own story and owning that story. I think especially activists now can look back on the days of Earth First! and ELF and see how much their opponents ended up telling their story and defining who they were. So a lot of the actions now are done more publicly.”

  This type of public activism makes perfect sense in our age of hypermedia. And I think a reimagining of Abbey’s blunter, earlier environmentalism holds promise. Imagine a kind of environmental Hunger Games.

  I mentioned to Jane that one of the reasons so many environmentalists have gone gaga over what DeChristopher did was that it suggested new possibilities—a new legend, even.

  “I agree,” she said. “What he did is more of a symbolic thing. Of course, it didn’t really work out for him as far as the jail sentence. But he didn’t know that going in. I’m not sure he appreciated the potential criminality. I don’t know him, but it seems it was a fairly spontaneous decision: ‘Hey, here’s a paddle’ and then he realizes he can really pull it off. And then the hammer comes down.”

  Everything Jane was saying made sense to me, but the fact that DeChristopher stumbled onto his act didn’t make it all that different from other historic acts of rebellion. And within the environmental community it was a historic act. Like many good discoveries it was accidental, but what was discovered was nothing less than a new way of monkeywrenching. He was on to something. A way of fighting without blowing things up.

  After all, blowing things up, or putting sugar in tanks or monkeywrenching in general, never got anyone all that far anyway. True, it slowed down developers momentarily but then when the resistance dried up or the resisters got bored or went on to other things, the developers went right back to their developing. At its best it held off the enemies while public opinion formed against them. The monkey wrench itself was a symbol, and monkeywrenching has always been a game of symbols, starting with the famous Earth First! unfurling of the illustration of the crack in the Glen Canyon Dam. The goal is to stir people, rally them, and turn the symbolism in your direction. To take the phrase they love to batter you with—“environmental extremist”—and judo flip it into “environmental avenger.” Or better yet, “environmental hero.”

  Edward Abbey may be in some ways dated, but certainly not in his use of the power of symbol.

  FROM GRAND JUNCTION, Hones and I drove up the continental divide to Vail Pass, and pulled over at a rest area at the top of the world. It was there that, more than twenty years before, I once started a cross-country ski trip, a delightful all-day sojourn that ended with margaritas and burritos at a Mexican restaurant in a tiny downslope town whose name I can’t recall.

  Today I wouldn’t be skiing, but pretty close. The plan was for Hones to keep driving to the town of Eagle while I hopped on my bike and glided down. I took my bike off the rack and was soon flying downhill on the bike path that ran parallel to the highway. When I lived in Colorado I reveled in the twin pleasures of ascent and descent, but today there would be no ascending. I dropped a couple thousand feet in a few minutes, taking a downhill skier’s pleasure in flying down the mountain at thirty to forty miles per hour.

  After we met in Eagle, we drove through the rest of the mountains and then down into what Stegner called the “ringworm suburbs of Denver.” There we spent a late night of drinking and eating with my friend Randy, a fine host. The next morning, Hones’s last in the West, we packed u
p early and headed to the Denver airport, where I would trade in my old friend for my wife and my daughter.

  We snuck up behind Hadley at the baggage-claim carousel. She had recently turned nine and had known the man she called Mr. Hones her whole life. I surprised her, and she laughed and threw herself into my arms. Then the second surprise stepped out from behind me and Hadley hurled herself at Mr. Hones. Meanwhile I got to hug my wife for the first time in three weeks.

  It was a glorious reunion.

  10

  PROPERLY WILD

  Until she landed in Denver that day, Hadley had never set foot west of the Mississippi. Fifteen years before, Nina and I had gotten married in Boulder and eloped to Taos. We always imagined we would make our home, and raise our children, in the West.

  We were wrong, of course. But over the next week we made up for lost time, showing Hadley our old haunts in Boulder, taking her up to the Continental Divide, and bringing her on a shorter version of my river trip on the San Juan in Utah.

  “I never imagined the mountains would be like this,” she said when she first saw the Rockies.

  It wasn’t until we were off the river—“back in captivity,” as Hadley put it—that I remembered that Ed Abbey had gone down the same river with his own daughter. The essay chronicling that trip, “Running the San Juan,” is an exercise in parental pride, as his daughter Susie, then eleven, paddles down the river captaining an inflatable kayak, her very own duckie.

  Abbey might be a fine role model as a defender of wildness and an embodiment of resistance. Not so much as a father. There is the famous story that Abbey told and that all his biographers retell of the time he went camping in the Owens Valley with Susie a year before the river trip, when she was ten. Without saying a word to her, Ed headed out on one of his long morning hikes. Susie, thinking herself abandoned in the wilderness, grabbed her father’s briefcase (that held his writing) and tried to walk to the highway. Ed, finally hearing his daughter’s cries of despair, turned back from his hike and searched for her. He found her in the desert alone, wailing in terror. The stuff of parental nightmares.

  “Ed was a good man,” Ken Sanders had told me back in Salt Lake City. “He was extremely loyal. He was generous to his friends, to causes. He gave away about ten percent of his income and he never made that much.”

  But then Ken shrugged.

  “Of course, he was a pretty lousy husband. And until he married Clarke, and had Becky and Ben, he was a really shitty dad. His boys grew up without a dad at all.”

  The letters from Abbey’s grown sons, Josh and Aaron, to their father are almost too excruciating to read. The boys barely knew their father, whom they always address simply as Ed, and their attempts to impress him or appeal for some scrap of attention are heart-wrenching. At the same time, the journals reveal the deep remorse that Abbey felt at having been such a bad parent. True, it was not enough remorse to make him change his behavior, but it was genuine.

  If Abbey wasn’t the world’s greatest dad, he was a worse husband, at least in his early attempts.

  At various times he wrote:

  Don’t really want to be a father again—but do like going through the motions.

  I believe in marriage. I love my wife. And yet I can’t bear monogamy. That’s the rub—for me it’s unnatural. Cruel. Painful. Unbearable. I like girls; can’t seem to get over it, or outgrow it, or sublimate it—in fact the more active and creative I am, the happier I am, the more I crave sexual excitement. Which means for me a new girl now and then, in bed.

  And in his novel The Fool’s Progress:

  If I were forced to choose right now, at this very instant, between a platter of hot-buttered sorority girls and/or saving the entire Northern Hemisphere, including a billion or so innocent Chinamen, which would I choose? It’s a tough question.

  Part of the Abbey legend is that he finally mellowed. He married Clarke Cartwright, his fifth and final wife, in 1978 at the age of fifty-two. Clarke wouldn’t put up with Ed’s nonsense. Together they had two children, Rebecca and Ben, and Abbey was by all accounts a doting father. I imagine that marriage benefited greatly from Abbey mellowing with age, or, more technically, the tailing off of testosterone.

  In contrast to Abbey and his five wives, Wallace Stegner stayed married to Mary Page for his whole life. In fact, no one can seem to mention Stegner without extolling his marriage, and it certainly deserves extolling. Having spent his childhood watching a bad man abuse his spouse, he vowed to be a good man to his own wife. Where Abbey at times seemed to have no conscience, Stegner’s was overdeveloped.

  But when I met Page Stegner and his family in Vermont, I learned that his parents’ marriage was more complicated than the myth. Page told me that his mother had been distant, almost resentful, of the intrusion the young Page had made into the society of two she’d formed with Wally. Sometimes she treated him less like a son than like a rival for Wally’s attention. Page described Mary Stegner as something of a “professional invalid.”

  “She perceived early on that a way to capture and enslave my father and keep his attentions from wandering in any direction—not that he would have anyway—was to be sick.”

  I thought of how Sally Morgan, the fictional wife in Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, had polio and was cared for by her husband.

  “It was tangled up in his own mother’s sickness and his father’s response to that sickness, not being there for her,” Page continued. “In some ways my mother had figured it out. So all her life she was sick. With one thing or another thing or another thing. And sometimes I have to say I don’t believe she was. I mean, how do you have emphysema and get over it? I don’t think you do.”

  It made perfect sense. What better way to assure the loyalty of someone with an overdeveloped sense of obligation and responsibility?

  This was a muddying of the picture of the perfect lifelong marriage.

  But Page wanted to make one thing clear. He loved and respected his father. He hadn’t liked the Oedipal treatment he had been dealt in a recent biography. The biographer’s inclination was natural enough: here was the only son of a famous writer and professor who was also a writer and professor himself. The imagination runs right toward anger and strife, dark Springsteen songs, the clash of fathers and sons. But that’s not how it was, Page insisted.

  “Well, it wasn’t perfect,” he said. “But he was a good dad. And he, not my mother, was the real nurturer in the family.”

  Loyalty and commitment were primary values not just in Wallace Stegner’s life but in his fiction. Even the affairs he portrayed in his novels were relatively chaste. A perfect example is the kind of faux infidelity that lies at the heart of The Spectator Bird, which won the National Book Award in 1977. In the novel, the main character, Joe Allston, who shares some of the grumbling prejudices of his creator, reads a journal to his wife, Ruth, recounting their trip, twenty years before, to Denmark. That trip occurred just after the death of their only child, Curtis, and led to a friendship with a dishonored Danish countess named Astrid. Astrid, beautiful and enigmatic, serves as a tour guide for the Allstons, and Joe, despite himself, ends up falling in love with her.

  WALLACE AND MARY STEGNER.

  Their affair climaxes on Midsummer Night in the Danish countryside when Joe Allston rows Astrid out to a small island. The two hold hands and kiss—just once—before realizing that there is no way they can betray Ruth. “You are not the kind who shirks things,” Astrid says. The book’s real climax, however, is not the moment of infidelity but when Joe reveals the infidelity to his wife all those years later. After he does, he “falls all to pieces.” He claws for his coat and pushes out into the night, crying while walking up and down the couple’s long driveway, which sits above the California hills like the deck of a ship. He realizes the absurdity of a nearly seventy-year-old man falling apart over what must seem like nothing in “the age of infidelity, when casual coupling and wife-swapping” are all the rage. He walks back and forth beneath the live
oaks that arc over the driveway, staring down at the pale heads of a field of daffodils gleaming in the moonlight. Ruth joins him and urges him to come back into the house due to the cold. “It seemed a good idea to kiss her, there in the open moonlight between the oaks, in sight of the ghostly daffodils.” He does and then they walk back to the house together.

  Not the stuff of racy fiction, but powerful in a way that my summary perhaps does not convey. “I’d rather be your obligation than your ex-wife,” Ruth says at one point, but Joe insists she is neither. While he now goes years without thinking of Astrid, Ruth is always a part of him. She is not an obligation: “I simply made a choice and it wasn’t that hard a choice either.” And: “It seems to me that my commitments are more important than my impulses or my pleasures.” They walk back to the house, “two young people with quite a lot the matter with us.” Earlier in the book, Joe Allston has defined himself as a “spectator bird,” always on the sidelines and never involved, but now he sees his truer identity: a bird with a mate. A mate you can hunt up “bugs and seeds for” and “mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle.”

  What Stegner has done here, in a way that was obviously not lost on a certain student of his from Kentucky, was give us a literature of fidelity. Of marriage.

  Edward Abbey took a different approach. He saw sex as the last frontier. He liked to point out that animals in cages procreate more often than those in the wild, and believed that modern humans, living their limited, constrained lives, are the same way. With the frontier closed, our wild lands disappearing, our lives tame and devoid of adventure, we turn to the only wild thing left.