by Edward Abbey
But not interesting. Much too familiar a type. More problematic were those chaps surrounding me (on all sides) at the Ruins Bar in Glob, Arizona, on a hot summer afternoon in 1981. Two more cowboys had come in, accompanied by their heifers. All wearing the funny hats, the tight pants, the flowered shirts. You could tell the cowboys from the cowgirls by the wider hips. On the cowboys. The girls looked like they couldn’t calve a salamander.
And then a cool young woman, elegant as a sylph, golden-haired, walked in and sat down at the bar one stool away from me. She wore oversize black sunglasses, opaque, inscrutable, and a T-shirt printed with the image of a life-size owl. Two great protruding eyes confronted me. Like an oaf, I stared; the lady gave me a slight smile.
I was about to move onto her adjoining stool when a burly fellow came between us, taking the seat, putting an arm about the girl and a large hairy elbow on the bar in front of my face. The bartender was silent as he poured my fourth double-shot screwdriver. I was getting tired of the orange juice but figured I’d best stick to the regimen. Strict self-discipline, that’s the secret of a full, healthy, productive life. I stared at the blonde, aware of the owl.
“You like my girl?” the large fellow said. He was a Mexican, a Chicano, with round, brown, solemn face, dark eyes, the shoulders of a fullback. A Mexican but a big Mexican.
“Now, Primo …” the woman began.
“You like her, eh?” The dark eyes were aimed at me—not at the wall, not at the mirror, not at the other guy.
I knew he probably carried a knife, a switchblade. All cholos carry switchblades, everybody knows that. The trouble was he was so big, and ugly, and mean, he wouldn’t need a knife. My sole weapon was my superior WASP intelligence. Which only functions, however, in retrospection. “I’m never getting out of here alive,” I said, to myself but aloud.
Primo smiled, laughed, gripped my shoulder in his enormous paw, and said, “You’re right, man. You’re not. Better buy us a drink.”
Under the volcano. I was glad to buy time by buying Primo and his Blondie each a drink. Bar buddies. He called me Grizzly Adams; I called him Pachuco. We discussed his occupation. He was an operating engineer, he said with pride—a Cat-skinner, a bulldozer driver. I asked him the best way to disable a D-9. “You mad at the company?” he asked. “That’s right,” I said. Primo recommended pure shellac, about two quarts, in the fuel tank, and a few handfuls of fine sand in the crankcase. But don’t touch my machine, he added with a slow, smiling flash of teeth, gripping my shoulder again. I could hear the gristle squeak.
We spoke of my trade. Fire-tower lookout. Lightning on the tin roof. The sound of trees breathing. Ten days of solitaire, two days of Glob. “That’d drive me crazy,” Primo said. “Watcha do for love? Screw chipmunks? You must be crazy as a bedbug, Griz.” To the bartender, he said, “Bring old Grizzly here another double OJ. Before I have to cut him up.”
“Why not?” I said. Never argue with the man who’s buying the drinks. Growing more reckless, foolish, even suicidal, I kept leering at his woman. “Take off them big shades, honey,” I said. “Lemme see the light of your eyes. La luz de mi vida.”
She smiled but shook her head. Probably had a black eye, thanks to her pet gorilla here. Maybe two. He looked like the type that would do it. “I like your owl,” I said. “Both of them.” I was seeing double. Better get out of here. Fairly soon. For the first time I noticed the four young thugs in a nearby booth, watching me. Compadres. But not my compadres. La raza here and everywhere. “Viva la causa!” I heard myself shouting. Not a friendly face anywhere—except Primo himself, my Primero, sitting here beside me.
He whacked me on the back. “What cause you talkin’ about, Griz?” His eyes were glowing now, reflecting perhaps the blood in my own; his grin looked bigger, more fierce than a scowl.
His slap made me spill part of my drink. I muttered three Spanish words, five little syllables that one should never utter, aloud, in the border states, unless one is prepared to die. I could see the words floating on the smoke before us.
The chatter came to a stop. The cowboys looked at me with pity. But not much pity. Drunken hippie, they were thinking. A dog’s death. Kicked to pieces in a dusty ditch. And I was thinking (I think), well, what the hell. This is it. Never apologize, never explain.
Primo turned his glass in his big hands, looking solemn and serious. “Griz,” he said, “we better step outside for a few minutes.”
“Right,” I agreed. Really. The happy hour. I got up and looked for the front door.
“No,” he said, “this way.” One arm around my shoulders, he guided me out the back door and into a sun-bleached alley, among the crumpled garbage cans.
Blinking and swaying, I turned to face him. The sunlight dazzled my eyes. Primo looked for a moment like my brother Howard, the dark one, the truck driver, the high steel man.
“Griz,” he said, “you know what you said in there?” I said nothing. “You must be crazy.” I was silent. Primo said, “I’m not going to kill you, Griz. You’re too drunk and ugly and stupid. But don’t come back in there. If I was you I’d go out in the desert for a while and crawl under a bush and get some sleep. But before you pass out, try to think about some things. If you got any brains left.” He watched me; I watched the hard edge of a silver cloud move above the skyline of the backside of the Dominion Hotel.
A door slammed. “Primo,” I said—or meant to say. But he was gone. Never apologize. Never explain. I stepped carefully down the alley, leaned around the corner, and felt my way brick by brick back to my car. Some son of a bitch had snatched the flower off the hood. I got in and drove out of town, through the shining miasma of my drunkenness, turned off the highway, and went up a steep dirt road that led to a pass between a pair of cactus-studded hills. I stopped there and shut off the motor.
I could hear the insane singing of the cicada in the desert heat. About 102 degrees in the shade. But there was no shade. Not a mesquite tree in sight. I thought of Hemingway—Lieutenant Henry—walking through the rain. Catherine has just died in childbirth. Much to the hero’s relief—no, that’s not it. It’s the screaming of the locusts defying the sun, which sounds in a way like rain.
Towering clouds hung on the far horizon, shot with a flickering incandescence, twenty miles to the east. Thunder rumbled. God growling at me again. I don’t care, I ain’t afeard of Him. Not with that big .357 magnum in the glove compartment. Under the gloves. Ain’t gettin’ outa here alive? Ain’t none of us gettin’ outa here alive. That’s the way it is, boys, and that’s the way it’s meant to be. It’s hard but it’s fair. Is that gun loaded? Of course it’s loaded. What good is a gun that ain’t loaded? Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Sure, people with guns kill more people. But that’s only natural. It’s hard. But it’s fair. My God but this car is hot.
I stumbled out, opened the flowerless hood. The engine was gone. Damned Nazi automobile. I took out my canvas cot, unfolded it, set it up on the shady side of the car. Why sleep on the ground if you don’t have to? Only an idiot sleeps on the ground from choice. Little bugs crawl in your ears. A panicked pissant, scrambling over your eardrum, sounds like a horse marching through cornflakes. Horrible, undesirable, unnecessary sensation.
Miles below the tough little town of Glob wavered under heat waves. Went to the town library once, asked the librarian for a book—Philosophy of William James. The librarian, a middle-aged lady with mustache, began rummaging through her card index under the letter F.
I lay down on the cot, placing my hat over my eyes. Who built this old road? Why? Who knows? Who cares? Who found that big nugget down there? Forgotten now. I thought of my brother. I thought of Mr. Bundy hunting his cactus-fed cows along the Utah line. Seventy years in the sun. Forgotten. Fear no more. Primo? Somewhere in Missouri a truck driver named Hinton pulls into an all-night truck stop. Kidneys aching. Forget him. I thought of my father at seventy-eight, still going out to the woods every day to cut locust posts for the coal mines.
Pit props for the miners, down there in the dark. Forget them too. I thought of those who do the world’s work and are never paid enough and never will be, and they rise and are beaten down, and rise again and are beaten down again, and always lose.
The clouds grumbled on the east. God crept closer, mumbling. I raised the right fist, shook it at the old Bastard, and passed out.
To wake in the dark, hours later. There were no stars. A soft and misty rain was falling on my face.
Fire Lookout
Men go mad in this line of work. Read a book called The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and you’ll see what I mean. He spent a summer as fire lookout in a shack on Sourdough Mountain in the Cascades, a lookout haunted by the spirit of Gary “Japhy Ryder” Snyder who had also worked there. Kerouac never recovered. A few years later the Forest Service offered me the same job at the same place. Trying to maintain their literary reputation. Prudently I turned it down.
Women too go mad in the solitary confinement of a mountain peak, though not so readily as men, being stronger more stable creatures with a lower center of gravity. Perhaps the severest test of a marriage is to assign a man and wife to a fire lookout; any couple who survive three or four months with no human company but each other are destined for a long, permanent relationship. They deserve it.
My career as a fire lookout began by chance. Having injured my knee during the Vietnam War (skiing in Colorado), I was unable to resume my usual summer job as patrol ranger in a certain notorious Southwestern national park. I requested a desk job. The Chief Ranger thought I lacked the competence to handle government paper work. He offered me instead the only job in the Park which required less brains, he said, than janitor, garbage collector or Park Superintendent. He made me fire lookout on what is called the North Rim, a post so remote that there was little likelihood I’d either see or be seen by the traveling American public. An important consideration, he felt.
The lookout tower on North Rim was sixty feet tall, surmounted by a little tin box six feet by six by seven. One entered through a trapdoor in the bottom. Inside was the fire finder—an azimuth and sighting device—fixed to a cabinet bolted to the floor. There was a high swivel chair with glass insulators, like those on a telephone line, mounted on the lower tips of the chair’s four legs. In case of lightning. It was known as the electric chair. The actual operations of a fire lookout, quite simple, I have described elsewhere.
My home after working hours was an old cabin near the foot of the tower. The cabin was equipped with a double bed and a couple of folding steel cots, a wood-burning stove, table, shelves, cupboard, two chairs. It made a pleasant home, there under the pines and aspen, deep in the forest, serenaded by distant coyote cries, by poorwills, and sometimes by the song of the hermit thrush, loveliest of bird calls in the American West.
My father came to visit one day and stayed for the season. He was given the job of relief lookout on my days off. In the evenings after supper we played horseshoes. Whenever I hear the jangle of horseshoes now I think of North Rim, of that forest, that cabin, that summer. My father has powerful hands, hard, gnarled, a logger’s hands, very large. In his hand a playing horseshoe looks like a quoit; a horse’s shoe can hardly be seen at all. His pitch is low and accurate, the shoe—open end forward—sliding with a soft chunk full upon the upright, rigid peg. A firm connection. Top that ringer, son, he’d say. We walked the Grand Canyon from rim to rim that summer, and once again a few years ago. The second time he was seventy-two years old.
The first sensible thing I did at North Rim, before my father appeared, was fall in love with the ranger. Not the Chief Ranger but the one who manned the park entrance station a few miles down the road. Park Ranger Hendrickson (GS-4) was one of those golden Californians from the San Diego area. She wore her sea-bleached hair in a heavy ponytail that fell below her clavicles. Like most girl swimmers she had a well-developed pair of lungs, much admired by the boys. Pretty as a Winesap in September, she looked especially fetching in her ranger suit: broad-brimmed straw hat, white blouse with Park Service pin, the snug skirt of forest green twill that ended, as was the fashion then, a good six inches above her knees. Like most sexual perverts I’ve always suffered from a fatal weakness for women in uniform—for cheerleaders, majorettes, waitresses, meter maids, prison matrons, etc. On my first meeting with Bonnie Hendrickson (as we shall here name the young woman) I said to her, frankly, “You know—I’ve always wanted to lift a ranger’s skirt.”
“You’ll need a hiking permit,” she replied. A quick-witted girl—with a B.A. in French. We soon became good friends. On my days off I sometimes helped her get through the tedious hours at the entrance station. While she leaned out her little window collecting entrance fees from the tourists, answering questions, chatting about Smokey the Bore and the fire danger, I was kneeling at her feet, unseen from outside, gently rolling down the ranger’s pantyhose. We played various such experiments in self control. I experimented, she displayed the self control. An innocent game, like horseshoes, with similar principles. Top that ringer …
On her days off she would visit me in the lookout tower, assisting me in my duties. As I’d be reporting a fire over the Park Service radio system she was unbuttoning my Levi’s. “Fire Dispatch,” I said into the microphone, “this is North Rim Lookout.”
“Yeah?” The Fire Dispatcher had the weary, cynical voice of a police desk sergeant. “What’s your problem now, Abbey?”
“Reporting a smoke, sir.”
“Yeah? And where do you think this one is, Abbey?”
“Well sir, I’ve got a reading of zero-four-two degrees and thirty—oooh, watch those fingernails!—thirty minutes. Near Fredonia.”
“Yeah …” A long pause. Then the weary voice. “I hate to tell you this, Abbey, but that’s the same fire you reported last week. Like I told you then, that’s the Fredonia sawmill and it’s been smoking away in that same spot for fifty years. Ten four?”
“Yes sir, ten four. Oh Christ … oh yes …!”
“No swearing on the airwaves. These here transmissions are monitored by the Federal Communications Commission.”
One cold rainy afternoon Bonnie and I were down in the cabin on the bed, a fire crackling in the stove, when our experiments were interrupted by a banging on the door. Bonnie ducked beneath the covers, I yanked on my pants and cracked the door open. Two Park Service fire fighters stood there grinning at me through the drizzle, their truck snuggled against the plump round rear of Bonnie’s little car. “Hey Ed,” says one, “we got a report of a hot fire in this area.”
“Get out of here.” I slammed and barred the door. But I don’t want to give the impression that a fire lookout’s life is all work. There was time for play. One night a week we’d drive to the village on the Canyon rim and visit the bar. My Hopi friend would be there, old Sam Banyaca the shaman, and the veteran mule wrangler known only as Walapai, a leathery runt of a half-Indian cowboy who always squatted on top of his barstool, having never learned to sit anything but a horse. Behind the bar was Robert the intellectual bartender, smug smirk on his fat face, about to recite a new limerick. He claimed to be the only living composer of original limericks in America. I still remember two of them. I wish I could forget.
A modest young fellow named Morgan
Had an awesome sexual organ;
It resembled a log
Dredged up from a bog,
With a head on it fierce as a Gorgon.
And the other:
An old Mormon bishop named Bundy
Used to wed a new wife every Sunday;
But his multiple matehood
Was ruined by statehood—
Sic transit gloria Monday.
“Mundi!”
“Monday!”
“It’s Friday, f’crush sake,” says old Walapai, turning his bleary eyes toward us and swaying on his stool. “You honkies drunk already?” He crashed to the floor.
I spent four sweet summers on that sublime North Rim, not always alone
in my tower. During the third summer a thing happened which caused me the deepest grief of my life. So far. The pain of my loss seemed unendurable. I called an old friend, Ann Woodin of Tucson, for comfort. She came to my part of the forest bearing apples, a flagon, black caviar and a magnum of Mumm’s. We sat on a log under the trees at evening, by a fire, and listened to the birds, and talked, and ate the caviar and drank the champagne and talked some more. She helped me very much. A lady with class, that Ann. A lady of class. The same who once rescued me at two in the morning from the Phoenix City Jail down in Goldwater country, where the police had locked me up for what they called “negligent driving.” Joseph Wood Krutch, another Tucsonan, dedicated one of his books to Ann Woodin. She is, he wrote, “an ever-present help in time of trouble.”
