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You know I couldn’t resist one favorite writing about another.

Sheepmen and many others shoot [golden eagles] on sight, on general principles. Our hero Ernest Hemingway could not resist the temptation to bag an eagle now and then, though he hated himself afterward. Not an easy job to be, or to have been, Ernest Hemingway.

–“Watching the Birds: the Windhover”, from Down the River

Aside from the obvious criticisms that could be made of Papa shooting eagles (we’ll let Abbey do that), that final sentence says a lot, doesn’t it? Not an easy job at all…

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The hardcases among us snap the tabs from cans of beer, kept cool like catfish in gunny sacks trailed in the river. Fssst! The others stare. Impossible to muffle that sudden release of CO2 under pressure, the conspicuous pop! Sounds like a grenade attack. Incoming! Nobody here flinches but everyone knows who is drinking the beer. And who’s been hoarding it. Would be helpful if some clever lad invented a more discreet, a more genteel mode of opening beer cans. A soft, susurrant, suspiring sort of … s i g h … might serve nicely. A sound that could pass, let us say, for the relaxed, simple, artless fart of a duchess. Ingenuous. But our technology continues to lag behind genuine human needs.

–“Running the San Juan,” from Down the River

I love this image of Abbey the hardcase, on the morning following some hard drinking, when everyone’s hungover, shocking his fellow river rafters with this beer can and picturing a more private option. And how about that artless fart of a duchess? An image if I ever read one. The sound effects and the concepts tickle me. Who wants a beer?

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Fragments of autobiography, journalistic battle debris, nightmares and daydreams, bits and butts of outdoors philosophizing, all stirred together in a blackened iron pot over a smoking fire of juniper, passionflower and thorny mesquite. Agitate. Redneck slumgullion, like any stew, makes a tasty, nutritious and coherent whole. And why not? Society too, human society, is like a stew – if you don’t keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on top.

–Edward Abbey, from the introduction to The Journey Home

Here Abbey describes what is to come in this essay collection, but we also get a nice quick punchy taste of his voice and his perspective on humanity.

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In the early 1970’s… the stone house was isolated enough that Abbey could stand outside and urinate in peace – as his friend Dick Felger once observed him doing from the roof of the house, after Abbey called out to him when he was driving by. This was Abbey’s privacy test; when outdoors urination was no longer feasible, it was time to move on. He told Sandy Newmark that “if you can’t pee in your own front yard, you live too close to the city.” –from James M. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life

I have to say I could appreciate this notion of privacy. I may have to come up with an Abbey quotations meme around here, to go along with hemingWay of the Day and two-wheeled thoughts.

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