Down the River by Edward Abbey

Posted on April 24, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Down the River is a collection of Abbey’s essays, mostly (if not all) previously published in various publications but generally (if not always) reworked for latter publications, as was his habit. The theme here, of course, is rivers; but he uses his theme lightly and spreads it out wide. The collection has four parts. Part I, “Thoreau and Other Friends,” gives us “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” a lengthy study of that man over the course of Abbey’s ten-day trip down the Green River in Utah with friends. “A crusty character, Thoreau. An unpeeled man. A man with the bark on him.” …about which the same could be said of Abbey himself. Also in this first section appears “Watching the Birds: the Windhover,” about a season spent as a fire lookout, looking out also for birds, in which he gives us this lovely image:

The redtail hawk is a handsome character. I enjoyed watching the local hunter come planing through the pass between our mountaintop and the adjoining peak, there to catch the wind and hover in place for a while, head twitching back and forth as it scans the forest below. When he – or she – spots something live and edible, down she goes at an angle of forty-five degrees, feet first, talons extended, wings uplifted, feathers all aflutter, looking like a Victorian lady in skirts and ruffled pantaloons jumping off a bridge.

Part II is “Politicks and Rivers” and earns its name; here Abbey waxes philosophical and praises nature while criticizing our treatment of her. Part III, “Places and Rivers,” tells more stories of Abbey’s river trips, to which I am especially partial; his descriptions of lost (or soon-to-be-lost) rivers and valleys and canyons are poignant and might in fact make you cry. Finally, Part IV, “People, Books and Rivers” contains “Footrace in the Desert,” detailing possibly Abbey’s first and last running race, and a lovely portrait of John de Puys (“My Friend Debris”), Abbey’s good friend. It finishes with “Floating,” another dirge for lost rivers.

Repeatedly Abbey is funny, even ridiculous, and often lecherous. But this is also a man who has me looking up words like ‘gelid’ (‘very cold, icy, or frosty’), ‘dithyrambic’ (‘wildly enthusiastic; wildly irregular in form’), ‘oleaginous’ (‘rich in, covered with, or producing oil’), and who uses phrases like ‘concupiscent scrivener’ (definition: Edward Abbey). Remember, he had a master’s degree in philosophy. But he also writes, in “Meeting the Bear,”

Though a sucker for philosophy all of my life I am not a thinker but – a toucher. A feeler, groping his way with the white cane of the senses through the hairy jungle of life. I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace – whether a woman, a child, a rock, a tree, a bear, a shaggy dog. The rest is hearsay. If God is not present in this young prickly pear jabbing its spines into my shin, then God will have to get by without my help. I’m sorry but that’s the way I feel. The message in the bottle is not for me.

This collection, like *almost all the Abbey I’ve read, I highly recommend. It offers a great and varied example of his best nonfiction; it’s poignant, funny, light-hearted and deathly serious, and beautifully, beautifully done. I hope you love it as much as I do.

*Continue to beware of Black Sun for its self-indulgent and unrealistic fantasy of the middle-aged man landing a sex-hungry teenaged virgin for wild romps in a natural paradise.

Rating: 8 raft trips.

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Edward Abbey: on Ernest Hemingway

Posted on April 20, 2012 by pagesofjulia


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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Edward Abbey: on opening a beer

Posted on April 17, 2012 by pagesofjulia

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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book beginnings on Friday: Walking It Off by Doug Peacock

Posted on April 13, 2012 by pagesofjulia


Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

Doug Peacock was a good friend of Edward Abbey’s, and was the inspiration for the Hayduke character in Abbey’s highly regarded The Monkey Wrench Gang – thus, obviously, my interest in this memoir. It begins:

High in the shadow of Dhaulagiri they are bleeding the yaks. Two Tibetans hold the curved horns of the shaggy beast and a third man uses a wooden bowl to catch the bright red blood that pulses and spills out a hole in the yaks’ neck.

So, a little rough in the beginning if you don’t like pulsing blood! I’m okay though. 🙂 What are you reading this weekend?

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The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

Posted on April 12, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I fear this review won’t do this book justice. Maybe I’m just intimidated. But I read it on vacation and sadly took NO notes – nor do I usually, but it took me a little longer after reading to write the review, and those were hectic days. And it’s a significant book: one of Abbey’s two most famous books, that alongside the nonfiction Desert Solitaire really made his career and solidified his celebrity, as well as birthing the Earth First! organization and movement. If ever a book had a cult following, this is it.

The story follows four individuals. Seldom Seen Smith is a Jack Mormon with three wives in three small towns in Utah; they gave him his nickname for being rarely around any of their three households; he guides river raft trips down the Grand Canyon and generally camps out and around in the natural world more than he stays home. Bonnie Abbzug is a Bronx Jewish girl working out in Albuquerque for Dr. A.K. Sarvis, who when he is widowed takes refuge in Bonnie’s desirable arms. She is much younger and beautiful and very capable; she manages his medical practice as well as satiates his considerable sexual urges. As the book opens, Bonnie and Doc amuse themselves by cutting down billboards with a chainsaw. George Hayduke is a young, muscular, angry Green Beret Vietnam veteran who returned from war with nothing on his mind but the beautiful desert country he loved; upon finding it defiled by industry and roads, he wanders around in a murderous mood until happening upon the other three.

The four form a conflict-ridden union of semi-organized, anarchic environmental activists – stress on the “action” part. They destroy heavy machinery and blow up bridges and the like. The group’s greatest ambition is to take out Glen Canyon Dam and free the mighty Colorado River (and liberate Seldom Seen’s hometown, now underwater, of Hite, Utah). They have adventures and do battle with a small-town Search and Rescue team lead by the Church of Latter Day Saints’ Bishop Love, which is really just a posse of renegades angry at Seldom Seen and whose profits are tied up in the industry that the Monkey Wrench Gang is bent on destroying. There is gunplay; there is infighting; there is sex and camping and nature-praise. It’s rather glorious; The Monkey Wrench Gang is funny and doesn’t take itself too seriously, although its values (pro-nature, anti-development) are definitely heartfelt and poignantly expressed. It’s easy to see how this novel, published in 1975, led like-minded young people to try to live it out.

Common critiques are easily spotted. Most glaringly for me, Bonnie is a sex symbol. Doc is her lover despite being “old and bald and fat and impotent” (the first three are true, the forth patently not; there is reference to his “grand erection,” on which more in a minute) but Seldom Seen openly worships her (which is accepted by all) while Hayduke tries to resist his equally obvious desire. This dynamic is not PC, although I fear it is entirely realistic even today. Knowing just a little about Abbey (one biography, check), it is painfully obvious that Doc (and Hayduke, and Seldom Seen) live out various forms of Abbey’s own lust for vastly younger women (their thighs, their buttocks…) – see again Doc’s “grand erection” even when threatening impotence. This is clearly indulgent of the author’s lechery. But somehow I note that and carry on unoffended. To be fair, Doc is rather laughable. Further, the group is not PC in its attitudes towards American Indians (somewhere in here is the often quoted line “drunk as a Navajo”) or Mormons, continue the list from here. And these are not your average environmentalists; they eat a lot of meat and drive big cars and throw beer cans out the windows along the highway (another famous Abbeyism).

But it’s a hell of a story; I was totally involved, and what can I say, I buy into Abbey’s greatness and went right along with his self-indulgent fantasy. I wanted to see the Glen Canyon Dam come down, too. I wish there was more. Oh wait! Hayduke Lives! That’s gotta be next on the list.

Rating: 8 sticks of dynamite.

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Edward Abbey: a recipe

Posted on April 4, 2012 by pagesofjulia

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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on mountain lions

Posted on April 2, 2012 by pagesofjulia

This is my memory of what happened.

In August of 1990 I was just past my 8th birthday, backpacking with my parents in the White River National Forest in Colorado. We made camp for the evening; it was still daylight. We were in a low, fairly clear area, with the land rising up around us; the grass was tall and golden-brown. I had wandered off by myself, I don’t remember why, and was wandering back toward camp when I looked up into the eyes of a creature I didn’t recognize. It was the size of our family dog, Eile, a Weimaraner. But its face was that of a cat. It was golden-brown, like the grass. It had paused mid-stride to gaze back at me. We were maybe 10-15 feet apart, and we both stopped and looked at each other for a few seconds. I wanted to make the moment last. I was always excited to see wildlife when we camped and backpacked; I remember being enchanted by marmots. Then the big cat walked off and I went back to camp. I told my father I had seen a new animal, and he asked me to describe it, and I told him the same description I’ve given here: the size of our dog, with the face of a cat, golden-brown. He was very excited and told me that I’d seen a mountain lion. I knew what a lion was and told him that wasn’t right, but later he found a picture of this different kind of lion, with no mane, and I recognized it. Yes, I’d seen a mountain lion. I remember my father being thrilled, but there was some note of alarm, too; I’d made it out of the experience fine, so there was no sense in being frightened (I think he told me that now that it knew we were there, it would stay away from us), but you might not send your eight-year-old off on such an encounter knowingly. I felt no fear, of course, not knowing anything but that this creature resembled my pets back home. Nothing scary about that. I’ve wondered if it simply wasn’t hungry, or if it recognized my innocence, my fearless curiosity, my lack of intention to do it any harm.

The above is my memory more than 20 years later, of course, and it may be faulty. It’s even possible that I remember the story as family lore rather than remembering the incident itself; but I don’t think that’s the case. I can picture the cat, and the dry grassy field.

Do my parents remember this experience the same way? It’s been a long time, and I was small. In fact, I had to look up the when-and-where using Pops’s travel log (thanks so much, Pops, for keeping one!). I was surprised at the date; I thought I was smaller than 8 when this happened. To which Pops says, “eight is still pretty small!”

They’ve shared their memories for us here.

Mom:

My memory is such that I doubt if I was there. I either remember the telling of the tale, or I remember telling the tale. The one thing that seems authentic is a flash of astonishment on your face. Maybe I saw you seeing something – and later heard what Hank actually saw, the mountain lion.

Dad:

I have a “clear” memory of it, which probably has a 50% chance of being accurate.

I don’t remember Karen being there so it will be interesting to see what she says. You and I were on a hike – who knows how far from our backpack-camp given your age. We were walking up over a slight rise when you made some exclamation – I don’t remember what. By the time I looked where you were looking, all I saw was a flash of tawny brown disappearing over the hill and/or into the brush. We were in relatively open, scrubby terrain – not in the woods. This was definitely mountain lion habitat – not bobcat or such.

I asked you to describe what you had seen, and it’s based on your description plus my furtive glimpse that I concluded it was a mountain lion. I remember not having any doubt, and emphasizing to you what a special observation it was. I have and would describe this to others as your sighting, not mine; without your description, I would not have been so sure. I might have reasoned that I probably just saw a deer (no tail flash tho’) or a coyote (no bushy tail tho’).

and then:

You thought you were ALONE?!!! Wow; that’s hutzpah – and how very irresponsible of your parents if true!

All of this came back to me recently in reading a few collections of Edward Abbey’s essays. In an essay entitled “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom” (oft-quoted and reprinted; my version comes from The Journey Home), he describes his one encounter with a mountain lion. When he became aware of its presence, he was exhilarated, having wanted to meet a lion all his life (something I’d read in earlier essays). He felt fear, but also:

I felt what I always feel when I meet a large animal face to face in the wild: I felt a kind of affection and the crazy desire to communicate, to make some kind of emotional, even physical contact with the animal.

He tried to shake its hand. And if that sounds crazy, I ask you to go find a copy of this essay and read it all the way through. It’s only 11 pages long. And by the time he wants to shake this lion’s hand, I propose that you might be with him, searching for communion. I certainly was.

Abbey only had the one encounter, and in earlier essays I’ve read, he laments that fact; he waited for and sought that one encounter all his life. It makes me feel that much luckier that I got to see one, too.

Aside from the beauty and grace and rarity of the mountain lion, there’s a question growing out of this blog post about the nature of memory. That, too, reminds me of some recent reading: you may have noticed me raving lately about A Difficult Woman, the Lillian Hellman biography by Alice Kessler-Williams which – among many other things – examines the themes of memory and truth in Hellman’s life. I believe that our memories are fluid and unreliable. It may be that there is no absolutely true memory; it is my experience that people consistently share different memories of the same event. That being said, I think my father probably has it right; we were probably together. It seems more likely (because why would you let your 8-year-old wander around alone in mountain lion country), and I’m inclined to trust his memory which was then mature over mine which was then young… also, inflating my own role to a solo encounter feels like something a child’s memory might do. But it’s interesting to see these different memories, don’t you think?

Be advised: I’m out of town, so you’re viewing pre-scheduled posts until April 9. I love your comments and will respond when I return! But I’ll be out of touch for a bit. Thanks for stopping by!

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Edward Abbey: A Life by James M. Cahalan

Posted on March 26, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I appreciated Calahan’s biography of Ed Abbey. I found it the perfect next step in my increasing fascination of the man’s work, which (for me at least) is also necessarily a fascination with the man. As I’ve mused before, there is too much of the man in the work for one to possibly extricate them. And this book was just the thing for me. I learned a lot about Abbey, some of which you can find in that earlier post. Calahan’s angle on Abbey, if you will, seems to be the contradictions of the man – an angle I’m always ready to appreciate. In this case, he (Calahan) speaks often to the public figure Abbey created for himself and the often distinct private, “real” Abbey. And then there are those controversial aspects…

Abbey’s stance on immigration, for example. The public maligned him for being a racist after he spoke (and wrote) against allowing immigrants in from Mexico, which was perhaps an understandable response, but an overly simplistic one. In a nutshell, Abbey conceived his anti-immigration stance as an issue of economics, not of race; he stressed that he was against immigration of any kind of people from anywhere, including the internal migrations within the United States (easterners moving into his beloved west), which he conceded he could do nothing about. He had lots of Hispanic, Mexican, and Native American friends, and liked to visit Mexico. He also, though, wrote and spoke of the unpleasantness of Mexico and Latin America and stated that he didn’t want to live there (and neither, he pointed out, did most Latin Americans – meaning those immigrated to the US). I understand this stance perfectly and see how it could be a position without consideration of race: more people are bad for these precious and shrinking wild open spaces, regardless of their race. But it’s easy to see where he got beat up for this position, too, especially considering his reluctance to back down from controversy, to apologize or restate his position. Rather, he was inclined to bait his critics by making farcically backwards remarks.

Similarly, Abbey’s relationship with women was a complicated one. He repeatedly stated that they were the “better” sex, that he respected women and certainly that he loved them (as evidenced, in some sense, by his five wives and many extramarital relationships!). But there was that ludicrous letter he wrote to “Mizz” magazine, and all the cheating he did on his wives. He was supportive and helpful in the professional writing careers of a number of serious women (Terry Tempest Williams comes to mind, as I recently read her most recent work – the review should be out any time now). But even in his fifth and by far most successful marriage, he was firm in his wish for his wife to be a full-time mother to their children. Misogynist? Ah, I don’t quite think so; but his relationship with women was complicated.

And another example: Abbey repeatedly denied that he was a naturalist. I’ll let Cahalan himself speak here.

It is true that Abbey was not a naturalist in the scientific way that Rachel Carson or even Annie Dillard was qualified to be; he got mediocre grades in subjects such as zoology. Wendell Berry was right (and Nancy Abbey agreed) that Abbey’s real subject was himself – that as an author he was primarily an “autobiographer” more than an “environmentalist.” Yet Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang activated more than a generation’s worth of activists toward a radical new brand of direct action in defense of wilderness. While telling the story of himself and his friends, Abbey managed to change the world.

I share these observations on Abbey just to share some of what I’m learning about him. But back to the book review:

I like that Cahalan has a coherent approach to Abbey’s life here: the contradictory man, the public vs. private figure, the questions his life raises. Cahalan muses on these questions without authoritatively answering them, which is appropriate. These are questions without definitive answers. It is a sensitive biography, appears well-researched, and gave me just what I was looking for. I leave it thoughtful and curious about still more Abbey, but thoroughly satisfied (for now) in terms of biography. I recommend this work, and I still recommend all the Abbey you can find!

Rating: 7 women younger than the last.

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Edward Abbey on privacy

Posted on March 24, 2012 by pagesofjulia

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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musing on Edward Abbey

Posted on March 22, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward Abbey recently, as you know. I’m currently reading his Down the River, a collection of essays, as well as Cahalan’s biography, Edward Abbey: A Life, so I’m a little immersed. My fascination with him is recent, and I have a long way to go in studying him, but that’s the exciting thing about discovering an author you love, especially when that author was prolific enough to keep you busy for a while, which Abbey was. (I guess it would be even better if he were alive and still writing.) I’ve read only four (Down the River makes five) of his 25 books (I’m using this bibliography), and I’m already holding a second book about him, his friend Peacock’s memoir Walking It Off. It’s exciting to know there’s that much more to read by and about him. Heck, I haven’t read everything I want to read by and about Hemingway yet, and I’ve spent years studying him.

I’m contemplating why I’m so interested in him. I love his writing, of course. But there are other authors whose writing I admire whom I fail to get interested in as individuals. Authors of fiction often are able to stay separated from their work, of course, unless their fiction becomes very autobiographical – which was true of both Abbey and Hemingway. The fact that he writes nonfiction, and autobiographical fiction, makes Abbey the man play a significant role in my reading of him, obviously. And Abbey is fascinating because he’s sympathetic, yes – meaning I agree with many of his politics and values and emotional reactions to the world – but he’s also fascinating because he’s nuanced, complex, contradictory, and not 100% sympathetic. The most fascinating figures, to me, are those that we cannot wholeheartedly and completely endorse. Hemingway, Hefner, Harry Hughes (I haven’t read it yet, but one of my favorite library patrons has been raving about the apparently fascinating and weird biography of Hughes we have here), Lillian Hellman whose new biography by Alice Kessler-Harris I found so wonderful, and my oldest, best friend, are all complex personalities, very different from one another, but somehow similar in their contradictions.

Of course, the more I read about Abbey, the more I see how similar he is to my longtime favorite, Ernest Hemingway. They were married four and fives times, respectively. Hemingway left each of his first three wives for the next; the fourth he left in death. Abbey left wives 1, 2 and 4 for 2, 3 and 5; his third wife died, and he left the fifth in death. Both were serially unfaithful. Both authors were aware that they had a gift, struggled with their writing which they took very seriously, rewriting repeatedly, working very hard on their craft; and both struggled with some form of depression and angst in the process. As perhaps is evidenced by their plentiful relations with the opposite sex, both were very charismatic men. Their writing styles bear a resemblance, as do their outward projections of themselves as masculine, hearty, strong, skilled with their hands. The biggest difference, the one that glares off the page at me as I read Abbey’s biography (which I’m not finished with yet, so take me with salt!) is the circumstances of their deaths. According to Wikipedia – since I’m not jumping ahead in my book – Abbey died from “complications from surgery; he suffered four days of esophageal hemorrhaging, due to esophageal varices, a recurrent problem with one group of veins.” This is a far cry from Hemingway’s demise, from a self-inflicted double-barreled shotgun blast to the forehead. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be focused on a literary hero whose life, for all its tragedies, excludes the unique tragedy of suicide.

I’m very much enjoying getting immersed in the life of this prickly, unique, humorous and passionate man whose work I very much admire. And I’m struck by the fact that all those adjectives could apply to my first literary obsession, Papa. Who have you been stuck on lately, and why?

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