Abbey's picnic: no food, no water, no car—another good day in the desert for a celebrated author

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Ingrid Eisenstadter

Edwarf Abbey was one of the America's great wilderness advocates. Let's keep things the way they were, he was fond of saying. He was also a writer. (If asked, he called himself an "arthur.") Born in 1927 an Appalachian hillbilly, he came into the world on the cusp of the Great Depression. He grew up to establish himself as a cranky misanthrope, promiscuous misogynist, and brilliant nature writer with a lightning wit.

Abbey is best known for two books, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness and The Monkey Wrench Gang. The former is an essay collection about the lonely beauty of southwestern deserts, and the latter is a novel--a rowdy, Luddite comedy about cutting down highway billboards, blowing up dams, and pouring Karo Syrup into the gas tanks of earthmoving machines to, well, prevent them from moving earth. It's a book about throwing beer cans out of car windows. "Beer cans are beautiful," Abbey maintained. "It's the highway that's ugly."

Both books have been continuously in print since they were first published a few decades ago, and the action-packed Monkey Wrench Gang has been licensed to movie producers much of that time. The book has never completed the trip to the big screen, apparently because the same film studios that fearlessly produce entertainment about the destruction of people are afraid of a movie about the destruction of property. That's illegal.

Abbey died at 62, in 1989, just before the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. That was lucky for Exxon, but unlucky for wilderness, which lost a good friend. So did I. Had Ed lived, this year would have marked the occasion of his 75th birthday. Here's a story that happened closer to his 45th, when he was writing The Monkey Wrench Gang, a time when we had cast our lot together.

Still sometimes today people ask me if we really lived the lives described in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and I confess, no, we did not. And we never will again.

About this time of year, almost 30 years ago, Ed and I were laboring through the exurbs of Ajo, in the south of Arizona. We were driving on a miserable, unpaved. backcountry road in an old VW van that he had recently purchased from some dope-smoking longhairs. There were, of course, paved roads to Ajo, but Ed had taken the scenic route, as usual. He had the gas pedal to the floor on this javelina trail, and we were doing 15, maybe 18 miles per hour because of an imperceptible incline (ah, the VW van). It was not scenic. Just the lamentable, searing desert and us. I was hungry, hot, annoyed. I was thirst.

"I'm thirst," I said.

"Have some water."

"You brought water?"

"No. You?"

"No."

He thought for a while and said, "I'm thirsty, too."

Silence.

Anger.

"I've told you a thousand times not to go into the desert without water," he said.

"Well, had you told me we were going to go this way, why, I suppose I would have brought some water," I said, eventually adding, "and food."

"What? No food?"

"No. No food. Nothing to eat."

"I'm hungry," Ed said.

Now we just ignored each other. Ed was concentrating on staying on the road and, as nothing really distinguished this particular road from anything to the left or right of it, staying on it was not easy. As for me, I was concentrating on the bleak horizon shimmering in little waves of heat, the only thing in sight that was moving.

Everything we owned was in the back of the van, as usual. Whenever Ed heard about a house that had fewer neighbors than ours, or more property, or a bigger refrigerator, we moved there, as we were doing this day. It wasn't very hard to move because we didn't own very much: some clothes, one of which was a tie; a typewriter (manual); a sewing machine (treadle); some pots purchased at J.C. Penney in St. George largely as a means of cashing an unemployment check; an ice chest; books maps tools; a bottle of wine; and some money, not much. As usual.

We spoke only intermittently in the oppressive heat, because as soon as we opened our mouths the desert sucked the moisture out of us, and we were running low already. When our sparse conversation lapsed entirely, the only sound we could hear was the low-slung van waging battle with the rock-strewn road. Kerchunk. Kerchunk.

Looking across the exsiccated wasteland, I explained again to Ed that I was sick of the desert and longed for the mind-numbing humidity of home, Bronx, New York.

"How's about a trip East?" I asked.

"No," he replied uncomplicatedly, and began to point out the sights. Of course, there were no sights by anyone's standards but his, so I ignored him.

Kerchunk. Kerchunk. I glanced at the speedometer. Ten miles per hour.

"Can't you get this crate to go any faster?" I asked.

"I've got the pedal on the floor, fer chrissake. What do you want me to do? Push?"

"I'm thirsty," I said.

"Well, you should have brought some water. That was stupid."

"You're the one who's stupid."

"No, you."

"You."

By now I was aware that the rhythmic pitching of the van was corresponding not to our hitting rocks in the road, but to the sound of the engine. Kerchunk. Kerchunk. It was growing louder.