Desert rats, mountain men

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 2002

Adventures With Ed, A Portrait of Abbey by Jack Loeffler, University of New Mexico Press, $24.95. Edward Abbey: A Life by James M. Cahalan, University of Arizona Press, $27.95. Radical defense of wilderness was most famously celebrated in two Ed Abbey books, Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. Now two new biographies look for the roots of this maverick's sensibilities.

Early on, Abbey discovered his power to shock. In Adventures With Ed, Jack Loeffler relates a tale of Abbey's stint as student editor of the University of New Mexico's literary magazine, Thunderbird, where he "committed an act of literary heresy that people have never stopped talking about. He published an issue ... on the front cover of which was printed, `Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!' signed, Louisa May Alcott. The campus went wild. Ed wouldn't rescind the issue or apologize, and his tenure as editor was terminated." When he was a newspaper editor in Taos in 1959, Abbey, Loeffler, and two friends became a chainsaw gang. They started by hacking down 12 billboards north of Las Vegas, New Mexico--activities that became fodder for The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The prospect of the irretrievable loss of wilderness to profiteering prompted Abbey's greatest sorrow and anger. As he proclaimed in Abbey's Road, "Today, our technological-industrial social machine is trying to enslave the whole of Nature--put everything to work for the sake of human greed and human power. That, I think, is the ultimate evil of the modern age."

Loeffler makes us privy to an adventurous brotherhood, two friends who duked it out verbally and still remained close. "We became adept at sharing silence, even over the phone," Loeffler writes.

Both Loeffler and James Cahalan, in his Edward Abbey: A Life, recount Abbey's irresistible appeal to women, and the conflagrations it caused in four failed marriages. "There was something charismatic about Abbey," Loeffler writes, "not just to women but to his male friends too."

Whereas Loeffler provides firsthand, affectionate anecdotes, Cahalan's work is an academic accounting of Abbey's journals, letters, audio- and videotapes, public appearances, 21 books, and numerous magazine manuscripts. Cahalan interviewed Abbey's family members, former wives, girlfriends, and rangers Abbey had worked with at 16 national parks.

Cahalan plots, sometimes ploddingly, an entire lifetime, from Abbey's birth in Home, Pennsylvania, to his last years in Oracle, Arizona. Cahalan sees Abbey as a marketing maven, who combined savvy self-publicizing with true literary genius to cajole his readers int6 protecting the environment.

He speculates that Abbey's counter-culture-cowboy mystique may have been inherited, with the father passing on itinerant ways to his son. As the economy withered in the Great Depression, Abbey's dad, Paul, drove the family around Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the summer of 1931, selling nameplates and other items along the road to survive while the whole family camped in a tent. And it was the resourceful can-doism of his mother that fortified her son to move environmentalists and agendas.

Loeffler and Cahalan agree that Abbey adopted a "resist much, obey little" approach not for mere anarchy's sake, but to jolt people into sensing the urgency of protecting the wilderness. They also record some of Abbey's more alarming quirks, such as a habit of throwing out beer cans while driving. Such behavior was Abbey's. personal protest against building highways on pristine land to ferry sightseers into his beloved national parks.

Loeffler supports Abbey's contention that he did not see himself as a naturalist but strictly as a writer dedicated to preserving nature's beauty. That dedication was irrevocably confirmed by a mystical, pivotal experience in 1948 that changed Abbey forever. Abbey had hiked down alone into Havasu Canyon, a branch of the Grand Canyon. After five weeks he emerged and, Loeffler writes, "Abbey's soul adhered, once and for all, to the desert dust, the red rock, the pinon-juniper wood bark, the clear air, the wilderness of the American Southwest."

Loeffler says Abbey's credo was twofold, as articulated in One Life at a Time, Please First, for a writer to be true to his subject, no matter where the truth leads him. Second, to write clearly and succinctly, as in metaphorically, "clear as the desert air."

Both books afford a welcome and fuller understanding of this wilderness hero, exploring the contrast between a crude, rude exterior and a remarkably tender passion for the natural world.--Sunamita Lim

Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr Jr. by William Alsup, Yosemite Association, $24.95. In August 1933, when a prominent young lawyer named Walter A. Starr Jr. failed to show up after a solo trip to the mountains, his law partner went to the Sierra Club for help. Club president Francis Farquhar dropped everything to assemble a world-class rescue team. A day later he was combing the range in a two-seater airplane while handpicked alpinists were scouring the rocky ground near an abandoned tent on the east side of the Sierra. The climbers included the crusty old king of Sierra first ascents, Norman Clyde, and two youngsters who had just returned from a Sierra Club High Trip, Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson. All three would make indelible marks in mountaineering history.