Why have I never heard of Edward Abby?

I’m ​always pleased to discover a writer I’ve overlooked. How did Edward Abbey manage fly under my radar?  Environmentalist, anarchist, philosopher, renegade poet. His first book Desert Solitaire, an ode to Arches National Park, where Abby was a park ranger for a number of seasons, had me hooked.

I spent several happy weeks on the trail of his other works. Dessert Solitaire, by far my favourite, is a love letter to the wide spaces of southeastern Utah. It is also lament against the encroachment of industrial tourism. Chiselled in between the lean and lovely prose are pithy observations about corporate America that could have been written today. The fact that he was writing in the 60s, 70s and 80s—Abbey was born in 1927 and died in 1989—makes his writing seem prescient.

What really captured my attention is what he has to say about “mesa, canyon and plateau [where] the pacific desert lies in whiskey-coloured light and lilac dust." His job as a park warden gave him plenty of time to absorb the “stillness, solitude and space; an unobstructed view every day and every night of sun, sky, stars, clouds, mountains and canyons; a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate—though impossible to name—in the remote.” The enigma of the desert is something I have contemplated from my home in the grasslands of southern Saskatchewan.

Abbey was painfully aware of the limitations of experiencing the desert through human senses—man being exploitative and destructive in his—and wanted be part of what is not human, to overcome his anthropocentrism.  He writes: “In deep stillness, in a sombre solemn light, these beings stand, the fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence: how necessary.  I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief-like a whisper of wind—when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy , anxious, brooding consciousness of man.”

It is unsurprising that Abby chose to be buried in the desert in an unmarked place where he could become a part of it.

Abbey's backstory is fascinating. He was a prominent writer in the 80s, well-known for his environmental advocacy, particularly scathing of land use policies and clearly“anti-establishment.” Before exploring the American southwest he served as a military policemen in the U.S. army; studied philosophy at the University of New Mexico, and spent a year at Edinburgh University as a Fulbright scholar. His master’s thesis was on anarchism and the morality of violence. He asked, “To what extent is the current association between anarchism and violence warranted?”

Abby wrote eight works of fiction (several became movies) and a dozen non-fiction books. The Serpents of Paradise, a collection of essays and excerpts, roughly chronicles his lifetime of writing. From Pennsylvanian farm boy to anarchist, from naturalist to social critic.  He described himself as “a man of small needs, infinite desires and philosophic pretensions.”  He was sometimes criticized as a misanthrope—which he objected to (citing his hope for “man, the fool”). Clearly he never had much faith in humankind, in cities or human ambition.   “No matter in what nation I live I am certain I would find much to detest. All big social organizations are ugly, brutal, inhuman—prone to criminal acts which no man or community of men, on their own, would even think of. But just the same I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from hope. For me that’s patriotism.”

Antiwar, anti-God, anti-cattle industry, anti-immigration. The Monkey Wrench Gang, a work of fiction, describes a gang of idealists who undertake sabotaging road-building equipment. It’s hard to imagine, given the detail, that Abby didn’t take part in eco-terrorism himself. The FBI apparently had him on a watch list. Abbey hated road building, particularly roads that through his sacred desert spaces. He saw roads and the tyranny of the automobile as the beginning of the end of these hallowed places. "No more cars in national parks,” he wrote. “We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they too, are holy places.”  His suggestions on how to make parks accessible without roads is downright funny, but his intention is serious. Let these places be."

He loathed tourists, especially those dependent on cars and roads, and described the new park campgrounds as suburban villages: “elaborate house-trailers of quilted aluminium crowd upon gigantic camper trucks of Fibreglass and moulded plastic; through their windows you will see the blue glow of television sets and hear the studio laughter of Los Angeles.” His view of the damning of the Colorado, the flooding of the canyonlands, and sterility of Lake Powel, pulls no punches. On the American tendency to commodify nature and pander to the right, he wrote scathingly, “the voting bloc of Know Nothings, racially prejudiced, religiously bigoted, opposed alike to the graduated income tax, the United Nations, urban renewal, foreign aid, legislative reapportionment, public welfare, Medicare, and even free lunches for children.”

Yet as timely as these observations seem to me (especially in light of the political mayhem in the States) I began to understand why Abby has not remained in the public eye as a great environmentalist. The more I read more the full-dimensional man came into view and the more I understood why some of his views were problematic Why he was called sexist, racist, and a dangerous subversive.

His attitude towards women was definitely sexist.  To him, at best, women were pleasing ornaments (“at University of New Mexico I studied women”); at worst, objects to fulfil his basic needs. In a tale of a river expedition his only mention of the wife who accompanied him is that she was supposed to be the succour of his old age and he couldn't afford to lose her on the rapids. I suppose at one time this might have been deemed humourous. An excerpt from his novel, A Fool’s Progress, about his pursuit of a woman, the ethereal Claire, lapses into a sexual fantasy that is, frankly, as boring as it is demeaning.

His description of shooting caged rabbits (“though we ate them”) does not show him in a flattering light. He’s an advocate of the 2nd amendment of the American Constitution, the right to bear arms. I could get behind his disdain for the American pursuit of pecuniary happiness—“Business means America and America means business,” quoting from the U.S. Chamber of commerce, and even his lament about “the Sick Seventies" ("when even sex therapy and spiritual fulfilment are growth industries. (My cousin Gus, told me the other day, with barely subdued excitement, that he has nailed down the Transcendental Meditation franchise for Winkelman, Arizona)," but he progressively veered into red-neck territory.

 The Serpentines of Paradise reveals Abby’s downward trajectory into a hard-drinking radical.  As he grew old and more jaded, less joyful in his dismissals and complaints, his writing became didactic. We see him, sick and struggling, on a river trip in Alaska, out of his element and hungry to see “GRIZZ,” like one of the tourists he despises.  On another river trip, alone and at the end of his strength, at the confluence of the Colorado and the Green Rivers, he knew full well that each vigour-testing excursion may be his last.

He became bitter. In the last two or three essays in 1988 he harangued Mexican immigrants, the cattle industry, women’s fecundity and overpopulation— with barely suppressed violence. 

Maybe, I conceive, this is why I'd heard of Edward Abbey. 

I suspect my personal library has a good few writers that have not stood the test of time. Abbey was clearly at his best when he stayed in the desert. His descriptions of the canyonlands in fall colour, or the desert ranges, are sublime. “Blue hills prickly with cactus, agave, spiny shrubs and stinging nettles, mostly bare of any vegetation at all, scaled and plated with loose rock, the high ridges notched with points like a dragon’s backbone.”  He writes of walking out in the Badlands and seeing a single Indian paintbrush “lifting its cup of salmon-coloured, petallike bracts toward the sky. The paintbrush too is beautiful, with the especial and extraordinary beauty of wild and lonely things. Every desert flower shares that quality. Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could lie, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rock and shifting sands, any such creature—beast, rid or flower—testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent of all forms of life.  Including the human. Even in us.”

These are the desert lands I recognize. And while I'm not sure I'd have liked the man, there is much to commend in his writing, His sensitivity to the landscape and his drive to preserve it.  “What does the desert mean?” he asks, then answers, “It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we living things—men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge—we were a part of it all. That should be enough.”


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