Requiem for an Honest Man

He was an easy guy to know because fortunately there were no big moments. And he wasn’t the guy you imagined from reading his books. A while back, we met in this Mexican joint. Marc Gaede, a friend of mine, was in from Los Angeles hoping to entice Ed Abbey into writing a preface for his next picture book, and he’d brought huge prints of the West as the bait. Over the phone, Abbey had been putting Gaede off--no, by God, he didn’t want to be photographed. In person, he was, as usual, very soft-spoken and almost shy--except when he laid down his order for a platter of good greasy eggs and some pig meat on the side. Things were creeping along--Marc would set a print on a chair and Ed would mumble uh-huh--until the talk spun off into the technical aspects of monkeywrenching. It seems Gaede in an earlier incarnation had once wielded a righteous chainsaw in his own highway beautification program. Abbey began to drink in all the details, the American novelist busy stealing yet another life. Sure, he said, like he’d discovered a long-lost friend, he’d write the preface.

Then Abbey squared off before a small mountain of his books Marc had brought and autographed them for Gaede’s kids. That done, Abbey insisted on showing off his new joy, an old red Cadillac convertible that looked like it had been pre-owned by a pimp. I said, “Christ, Ed, you’ve got no shame.” His face brightened at such a wonderful thought.

I had lunch with him a week or so before he died at an Abbey kind of place--the air rich with the scent of seared red meat, the tables dotted with coeds. As usual, he admonished me to “get out of that silly magazine” (a city rag where I toiled at capturing the Angst of the city’s overfed and overpaid), and to get back into the desert with a pack on my back. And then he shoved forward a pile of books I must read--he always showed up with books he wanted to share. He spoke softly and with a slight smile on his face. The enemy of every government on Earth, the bogeyman of squads of developers, a man seemingly crazed with saving every scrap of wild ground--well, the same guy laughed a lot, and seemed to coast through the day fascinated and amused by the absurdity of life, including his own. He was 20 years older than I, but whenever I was around him, I was absolutely convinced that he was younger than I ever could be. I’d get almost furious because he seemed to be having more fun than I was.

This time lunch was about a novel--not one he’d written (he never seemed to talk about his own work) but one by some guy in Maryland named Bruce Duffy, a thick book entitled “The World as I Found It.” He pushed it eagerly toward me and explained it was about philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and the Tong wars of early logical positivism. I allowed that it all sounded as exciting as having my teeth drilled, but he would have none of my objections. By God, he’d written the author a fan letter, and I must read the book. And I did, and Ed Abbey was right.

He was not a simple person to consider. He believed the population had to be drastically reduced, yet fathered five kids. He was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., a onetime Army MP, a man who advocated destroying bulldozers to save land, tossed his beer cans out the truck window, and was addicted to classical music. He never made a lot of money, he gave 10% of his income to enviromental causes, and for years and years he scraped along with part-time jobs and kept writing and writing. He hardly seemed to raise his voice but had logical, coherent, fierce opinions. He had an anarchist’s contempt for government and was like a distillate of whatever the word American means.

And he could write better than any other man or woman I have ever known.

Many have pointed out these traits, and others, as contradictions. They were not. They were Edward Abbey, a bundle of appetites, ideas and delights. Before the last local mayoral election he called me up and we had lunch. Ed Abbey had decided to run for mayor--not grunt through a real campaign, but declare for the office, and debate the various pawns of the business community running for the job. We were sitting down over a plate of machaca when I broke the bad news to him. I said, “Ed, you don’t live in the city, you live in the county.” He seemed kind of indignant that such a requirement existed and could stop him from his appointed rounds.

The first time I met him I was out at his house to interview a guest of his for the local paper. I was leery, kind of like I was disturbing a national monument. So I tapped timidly on the door. He opened it up, introduced himself, and instantly thrust a copy of my first book into my hands--a text that had fallen dead from press and taken almost 10 years to sell 2,000 copies. He asked if I would autograph it and went on and on about its wonders. So he may have had pretty bad literary taste, but he was one of the kindest men I have ever known.

We became friends. And what we did was, well, we talked about books and ideas, mainly. I don’t think I ever spent 10 minutes kicking around environmental issues with him--I guess they were simply a given. He worked very hard at his writing. An Abbey draft was blitzkrieged with crossed-out words, with clauses and sentences moved, and had the general appearance of a bed of writhing serpents. Of course, it read like he was talking to you, like he had just dashed it off. He wrote so well that a lot of people did not appreciate the craft in his work--you can crack his books open almost anywhere and just start reading out loud. But if you start looking closely, you’ll find he makes every word count, every sentence, every paragrpah. The stuff’s as tight as the head of a drum.

Of course, what stopped people like myself in their tracks was not simply his style, it was his mind. He wasn’t just an entertainer, he had ideas to sell, and for decades he explored his ideas, refined them, and forced us to snap awake and pay attention. Ed Abbey invented the Southwest we live in. He made us look at it, and when we looked up again we suddenly saw it through his eyes and sensed what he sensed--we were killing the last good place. His words were driven by a moral energy, a biting tongue, and, thank God, by an abundant sense of humor, It’s pretty hard to read him without laughing.

And he was radical. Want to save the National Parks? Get the stinking cars out. Want to keep Arizona beautiful and healthy? Let’s make half of it a wilderness. Want to bring the Colorado River back to life? Let’s blow up Glen Canyon Dam. There are damn near 20 books. Read them and see. I suppose his reputation will now fall into the claws of the Visigoths of the English departments, and I don’t know what they’ll make of him. But here’s what I think: When I’m dead and dust, people will still be reading Edward Abbey. Because the stuff he wrote is alive.

It’s always dangerous to quote Abbey because he tends to blow one’s own words off the page, but on this writing business, I’ll let him have his say:

“That’s all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not. I believe that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays and novels--in the long run--make a difference. If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s work is of no more importance than the barking of village dogs at night. The hack writer, the temporizer, the toady, and the sycophant, the journalistic courtier (and what is a courtier but a male courtesan?), all those in the word trade who simply go with the flow, who never oppose the rich and powerful, are not better in my view than Solzhenitsyn’s village dogs. The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.” (From “A Writer’s Credo,” in “One Life at a Time, Please” (Henry Holt).

The morning he died, his wife Clarke called me and told me, and I felt like a giant hole had been punched in the mind of the Southwest, a kind of new, chilling void. And I sensed Tucson and the region had slipped one more rachet and lost another piece of its dwindling soul. I realized I was going to be a little lonelier for the rest of my life. I don’t figure on being lucky enough to know another Ed Abbey.

Then I remembered a letter he wrote to the newspapers--he seemed hardly able to get through a day without firing off a broadside to some daily or magazine. He suggested that a suitable memorial should be created for a leading local developer. He wanted to name the new sewage plant after him. Neither newspaper would publish the letter.

The last time I talked to him, he told me how he’d written an essay a year or so ago in which he’d noted that nobody in his family ever died. And then, suddenly, his brother had died from cancer, his mother had been run over and killed by a truck. He looked up at me with a mad twinkle in his eyes.

I said, “Maybe you ought to print a retraction.”

God, I’m going to miss him. Who in the hell is going to keep us honest? The guy we counted on, well, he moved on.