Adventures with Ed

A Portrait of Abbey

Jack Loeffler

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780826323897
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

No writer has had a greater influence on the American West than Edward Abbey (1927-89), author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction. This long-awaited biographical memoir by one of Abbey's closest friends is a tribute to the gadfly anarchist who popularized environmental activism in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and articulated the spirit of the arid West in Desert Solitaire and scores of other essays and articles. In the course of a twenty-year friendship Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler shared hundreds of campfires, hiked thousands of miles, and talked endlessly about the meaning of life. To read Loeffler's account of his best pal's life and work is to join in their friendship.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Abbey came west to attend the University of New Mexico on the G.I. Bill. His natural inclination toward anarchism led him to study philosophy, but after earning an M.A. he rejected academic life and worked off and on for years as a backcountry ranger and fire lookout around the Southwest. His 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy launched his literary career, and by the 1970s he was recognized as an important, uniquely American voice. Abbey used his talents to protest against the mining and development of the American West. By the time of his death he had become an idol to environmentalists, writers, and free spirits all over the West.

"Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler were like Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Loeffler delivers his friend, warts and all on a platter full of reverence and irreverence and carefully researched factual information, interspersed with hearty laughter and much serious consideration of all life's Great Questions. Jack's story elucidates and demythifies the Abbey legend, giving us powerful flesh and blood instead."--John Nichols

PART I

Earth is clearly more delved in and built over than before. All its parts are trampled, familiar, full of trade. Placid farms overspread notorious deserts. Fields rebuff the forest. Herds fright off the beasts. The very sands are sown, rocks cultivated, swamps drained. Today’s towns outnumber yesterday’s huts. Islands are not lonely nor cliffs intimidating—everywhere are residences, peoples, governments, life. And this above all proves man’s drastic growth—we so clog the universe it can barely support us; as our needs increase, we struggle with each other for them, and nature fails us.

—Tertullian, A.D. 150?–220

Introduction

It is a snowy day in Santa Fe, a good day to begin this book I have been entrusted to write. This is a book about Edward Paul Abbey, my best friend of a lifetime, who honored friendship and truth above all else. He was born in Home, Pennsylvania, on January 29, 1927, and he died in the Sonoran Desert on March 14, 1989. Ed was not only a great friend; he was also a great man. There are many of us who know this to be true.

Living a creative self-directed life is like running a wild river; you don’t deny the current its due, but you work your own way through the rapids, camp where you will, explore side canyons that intrigue you, and relish the danger, heeding no higher authority than the truth. Few men have the strength of character to follow the truth no matter where it leads. Edward Abbey was such a man.

He was an adventurer in both deeds and ideas; he was a great naturalist, although he abhorred the epithet; he was a lover of women, married five times, and took dozens of paramours; he was a gifted writer with twenty-one books and scores of articles to his credit; he was an avid reader of literature and connoisseur of fine music; he placed profound value on friendship; he detested bureaucracy and regarded it as a disease fatal to the human spirit; he fearlessly defended both the right of the individual and the rights of other species to coexist equally within the biotic community; he melded anarchism and environmentalism into a system of thought that will continue to affect western culture for generations.

For more than two decades Abbey and I were compañeros. We shared hundreds of campfires and hiked thousands of miles together. Little by little, we revealed to each other the details that make a human lifetime. These revelations took no chronological form; rather, they occurred by association as happens in conversation. Ed was given to philosophical speculation, and we spent endless hours pondering any possible meaning to existence. Much of the time we kidded and razzed each other. When we disagreed, we mostly debated, rarely argued, and fought only a couple of times.

We created our own history, some of which appears in this book. It seems appropriate that it should, inasmuch as it reveals the way Edward Abbey was as a fellow human being, or at least the way he was when we were together.

On a few occasions in the 1980s Ed suggested that I be his “chronicler.” But this book is not so much a biography as a biographical memoir divided into two parts. In order to write it, I lived with Abbey’s journals and papers, reread all of his books, and spoke with friends, enemies, and relatives. I have relied greatly on my own memory of our myriad conversations and experiences. I revisited many of our old campsites and hiked along many of our old trails.

Every now and then, I visit Ed’s grave and pour him a beer while I drink one myself. The timbre of his voice is clear as a bell in my mind’s ear. Other books about Edward Abbey may reveal other facets of this extraordinary man. But I have done my level best to follow Ed’s own motto: “Follow the truth no matter where it leads.”

I first heard mention of Edward Abbey’s name in the summer of 1964. At that time I was living in an old forked-stick hogan at the base of Navajo Mountain, Utah, in the remotest part of the Navajo Reservation. It was fifty-seven miles of rough dirt road to the nearest pavement and a good hundred miles beyond that to the nearest town of any consequence. My friend John DePuy, an artist, had come to stay with me for a while. It was “Debris,” as we later called him, who had told me about Navajo Mountain in the first place. After recuperating in a naval hospital from wounds he received during the Korean War, DePuy had traveled to Navajo. He had apprenticed himself to a Navajo medicine man when the naval constabulary tracked him down and took him back to Annapolis. He was discharged with a modest pension.

During his visit to my hogan, DePuy and I hiked many miles through that windswept red desert broken up by the most beautiful canyons in the world. It was during one of our hikes that he said, “You and Abbey must meet.”

“Who’s Abbey, and why should we meet?”

“Abbey is a friend of mine. He’s a writer and a loner and he loves the desert and beautiful women,” said DePuy.

“He sounds like a good man to me, DePuy,” I responded, inventing an image of someone sitting in a high place, his back to a rock, a million empty miles before him, a long-legged, languorous naked lady lying spent by his side.

Time passed, and I negotiated with the U.S. Forest Service for a job as a fire lookout atop Carracas Mesa in northwestern New Mexico. There was no tower there and no cabin—just a two-acre expanse of uneven Navajo sandstone. I could just barely get my pickup truck to the top of “The Rock,” as my lookout was known, and with a little jockeying, I could even get it level. That is where I lived for months at a time. At night I could see no light other than starlight and moonlight. Except for an occasional airplane, or if the wind were just right, the occasional chug-a-chug of the distant narrow-gauge railway, I could hear no sound of human provenance. I was utterly at home in the high ponderosa with the mule deer, black bear, wild turkeys, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, bobcats, coyotes, elk, mountain lions, Stellar’s jays, l.b.j.’s (little brown jobbies), ground squirrels, porcupines, rock rattlesnakes, lizards, tarantulas, tarantula hawks, ticks, ants, and wild horses running side by side.

I ate beans, cornmeal cakes, onions, and venison jerky that I prepared myself from meat of deer I had hunted, and I hauled water out of the San Juan River, which meandered through its canyon eight miles to the north, a river still pure enough in those days to drink straight from the current without fear.

I’ve never been less lonely and in better health on all counts.

About once a month I’d drive sixty or so miles into Durango to buy supplies, quaff some beer, and visit the bookstore, for one of the great features of life as a fire lookout is the time it allows for reading. During a typical fire season I would read about sixty books.

One day a new book was featured at the bookstore. The name of the author caught my eye. Edward Abbey, the guy DePuy had told me about a few years back. I picked up the book and examined it. Hardback. Expensive at $5.95. There was a picture of a familiar-looking Abbey on the inside of the dust jacket. Bearded, smiling, and possibly intelligent. Alive. What the hell. I coughed up the money and bought Desert Solitaire. Support your local author.

When I finally got back to my fire lookout from Durango, it was too dark to read. Sometimes at night I would fire up a kerosene lamp and read in the back of my homemade camper, but more often I would lie on my back on the sandstone, which still held the heat from the sun, and watch the night sky while listening to distant owls or coyotes or wind passing through the high timber. I lived in a paradise little known by most of my species, in whom I took little interest.

The next morning, after I had scanned the canyons and ridgelines for wisps of smoke and listened to the sounds of the wild, I radioed the ranger to let him know that I was on the job and that the forest was safe—from fire at least. In those days I was naive enough to think that I was protecting the trees in the forest from fire for their own sake. I had yet to witness clear-cutting from timber sales or chaining down of trees to make way for cattle or gas well drillers.

I brewed up a fresh pot of coffee on my Coleman stove, rummaged through my purchases of the day before, and settled down under the lone pine tree that had somehow rooted itself to soil hidden in a crevasse in the sandstone. I looked at my new book. It had a good feel to it and a good smell. I experienced the excitement I always feel when I crack a new book full of promise. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness! I had spent many seasons in the wilderness. The title of this book thrilled me in a fashion that is difficult to express. I started reading, tentatively at first, then with increasing interest. Near the end of the first chapter, Abbey had ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• PART I
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• PART II
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Bibliographic Essay
• Acknowledgments
• Index