I’m loving spending a few weeks in the desert landscapes of Castle Valley, Utah, near Moab.
I love the raw, unfiltered desert, the solitude, and the wide open skies.
And the stars!
What I am starkly aware of is that the desert isn’t trying to please me or make me comfortable but if I can appreciate that and love it as it is, cactus and wind scorpions and all, I will open my eyes to its unrelenting beauty.
Castle Valley is a sparse community—houses sprinkled lightly throughout an otherwise unspoiled wilderness. Each humble house here has unobstructed views and exposure to the red rock cliffs, majestic monuments, and oppressive sun. Neighbors are few and far between and the people who come here appreciate this area’s primary resource: solitude.
I’ve been coming to the Southern Utah deserts since I was a kid but being gone from the desert for a few years and now coming back to it, I’m rediscovering my awe and fascination for this wondrous and uncompromising landscape.
When we venture into town (Moab—about a 40 min. drive), to go grocery shopping or pick up Elio from summer camp, we often walk down Main Street and peruse the shops. The touristy shops often display replicas of Native American artifacts, National Park kitsch, and, strangely, an inordinate amount of memorabilia depicting aliens and Bigfoot.
I gotta look up the aliens and Bigfoot thing cuz if either or both are hanging around these parts, that’s a party I don’t want to miss.
Something else you will see a lot of in most shops, restaurants, and even public buildings in Moab, is the copious references to Edward Abbey: dog-eared books, yellowed newspaper clippings, and faded photographs. If you don’t know him, many regarded him as a controversial writer and environmentalist who lived in, fought for, and wrote about this majestic part of the world between the 1950s–1980s. Ed Abbey is a Moab and Utah legend, as dry and prickly as the cactus lands he so vociferously fought for.
He literally wrote the book on living in and loving this land.
Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_Wrench_Gang
I think my favorite book of his is Desert Solitaire but perhaps his most popular book is The Monkey Wrench Gang, a fictional story about a band of ecologically minded and slightly anarchistic misfits.
Check out this cast: “Seldom Seen” Smith, a disaffected Mormon river guide; Doc Sarvis, an eccentric, rich, but savvy surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, a young Jewish feminist assistant; and George Hayduke, a wild Green Beret Vietnam vet. The Monkey Wrench Gang is a rag-tag posse that doesn’t always work as a perfect team. Though they’re not not SEAL Team Six, they are united in what they feel is their responsibility to attack the symbols of land development such as bulldozers and trains that are spoiling the land, befouling the air, and destroying the their precious environment in the American West.
Ed Abbey had a sense of humor that could be as dry as the desert sands he loved so much. When he died in 1989, Ed Abbey left a message for anyone interested in his final words:
“No comment.”
His burial wishes were to subvert the state laws around interment. He did not want to contaminate the earth by being embalmed. Instead of a coffin, he wished to be wrapped in an old sleeping bag. Instead of a hearse and graveyard, he requested to be transported in the back of an old pickup truck and driven by just a few close friends into the desert to be buried somewhere secret and in the wild. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," he said. [1]
He also requested, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He also requested “gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, … a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking."[1] [2]
No wonder Ed Abbey is such a legend!
Though I never met him, I somehow doubt that Ed Abbey would want to be a legend. Those who did know him have said as much.
Another author, poet, and environmentalist I love and admire is Wendell Berry who shares Abbey’s passion, conviction, and often grumpiness for defending the natural world. It’s no surprise that these two were not only peers—comrades in letters—but more importantly they were close friends.
Wendell Berry writes this stunning poem for his friend Edward Abbey. Notice the rhyming couplets which presents both a deep coupling of friendship between the two friends, a mutual coupling and awe of the beauties of the natural world, and a coupling of us with the natural world. To note is that Wendell Berry is a Kentuckian through and through and some of the rhymes work best when you don a Kentucky accent while reading. In fact, rhymes that function best in his Kentucky accent act to anchor the poem to a sense of place, a geography which informs the language and vice versa. Fitting for poem which stands as the testament to how words can marry us to the earth. And if we are to marry the earth through words, certainly Wendell Berry and Ed Abbey are among the world’s most sanctified and capable officiators of that union.
Edward Abbey’s Gone
The old oak wears new leaves.
It stands for many lives.
Within its veil of green
A singer sings unseen
Again the living come
To light, and we are home
And Edward Abbey’s gone.
I pass a cairn of stone
Two arm-lengths long and wide
Piled on the steep hillside
By plowmen years ago.
Now oaks and hickories grow
Where the steel coulter passed.
Where human striving ceased
The Sabbath of the trees
Returns and stands and is.
The leaves shake in the wind.
I think of that dead friend
Here where he never came
Except by thought and name;
I praise the joyous rage
That justified his page.
He would have liked this place
Where spring returns with solace
Of bloom in a dark time,
Larkspur and columbine.
The flute song of the thrush
Sounds in the underbrush.
From “This Day Collected and New Sabbaths Poems,” by Wendell Berry.
Like so many of Wendell Berry’s poems, this stops me in my tracks and bestows me a moment of presence to notice the miracles and simple beauty of the natural world. It also gives us a look at an intimate corner of his heart devoted to his friend Edward Abbey.
In addition to his writings about the natural world, extolling its virtues for being exactly the way it is, one of the things I admire most about Wendell Berry is his strong and well-measured convictions about the environment, race, and human dignity. I am in awe of his ability to defy convention, even if his thoughts and opinions go against those who might normally be considered his allies. He stands as his own person with unique opinions and thoughts regardless of others who wear the label of environmentalist.
Wendell Berry grants this same honor and respect of being his own person to Ed Abbey. Wendell Berry’s love for Ed Abbey is seasoned enough and grounded enough that he clearly and openly denies any mythic or legendary status of Edward Abbey. Rather, Wendell Berry celebrates Ed Abbey’s perfectly broken and complicated humanness.
From his essay, “A Few Words in Favor of Ed Abbey” by Wendell Berry (1985):
Reading through a sizable gathering of reviews of Edward Abbey's books, as I have lately done, one becomes increasingly aware of the extent to which this writer is seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side. The problem, evidently, is that he will not stay in line. No sooner has a label been stuck to his back by a somewhat hesitant well-wisher than he runs beneath a low limb and scrapes it off. To the consternation of the "committed" reviewer, he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable list of any other kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.
What I love about this text is the invitation to appreciate and love Edward Abbey for exactly who he was or is and not just for the legend we tend to invent of him.
To do otherwise runs the risk of turning him into a being as mythical and fantastical as aliens or Bigfoot.
I believe that the same invitation Wendell Berry gives to see the truth of Ed Abbey is also extended to each one of us: Defy labels. Don’t stay in line with an opinion because it’s popular. Be a “horse of another color.” Honor and celebrate your own perfectly broken humanness and take “some care to appreciate” it in others.
The same way I’m falling in love again with this landscape for exactly how it is, cactus and wind scorpions and all, I’m also choosing to understand and love Edward Abbey in the same way.
This also goes for anyone else I may encounter in this beautiful, complicated, and uncompromising landscape called humanity.
Including myself.
May we all learn to see the beauty in ourselves and each other as we learn what it means to be One.
Still, if ever these I see a large Squatch print in the mud or see an otherworldly saucer in the sky or even hear the sound of bagpipes peppered with gunfire, I'm grabbing some booze and heading toward the tumult.
Perhaps the token for admission to that party is a monkey wrench and the removal of all of our labels.
Mongillo, John F.; Booth, Bibi (2001). "Edward Abbey: (1927-1989)". Environmental activists. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-313-30884-0.
Quammen, David, "Bagpipes for Ed", Outside, April 1989