Edward Abbey: Critic and Crusader

Strange to think of him now hiding out in the mysterious canyons of the Colorado Plateau like some solitary prospector from a B. Traven novel. Trim, leathery and artfully disheveled, complete with scraggly, unfashionable beard for more than 30 years, Edward Abbey presented himself as the literary watchdog of the arid American West, writing eight novels, dozens of travelogues and hundreds of essays, all aimed at the heart of the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned about in his surprisingly frank farewell address in 1961. Abbey's motto came from Walt Whitman--"resist much, obey little"--and he was delighted that everyone from the FBI to the Sierra Club derided him as a "Desert Anarchist." Blessed with a wicked sense of humor and penchant for pranksterism, Abbey, who died in 1989 at age 62, carefully cultivated his ever-changing role as a stubborn provocateur, be it in the guise of a river rat, a learned scholar, gun-toting curmudgeon or a committed ecologist, personas he shuffled at whim, the only apparent constant being his good-natured sarcasm. But he also was always a disciplined writer, even while playing the robust outdoorsman obsessed with stopping the pillage of the American West. "We can have wilderness without freedom," Abbey often said. "We can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness."

And he believed it. Throughout the Cold War era, no writer went further to defend the West's natural places from strip-mining, speed-logging, power plants, oil companies, concrete dams, bombing ranges and strip malls than the sardonic Edward Abbey. Saguaro cactus were sacred to Abbey, not utility poles. His entire adult life was devoted to stopping the "Californicating" of the Four Corners states he considered home--Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Abbey was labeled the "Thoreau of the West" by novelist Larry McMurtry in an article in the Washington Post, a squib that remains the best shorthand description of this unorthodox yet meticulous literary craftsman.

Abbey rejected out of hand the notion that he was a "nature writer" along the lines of John McPhee or Annie Dillard, even if the untamed wilderness did serve as his lifelong muse; instead he fancied himself an old-fashioned American moralist, a Menckenesque maverick who kowtowed to no one in his quest to expose others' treachery, hypocrisy and greed. It was the "moral duty" of a writer, Abbey insisted, to act as social critic of one's country and culture and as such to speak for the voiceless. And so he did, especially in his memorable 1975 jeremiad, "The Monkey Wrench Gang," with which he launched America's "eco-defense" movement and rattled the cages of both Big Industry and Big Government.

Abbey was born to the task he would set himself on Jan. 29, 1927, in Home, Pa. As an adolescent, he became disgusted with the big lumber companies' wanton destruction of the pristine Appalachian woodlands where he grew up hunting squirrels, collecting rocks and studying plants with the budding fervor of William Bartram, in what he called these "glens of mystery and shamanism." Abbey fantasized that he was James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo hiking the Adirondacks or Vachel Lindsay's Johnny Appleseed planting seeds in the Ohio River Valley. His father, Paul Revere Abbey, was a hardscrabble farmer and occasional coal miner who revered the radical leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, as they were popularly known, such as "Big Bill" Haywood and Joe Hill.

The entire Abbey clan, in fact, was steeped in American folklore of the Daniel Boone variety: a deep love of the untrammeled frontier and an obsessive mistrust of Washington, D.C. Young Edward inherited from his father an uncouth and ornery disposition to take on the establishment with relish, and head-on: "Sentiment without action," Abbey always said, "is the ruin of the soul."

In the summer of 1944, the 17-year-old left Pennsylvania to seek the America he had heard about in Woody Guthrie songs and Carl Sandburg poems. He hitchhiked to Seattle, tramped down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco, ventured inland to the redwood forests of Yosemite, then took boxcars through the San Joaquin Valley, making his meager keep picking fruit or working in canneries along the way. His hobo holiday of storybook adventure and intoxicating freedom lost its allure only once, when he was arrested for vagrancy in Flagstaff, Ariz., and tossed into a jail like the common drunkards there. It only added to a coming-of-age experience of which Jack London would have approved.

*