His preferred immortality
THE SAND SUCKS ME IN to my knees where I step, my boots dropping deeply into some kangaroo rat's living room. The scent of blooming primrose and verbena burdens an evening breeze, rose-sweet and heady, a contradiction in this desert place where El Camino del Diablo -- the Devil's Highway -- slashes across the underbelly of Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.
After a half-mile trek, I sit on a heaving dune with the skeletal Sierra Pinta to my back and a tide of Tyrian-dyed verbena surging at my feet. To the south, the twin shark's teeth of Mexico's Pinacate peaks gnaw the horizon.
Somewhere out here is the grave of Edward Abbey.
It's not like he doesn't have company. Unmarked graves punctuate this country, their heaped-up cairns of stones guiding travelers into a desert that swallows them whole.
There's one difference, however, between Abbey's grave and all the others: Abbey chose this place.
Few people know the exact location. He was 62 when, after four days of esophageal hemorrhaging, he died at home on March 14, 1989. Afterward, his wife and friends carried him to a place where he could rest without morticians and formaldehyde. Instead of a coffin and funeral parlor, he wanted his body zipped inside his sleeping bag, hauled to his grave in the back of a pickup truck, and buried quickly. He said: "If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture -- that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves."
Even facing death, Abbey was an optimist. "Despair," he wrote, "leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits." He believed in people, that we could set aside self-centeredness and the pursuit of growth for its own sake. That we could learn to care for each other first and as a result learn to care for the land.
Abbey had the right spirit, even among all his contradictions and character flaws. He understood nature's raw penetration. It was his only religion.
A dune off the Devil's Highway offers a comfortable place to rest away from my truck.
Turkey vultures ride a thermal toward the Sierra Pinta. The vulture, which some people say created the land with the touch of its wings, seems to be Abbey's totem animal. It was during his tenure as a ranger in Arches National Park that he began to see himself as a vulture: a "redheaded, foul-breathed eater of carrion, maintainer of desert cleanliness, a fully grown gadfly, by gawd, easier to see, easier to shoot down," according to his friend Jack Loeffler.
