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One of The Last Things Ed Ever Wrote

Cactus Ed, a correspondent to the very end

By Andrew Gulliford

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ood old garrulous, iconoclastic, hard to pigeonhole Cactus Ed. What can you say about a man who lived in the West, had five wives, five children and wasn't even Mormon? How do you begin to write about a major environmental thinker who proudly proclaimed that he loved wilderness and routinely threw beer cans out his pickup window for roadside workers to retrieve? Stories abound about Abbey and most of them are partially true. As a writer, anarchist and lover of all things wild in the Southwest, Ed has no equal. The serious student of Edward Abbey can read many books by him, and there's a growing body of articles and books about him, but now a new genre of Western writing is evolving and it's all because of Ed. The genre is simply titled, "I Never Got to Meet Ed Abbey, but . . ."
Think of the possibilities. A new generation of writers can muse on when they first read Desert Solitare; where they were when they understood the slogan HAYDUKE LIVES!; what it's like to act out certain scenes in The Monkey Wrench Gang; or how to replicate the explicit eroticism in Black Sun. We all have Abbey stories; we couldn't live in the Southwest without paying homage to the grand old man who wrote, "It's not enough to live in the West, you have to defend it." So as a writer in the emerging genre of I "I Never Got to Meet Ed Abbey, but . . .", here's my story. And it really is true. I have one of the last things Ed Abbey wrote. It's a postcard he penned less than a month before he died in 1989.

Abbey's tour de force account of being a wilderness ranger in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, came out in 1968. I read Desert Solitare in college in 1973. At the time I enjoyed the book, but I can't say it had an immediate effect. A few years later I began teaching fourth grade in Silt, Colo., where we have a bumper sticker that reads SILT HAPPENS! I read more Abbey and one spring break a friend and I got in my 1968 VW camper bus and off we trucked to Canyonlands. The first night, at Dead Horse Point, we did fine. The second night, off the top of the rim on our way to the Colorado River and back, we completely lost camp. We misplaced our tents, food, sleeping bags, etc. We just assumed that the sunset going down and the moonlight coming up would enable us to find the side canyon where we had camped. No such luck. On a cold night in our thin flannel shirts, we huddled in the sand around a border collie. Abbey's lessons about knowing what you're doing in the wilderness took on new meaning, and in those years his concept of monkeywrenching began to resonate as the intermountain West endured interstate highway construction and the energy and oil shale boom of the 1970s and early 1980s.
Then Colorado Governor Dick Lamm called the West "a national sacrifice area." And in a raucous speech in 1976 for the Vail Symposium VI, Abbey urged westerners "wherever you go in your auto travels among the wonders of our Rocky Mountain West," always carry "a gallon or two of shellac with you, and a bucketful of fine clean sand." The shellac was intended "for the fuel tank and the sand for the crank-case" of offensive, interloping heavy construction equipment. Later I would learn that Abbey probably "field tested" this technique along what is now highway 95 west of Blanding, Utah. He hated to see his beloved desert country opened up by asphalt just so that huge lumbering motorhomes - he called them "stegosauruses on wheels" - could waddle across the West.
I next encountered Ed Abbey in an Oregon dairy barn. Above some rusty milk cans I saw this hand copied, fly-specked mantra that has electrified me ever since. Now as a college professor I routinely share it with eager students. I call it the Four Corners Hikers' Credo. Abbey called it his advice to frazzled environmentalists:

Edward Abbey's
Advice to Frazzled Environmentalists

Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the West; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still here.

So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the griz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely mysterious and awesome space.

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active, and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators, I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards.

Ah, Ed. He didn't live long enough. He died at the age of 62, but what a life. And what an inspiration for us all. Later, I tried Canyonlands National Park again and this time after a long day's hike I remembered where camp was. I'll never forget being in the perfect spot for the spring equinox and watching the sun set and the full moon rise in equal harmony. In my 20s, the virtues of the desert were becoming more apparent just as the crush of development was becoming more grotesque.
I left Silt to attend graduate school and after four miserable years in Ohio I made it back the the Southwest and Western New Mexico University. There in 1989 the WNMU campus got ready to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the National Wilderness Act; I was in charge of local arrangements. We planned a big event including the first screening of the film "The Wilderness Idea" and a symposium with various dignitaries including Luna Leopold, daughter of Aldo Leopold who in 1924 had set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of the Gila National Forest as the first federally designated wilderness area in the world. Planning and organizing all the festivities for the Wilderness Society would take a lot of personal time so I asked for a favor. I called the Wilderness Society's Santa Fe office and asked for the unlisted telephone numbers of two famous writers on their board of directors: Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner. And that's how the FBI taped a telephone conversation of mine. When you consorted with the likes of Ed Abbey, who knew what would happen?

At first the Wilderness Society said "no" to my request for phone numbers. Absolutely not, they said. "Fine," I said. "Have your own twenty-fifth anniversary party. Find someone else to work with the national forest, to liaison with U.S. Senator Bingaman's office, and to mail out hundreds of invitations." Finally, they relented. In those days when you had someone's unlisted telephone number they actually picked up the phone. With exquisite joy I called Wallace Stegner to pay my respects to him as the Dean of Western writers and Abbey's former writing professor at Stanford University. Then I called old Cactus Ed himself.
The last book that Ed wrote and saw all the way through production was The Fool's Progress published in 1988. Russell Martin, a native of Southwest Colorado, wrote in The New York Times Magazine "a kind of outrageous comedy is central to the thematic body of Abbey's work - a freewheeling willingness to be brash, satiric, excessive. His is a kind of gallow's humor poised against the mechanized diminishment of the human spirit." And this book was outrageous. The main character Henry Lightcap, a welfare worker, shoots his television set, quits his job, and sets out on a pilgrimage to his Appalachian roots. On the way out of town he writes, "Chuckholes here and there, everywhere. A sticker on the tailgate of the truck in front of me says, ?This Truck Pays $7,500 a Year in Road Taxes.' Not nearly enough, you road-hogging pavement-busting traffic-jamming swine." The Fool's Progress continues in true picaresque style. I had to ask Abbey if it was autobiographical. On the phone I thought I heard him smile. He demurred about answering my question, then I asked him if he'd come to Silver City to speak at our 25th wilderness anniversary. He said no, he wasn't feeling well, but he recommended a friend, Dave Foreman the founder of Earth First! and he gave me Dave's private telephone number. That's where the FBI sneaks in.
The next day I called Dave to ask him if he'd speak on campus and he agreed. The day after that the FBI, who had tapped his telephone, burst into his bedroom at dawn and hauled him off to jail for conspiracy and for blowing up high tension power lines in southern Arizona. The swashbuckling Wyoming defense attorney Gerry Spence got Foreman off, but a few fellow Earthfirsters did hard time because the organization had been infiltrated by an FBI informer. So thanks to Ed Abbey, the FBI listened in on one of my telephone conversations and may even have started a file on me, who knows?
When I called Ed I asked him one more important question. I asked if he'd do a blurb review for my book Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale which was my doctoral dissertation about the largest corporation in the world, Exxon, ripping off oil shale towns on Colorado's Western Slope. After Black Sunday in 1982, Exxon's corporate guillotine put 2,300 people out of work overnight. Abbey said to send him some information on the book. I did. He replied on a handwritten postcard that he would be happy to read the page proofs.
And then the S.O.B. had the audacity to die. The nerve of him. Former secretary of the interior Stuart Udall wrote that I had "taken a scalpel to Exxon" and I was eagerly awaiting a companion comment from old Ed, but he cashed in his chips. What a dastardly thing to do, and what an excuse. Imagine getting out of a promise by dying! Where was his sense of responsibility? He wrote me on February 25 and he died on March 14, 1989.

I still have the postcard (see here). I realize now how extraordinary it is that Ed Abbey would have even talked to me on the telephone much less written to me. He was very ill. He knew he was dying. He knew it when he was writing The Fool's Progress, which is his own elegy of sorts, and yet in his last few weeks he agreed to help a struggling young author equally angry at the corporate rape of the American West. Now as a college professor I do what I can to teach Abbey's values and to instill in a younger generation his love of the West. I teach his demand to "Resist much and obey little" and his admonition "Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter." On some college term papers I even stamp Ed's words "Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top." Ed always said he wanted to come back as a turkey vulture so he could float around in the desert skies and eat carrion. I think he got his wish.
A few years ago I was leading a Smithsonian tour in the new BLM Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and two eager beaver tourists, just off a flight from Chicago, took off too fast on the trail and disappeared. The other guide and I could not find them. The rest of the hikers became concerned because Canyons of the Ancients is 160,000 acres. One of the tourists said to me, "Do you think you'll find them?" And I said, "Oh, yes, we'll definitely find them." The hiker said, "How do you know?" I replied, "Look up." Four turkey vultures were riding the thermals in the morning light. "We'll find them," I reiterated, "I just don't know when." I looked up again and I swear one of those turkey vultures winked at me. I think it was Ed.

Andrew Gulliford is a Professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College where he teaches Environmental History and Wilderness in America. His book Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale won the 2003 Colorado Book Award in its revised second edition. After hosting the 25th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Dr. Gulliford received a "Take Pride in America National Award" from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the "National Individual Volunteer Award" from the U.S. Forest Service. He can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.