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20 Years Gone: Edward Abbey

Why Abbey Still Matters

By Ken Wright

As of this month, Edward Abbey has been gone for 20 years. Yet he's still remembered. His name is still recognized by both fans and non-fans. The monkey wrench still stands as the icon of rebellion in defense of the American West. And all but one of his books are still in print, even two decades after he stopped punching at a typewriter (for he never got around to using a computer) - a remarkable feat for any author any time.

But 20 years after his passing, and now nearly 1/10th of way through 21st century, one question begs to be answered: Does Edward Abbey still matter?

When I bring Abbey - in book form - into my college classes, I find today that even if many of my students haven't read him, most nonetheless recognize him. Most have heard of him from parents, and aunts and uncles, and other outdoorsy parental-age kin and family friends, like a legend passed down and tale told and retold around whatever serves as tribal campfires these days.

Most of those students, though, having grown up in the post reading-books-for-pleasure era, have not actually read Abbey themselves. Abbey's books, to most young adults, are long, tedious, printed-word texts were scribed decades before they were born, back in the murky, musty pre-Internet days of the '60s and '70s. Yet when those students finally do actually get through an Abbey book - since I use Abbey in my nonfiction writing classes, Desert Solitaire, or The Journey Home, or Down the River are my usual choices for that forced taste of Abbey - they, like, get it. Totally.

And for most of them, they say it's like nothing they've ever read.

One reason for students finding Abbey's essays so novel, of course, is that this generation coming of age now was raised in a far less textual literary environment than previous generations. The unignorable reality is that for many students today a long piece of writing is a blog post or Wikipedia entry. A newspaper article qualifies as a tome for the modern media user. And so to my students, the focus and perseverance required to plow through actual full books - especially when those books are full of mind-journey and brain-stretching essays - is like the proverbial trudging odyssey through something as arcane as The Iliad.

But as someone versed professionally and personally in both the book and online worlds of writing, I have come to believe that there's another reason for the novelty of Abbey-style essay writing: Because the nonfiction found in most popular publications today are all about journalism. Information. Data. Guides. Who, what, where, when, and how - but very little why.

Internet writing, of course, lends itself to this type of material - brief, punchy, timely, and to the point. Even most outdoor and environmental magazines, though, have culled the philosophical musing from their pages (this magazine stands as a notable exception) and instead offer up a fare of spare and functional news pieces or how-to guides. Good, useful stuff; but somehow tossed in this literary downsizing is the why to. Why get out there? Why fight for the out there? Why do we need to have some out there at all?

But Abbey taught us that we need the yin with the yang. "Anger and love, how feel one without the other?" he mused once. "Each implies the other." But where, I myself muse today, is the literature of celebration and joy that gives us the motivation behind the how-to-fight of journalism and the where-to-go of how-to guides? (Take it from someone who writes and tries to sell that stuff.)

Well, it's still there in Abbey's books, for one.

Even though Edward Abbey has been - in true Internet style - tagged as "environmental writer," his writing wasn't just environmental writing. Rather than so much about issues and places, his work articulated a whole-life philosophy. Or, more, a whole-living philosophy: Get out. Do. That is the point. Because that is who we are. Less about places, and more about place. Less about how and what to fight and enjoy, but more about why fight and enjoy at all.

"For a mere five thousand years," Abbey wrote in Down the River, "we have grubbed in the soil and laid brick upon brick to build the cities; but for a million years before that we lived the leisurely, free, and adventurous life of hunters and gatherers, warriors and tamers of horses. How can we pluck that deep root of feeling from the racial consciousness? Impossible."

The point, Abbey said over and over, is to live a life. To live well. And to do that, we need places to live well. Hence, his urging to get out, and his demand that we fight for places to get out. His life was a living experiment, and his books were lab reports.

And for a generation inspired by his words, that's what they endeavored to do. Seeking to find and feel and follow their own "deep roots."

Later, many of them had kids - following yet another deep root in our ancestral consciousness.

The kids of Abbey fans now coming of age in the West are the second generation of the seeds he planted and cultivated by his fans. And now, as I have and continue to see in my classes - and in my own home - those kids are starting to move out into the world.

Even if many of them haven't actually read Abbey themselves, unless under the duress of a class assignment, many of these 21st century Western kids are now themselves seeking and molding their own place-based lives. Different, perhaps, than Abbey's own life, or even the lives of their own parents - because that's what kids do ? for many they are place-based lives nonetheless.

So these second-generation Abbey-fan offspring can be seen at farmers markets, and in their buying locally in contempt for corporate blandness, and their struggling to live cheaply in lovely towns surrounded by grand landscapes while fighting the whoring of their towns for industrial tourism and marketed second-home so-called "lifestyles."

And you can find a lot of their own articulation of those ideas and experiences on the Internet - if those of us raised back in the reading-books-for-pleasure era are willing to take the time to look.

It's all very different from what we older folks might recognize from the West of the '60s or '70s or '80s - yet it's very familiar nonetheless. And if it's not exactly how Abbey described it, then that's the role of a teacher, and of parents, and of evolution - which, as Abbey knew, was the real revolution. To grow. To change. To adapt. To evolve.

Yet the deep root remains. It's different whos, whats, wheres, whens, and hows - but it's still Abbey's whys.

Ken Wright hacks his living in Durango. His latest book is The Monkey Wrench Dad: Dispatches from the backyard frontline. Learn more or contact him at monkeywrenchdad.com.

Saturday, February 14, 2009
at 1:31:34 PM

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Michael says:

Abbey will always matter if for no other reason than that he managed to articulate clearly this one sentiment: "We need wilderness because we are wild animals."

His point (increasingly lost as the world becomes more cyber) is that our species has evolved in wild places and that our societal and "civil" institutions are only a part--and perhaps the lesser part--of all that makes us human. Hardly any other contemporary writer addresses this point, and none does so as compellingly.

Nice piece, Ken.