Revenge of the Saguaro. Tom Miller
him a hundred-mile view in all directions. In addition to living essentials, the glass-enclosed lookout perch, which resembled nothing so much as a prison guard tower in a World War II movie, contained the tools of his trade: an Osborne fire scanner, detailed terrain maps, an intercom linking him with other lookouts, binoculars, and gauges to measure rain, temperature, and humidity. On occasion he saw elk in the meadow west near the Peterson Ranch; whitetail deer were common sights east toward the Murphy Ranch. More than once he spotted black bear at the bottom of his tower. In the upper reaches of Aztec Peak, he could pick wild blackberries along a two-mile mountaintop trail, which has since been officially christened Abbey’s Way. Like his writing, it has switchbacks and meadowland.
His workday four months of the year went something like this: Up with the sun at about five o’clock, down the 52 stairs to the outhouse and to shower—a bucket of cold water over the head—a run with his black Lab, Ellie, then back upstairs to intermittently play the flute, read, and sit and think. During what he called office hours—7 a.m. to 6 p.m.—he sat in a high wooden swivel chair in the southeast corner of the room, jotting in his journal. He listened to jazz, classical music, and Willie Nelson with one ear while the short-wave radio sputtered into the other. He was a man at peace. When the peace got too dreary, he walked to the other end of the room to pick up his binoculars and venture out onto the catwalk surrounding his home. He peered intently into the woods in all directions and returned inside, muttering. “Dammit, still haven’t seen any raging forest fires. What a bore.” He watched a peregrine falcon fly by at eye level, then started up in his journal once again.
On this particular day at Aztec Peak, Abbey could see foul air some 30 miles from the lookout tower. He radioed a co-worker: “Signal Peak, this is Aztec. I’m seeing an incredible amount of smog out your way. Where’s it all coming from?” They agreed it came from Phoenix. Abbey appreciated the work he had carved out for himself. Jobs like this allowed him to buy time and, in lean years, food. In 1978, he sucked on his pipe and looked for puffs of smoke in the distance for $3.50 an hour. “I’ve got a job that requires very little intelligence. The waiting list is very long.”
If backpackers or other strangers ventured near the mountaintop, he would lock the outhouse—“so I won’t have to clean up after them”—and shut the trap door separating the uppermost flight of stairs from the catwalk encircling his room. He was by himself at the top of the mountain and generally preferred not to have uninvited guests climb up to his home to take in the magnificent view. An Esquire photo of Robert Redford camping along Utah’s Outlaw Trail in snow-white cowboy boots provoked him to laughter; a National Geographic article about a woman’s trans-Australia journey brought muttered jealousy. “I have no use for natural photography. I like photographs of places, animals, and people for history and documentation. But rivers and mountains and flowers—there’s no use for it. I can’t stand the stuff.” I mentioned to Abbey that once shortly after I returned from a trip to northern New Mexico, still radiating from the glory of the Sangre de Cristo range, I could finally grasp how some people get religion. “You don’t understand,” he insisted, “those mountains, that land—you don’t get religion from them. They are religion.”
His best writing illuminated that theology. If his works have a unifying theme, it is a simple, familiar one: Nature—the land beyond the land we know—battles capitalism, unrestricted access, industrial tourism, and rank abuse. You win some, you lose some. A “Jeffersonian anarchist” (his own label), Abbey described himself in a magazine piece as “beer-bellied, broken-nosed, overweight, shakily put together, with a bad knee [skiing accident].” He was grizzly and whimsical, well-read and inquisitive, drawing irony from a position he cheerfully conceded somewhat elitist. He bewildered his occasional college lecture audiences by spouting poetic pornography and bawdy environmentalism. It came as no surprise when the network producers reported back that Abbey was too unpredictable to consider for a national news feature. He could be a violent and offensive writer.
At the end of a rigorous day of vainly searching for forest fires, playing his flute, and writing, Abbey radioed in his final weather report. “I like that sunset,” he said as he clicked off the two-way. “It’s sinister-looking. Almost grim.” His life was marked by writing, river-running, contemplation, and mountaineering through the backlands—and even this, he feared, was too ritualistic. “I must do some traveling. I’ve been hiding out in the desert. I’ve got to get out and see the world again. I haven’t planned to do that since I lived in Hoboken.” The night I spent with him was just brisk enough to warrant a light blanket and, as 360-degree lightning provided a silent and constant obbligato, I slept in Abbey’s summertime studio as soundly as I have ever have slept in my life.
Seclusion such as this inspired Abbey’s celebrated 1968 work, Desert Solitaire, a powerful and sensitive narration of a year in the Utah and Arizona wilderness. The book presaged the environmental movement, hence it is clear of all the claptrap that has bogged down much of the literature of ecology since then. It expresses a pure and occasionally lusty passion directed at the land, its users and abusers. And it thrust upon him a pack of loyal followers, devotees who created the demand for his lyrical and self-deprecating writing.
“I am slightly uncomfortable in this role,” he admitted when pressed. “I’m not a ‘naturalist leader’ or any other kind. I’m a writer. I was writing about all this before it was popular, and I probably will when it’s no longer topical. I don’t want to write about the environment forever, but I don’t know how long it will be a subject everyone wants to read.” He gestured to a recent issue of Outside magazine. “Besides, when someone is willing to pay me a thousand dollars to write about why a road shouldn’t be paved into a national park, it’s hard to resist. Eventually I’d like to settle down and do novels. I really consider myself more a writer than an environmentalist.” There was a thoughtful pause, then a sheepish grin. “Well, I guess I am an environmentalist. There’s really no way around that.”
Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania, when Calvin Coolidge was still president. While slightly older friends were off fighting World War II, 17-year-old Ed Abbey took off by thumb, bus, and rail to see what lay far beyond the Alleghenies, to satisfy “that westering urge.” His introduction to the Southwest was an arrest for vagrancy in Flagstaff, Arizona, a city that remained an occasional foil for his literary conceits. Except for a two-year stint in the army and a couple of years as a welfare worker in New Jersey, Abbey made the West his permanent home, sometimes wandering away, always returning. The National Park Service and the United States Forest Service employed him sporadically for more than 20 years. During his last decade, he taught nonfiction writing and juggled a schedule of traveling, further wilderness exploration, and writing. One novel that he wrote atop Aztec Peak was set in post-industrial Phoenix. The city had been largely abandoned and civil war was raging: “simple anarchists and farmers” on one side, the military and reconstructionists on the other. The book followed the same theme developed in his other works, notably The Monkey Wrench Gang, his most popular, in which a merry band of ecoteurs plots to destroy Glen Canyon Dam. The construction of this dam along the Colorado River of Utah and Arizona created artificial Lake Powell, forever drowning some of the most spectacular and inaccessible canyon land in the country, a wilderness region dear to Abbey’s heart and typewriter. In The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1976, environmental absolutists down billboards, sabotage earthmoving equipment, and lay elaborate plans to destroy the dam itself, restoring the Colorado River and Glen Canyon to their natural state. Few could rationally argue with that goal.
Eco-raiding was a skill not foreign to Abbey, and one that he wrote about with the leer of the sensualist. “I like civil disorder and natural disaster,” he said one day, and we toasted public uproar and organic catastrophes over a hamburger lunch. “That’s why I like storms, earthquakes, and mail strikes. It breaks things up; there is temporary disarray. Anything to disrupt the order. The Monkey Wrench Gang got people going. I’d get letters from people endorsing the idea of blowing up Glen Canyon Dam, asking how they could help. The dangerous ones would enclose detailed diagrams of just how to do it, complete with sketches telling me where to place the dynamite. They’d want to meet at clandestine sites to make plans.” About all the brouhaha that book inspired, he remarked, “What’s that Waylon Jennings line—‘Don’t you think