By
Jessica Lee
"Resist Much. Obey Little." - Walt Whitman
A great man died March 14, 1989.
Twelve years ago next week, friends, family, UA colleagues and admirers gathered together at the Tucson Mountain Park, within Saguaro National Park, to say a final goodbye. If there has ever been a man who has loved the American Southwest enough to devote his entire life to defending and writing about it, it would be the late, great author Edward Abbey.
Some people want to read stories about how the West was won. Abbey wrote about how the West was (and still is) being lost.
At 17, Edward Abbey hitchhiked out West from his home in Pennsylvania. The glitter of the Rocky Mountains and the glare of the sun on sandstone struck a thorn in his heart. He permanently moved West in 1944, never to leave.
When he did leave one March day, it was to go to the desert where he breathed his last breath. He not only left a following, but a standard of Western etiquette that is still gripped and debated to this day.
Through his prowess as a writer, Abbey countered the American ideology - progress was not always better. He once declared, "I'm not a left-wing, nor right-wing, nor an outlaw - just a genuine rebel, a real trouble-maker, who simply does not believe in the modern industrial way of life."
His first huge literary success was the publication of "The Monkey Wrench Gang," a fictitious story about a group of four who traveled around Northern Arizona destroying man-made eyesores as a way of creating beauty.
They chopped down billboards. They put spikes into trees. They sabotaged bulldozers (just like the ones littering the UA campus). Their ultimate plan was to blow up Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. Of course, the plots the gang tackled were make-believe. The book was full of ideas Abbey only wished he could do.
It was Abbey who coined the phrase "eco-terrorism," and rightfully sparked an environmental movement of ecological sabotage. Yet, he despised being labeled an environmental freak. But, he said, "compared to titles such as lawyer, doctor and senator, it ain't a bad one to have."
Perhaps his finest novel is "Desert Solitaire," a collection of essays inspired from his days when he worked as a park ranger at Arches National Park. In the introduction he scribbled down a few words of caution:
"Do not jump into your automobiles next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place, you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
Life eventually led Abbey to the UA Creative Writing Program in the fall of 1987 where he taught graduate-level classes and workshops.
UA Professor Bob Houston was the acting director of the program in 1987 and developed a close friendship with Abbey. Houston remembers his "tremendous sense of irony, his wry sense of humor and his love for being controversial and stirring things up."
Despite what Abbey thought of the UA or the university system, Houston stressed that he "cared deeply for all of his students and colleagues. And that he had a tremendous respect for all writers."
For one thing, Abbey-ology is not fading in the Arizona sunset. His books and novels are still the torch that are used to light the dim and grim future of "progress" in the West.
We must honor his memory. Let the anniversary of his death be a call to us to dust off our copies of "The Monkey Wrench Gang." It is time to sneak around in the darkness, question authority, love the land, and set the developers straight.
Abbey did what he could.
Now it is our turn.
Dedicated to Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
