Edward Abbey's Road

Edward Abbey has been dead 13 years and we still don't know what to make of him.

His fans and his foes alike are still arguing over Abbey's literary merits or lack of them, marveling at his singular personality, grumbling about his propensity to blur the line between fact and fiction and in general deconstructing him in hopes that his contradictory legacy can be squeezed into some category.

All this bickering has inspired a cottage industry of memoirists, biographers and hagiographers who have done their damndest to solve the riddle of Abbey. In 1994 James Bishop came out with "Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist: The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey." That same year, David Petersen saw fit to air much of Cactus Ed's dirty laundry in "Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey 1951-1989."

There have been a few other books along the way. But the first definitive biography appeared just last year; James Cahalan's "Edward Abbey: A Life," which did a superb if protracted job of researching Abbey's entire time on the planet and doggedly putting to rest some of the more spurious claims made about him.

The newest Abbey book is "Adventures With Ed: A Portrait of Abbey," a memoir by Abbey's great friend Jack Loeffler. Loeffler was one of the band of brothers who spirited Abbey's body away after his death in Oracle, Arizona, and buried him, wrapped in a sleeping bag, in an undisclosed spot in the desert thereby fulfilling Abbey's last wish -- to become fertilizer. Loeffler's book is a somewhat guy-centric chronicle, but it captures, perhaps more than any previous account, Abbey's spirit.

Abbey is probably best known for his 1975 novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang," a rollicking eco-adventure story in which dynamite and acetylene torches figure largely in the protagonists' efforts to defend a wilderness "cursed with a plague of diggers, drillers, borers, grubbers; of asphalt-spreaders, dam-builders, overgrazers, clear-cutters and strip-miners." Monkey Wrench was quickly adopted as the manifesto of radical environmentalists and is credited with inspiring the movement that became Earth First! (although Abbey never officially endorsed the group).

But Abbey was also an eloquent prose stylist whose literary celebration of the wildernesses and wastelands of the Southwest, where he lived for 42 of his 62 years, remains unmatched.

In one of his most famous books, the 1968 non-fiction chronicle "Desert Solitaire," Abbey dubbed the desert "a world of light. The air seems not clear like glass, but colored, a transparent, tinted medium, golden toward the sun, smoke-blue in the shadows. The colors come, it appears, not simply from the background, but are actually present in the air itself -- a vigintillion microscopic particles of dust reflecting the sky, the sand, the iron hills."

Desert Politics

I was captivated by these sentences when I first read them. I was 20 years old, living in Death Valley, and I had just befriended a desert denizen named George who had a tattered library containing many of Abbey's books. In his cabin, locked in a metal trunk, there was also a small arsenal of firearms.

George had come to the desert to wait for the revolution. He was prepared to wait a long time. When the industrial state finally collapsed, he told me, these weapons would come in handy and I had better learn to use them. I was fascinated by and a little wary of George's anarchist politics, but in sparely populated regions, I figured, you couldn't be too picky about your friends.

One day George and I hiked deep into the desert in search of the grave of Jean LeMoigne, a pioneer who had expired in the area a century ago and by all accounts was buried out there somewhere. The sun was scorching hot. When we stopped to rest, George took his copy of "Desert Solitaire" out of his knapsack and read aloud: