In the early years of the Reagan era, I attended a PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers) union strike rally in Tucson, Arizona. I went not because I supported their cause (frankly, I wasn't interested), nor because I'm a great fan of unions (I'm not). I went solely because Tucson's most famous lefty of the day had been invited to speak -- Edward Abbey.

Abbey stood that summer evening on the bed of a flatbed trailer, speaking over the drone of the generators powering the lights and sound. His words flowed across a gravel parking lot; the brilliant Arizona sunset fading behind him as he hunched over a microphone. He read from a sheaf of lined notebook paper clutched in strong, gnarled-looking hands -- a short, powerfully-built man with unkempt hair and a tangled beard. His words fell, for the most part, on deaf ears; their mixture of defiance with anarchy and militance did not sit well with an uneasy crowd of former military men. I remember that when the moderator finally cut him short, he simply shuffled away and into the deepening night on the other side of the trailer.

When I moved to Tucson in 1979, I found myself suffering from a world-class case of culture shock. Imagine me, simple midwestern farm boy that I was, suddenly plunked down 2000 miles from home in the middle of a desert! I floundered that first year of graduate school, striving to adapt not only to a new scholastic environment, but to an entirely new ecology. I had grown up accustomed to soft waves of green grass, not an environment where every living thing wanted to poke holes in my ankles!

It was Edward Abbey who opened my eyes to the beauty that is the desert. It was Abbey who taught me that, unlike the gaudy magnificence of snow-capped mountains; or the ceaseless energy and the restless landscape of the sea; or even the calm, dusty cool of the forests; the desert is a world of small, subtle, beauty. It was in Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang that I first learned this lesson.

Never before had I encountered anyone who loved this barren, unforgiving land with such passion. The breadth of Abbey's devotion to this austere country was limitless; so unfettered that he believed he held a moral imperative to protect it from all who would despoil it. And The Monkey Wrench Gang was Abbey's means of sharing his devotion to the American Southwest with those who had never experienced its beauty or, who like me, dwelt uncaring within it.


A Fun Little Book

On its surface, The Monkey Wrench Gang is little more than the Robin Hood-esque tale of a merry little band of "eco-raiders." It details their antics as they gallivant about the Colorado Plateau wreaking havoc on anyone who would build a road or dam, drill a well, or dig a strip mine. The "gang" numbers only four: the slightly spooky ex-POW Vietnam veteran (George Hayduke), the delectable Ms from the liberal northeast sporting the requisite waist-length hair (Bonnie Abbzug), the world-weary surgeon with more money than he needs (Doc Sarvis), and the hawk-nosed jack Mormon polygamist (Seldom Seen Smith). As you'd expect from any counter-culture novel of the 1970s, the saga boasts the obligatory fornication, car chases, drug use, flatulence jokes, and running-dog-lackey-of-the-capitalist-pigs villains.

But that's only at the surface; deeper reading of his text lays bare Abbey's anguish on viewing the destruction of the sun-blasted land he adopted as his own Walden Pond. Abbey was never accused of being a lyrical writer. His prose was always much like the land he loved: dry; prickly; given not to grandiose beauty, but to at loveliness on a much smaller scale. Consider this paragraph from his opening chapter:

Far beyond the dam, the reservoir, the river and the bridge, the town of Page, the highway, the Indians, the people and their leaders stretches the rosy desert. Hot out there, under the fierce July sun -- the temperature at ground level must be close to 150 degrees Farenheit. All sensible creatures are shaded up or waiting out the day in cool burrows under the surface. No humans live in that pink wasteland. There is nothing to stay the eye from roving farther and farther, across league after league of rock and sand to the vertical facades of butte, mesa and plateau forming the skyline fifty miles away. Nothing grows out there but scattered clumps of blackbrush and cactus, with here and there a scrubby, twisted, anguished-looking juniper. And a little scurf pea, a little snakeweed. Nothing more. Nothing moves but one pale whirlwind, a tottering little tornado of dust which lurches into a stone pillar and collapses. Nothing observes the mishap but a vulture hovering on the thermals three thousand feet above.

Abbey eschewed flowery writing, preferring instead to strip language to its essentials much as he might have stripped his pack to the essentials for survival in his wilderness. No CD player, no GPS, no cell phone, no thermal underwear, no rose-scented foot cream -- he took only food and water, maps, a compass and some moleskin. It is the same in his writing: no polysyllabic paean to the beauty of his chosen land; only cold description of its barrenness and its loneliness, for these are the features he loved the most.


A Manual for Monkey-Wrenching

On a deeper level, down in those depths where it can worry at your psyche like a labrador retriever with a chew toy, Abbey's intrinsic anarchism is painted broadly through the text. Abbey didn't write a fun little novel with a pro-environmental message; instead he cleverly disguised a monkey-wrenching manual within the pages of some biting humor. Want to know how to start a bulldozer? It's a lot more complicated than starting a car, but Abbey's written step-by-step instructions. Need the formula and mixing instructions for thermite? As the Prego people might say, "It's in there." Need strategies for skulking about the wilderness at night, doing the deed, and getting away clean? Abbey's got the plans for you right here.

The Monkey Wrench Gang, perhaps more than any other writing, spawned the age of the eco-raider. Earth First! appeared early in the James Watt era, often leaving as their signature the message "Hayduke Lives!" or "Rudolf the Red Lives!" both direct references to the character of George Hayduke -- ex-Green Beret from Tucson, and the most militant of the gang (as an aside, I wore a t-shirt imprinted with the latter message the night I saw Abbey speak). Tree-spikers appeared in the forests of California and Colorado (spiking is never discussed in this book, by the way). The internal dialogue of the environmental movement is made plain in conversations between the militant Hayduke and his mates, as they pledge to do their work without harming anyone -- not even the polluters and developers. Even when the gang is being chased in a hail of bullets, they respond only by disabling their pursuers' vehicles. Although the political arguments about this issue were then and are still today stated in terms of pure black and white, it is obvious that Abbey knew there were many shades of gray.


The Land Itself

Crazy country, half of it perpendicular to the rest, much of it inaccessible even to a man on foot because so much of it consists of nothing but vertical walls. Seldom Seen Smith's country and the only country in which he feels comfortable, secure, at home.

A true autochthonic patriot, Smith swears allegiance to the land he knows, not to that swollen bulge of real estate, industry and swarming populations of displaced British Islanders, Europeans, and misplaced Africans known collectively as the United States; his loyalties phase out toward the borders of the Colorado Plateau.

Abbey spent decades living in the loneliest places in the country -- spending weeks without seeing another human face, spotting forest fires from atop giant lightning rods set on forested islands above the desert; rescuing misbegotten tourists from the back trails of national parks. The Colorado Plateau was, for him, the place where his soul found peace. He wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang in hopes of saving that special place from the rest of the world.

I hope it worked.

Recommended: Yes