GUEST SHOT

An Essay & Review

by John Bancroft

Cactus Ed Rides Again

A version of this review appeared in The Arizona Daily Star in 1990, not long after novelist, essayist and polemicist Edward Abbey's death. Abbey was unjustly given short shrift by the critics when he was alive, and even today he is too little known by readers east of the Rio Grande. His masterpiece, Desert Solitaire, should be on every book lover's shelf, and those who have not taken the hell-for-leather ride with Hayduke & Company in The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! are in for an adrenalin-charged jolt of literary hilarity.

EDWARD ABBEY DIED AS HE HAD LIVED: on his own terms and just beyond the reach of duly constituted authority. No death certificate, no solemn ceremony over a casket open or closed, definitely no undertaker, no official forms or functionaries to mediate a free man's passing from life into . . . what? The Great Beyond (or back of it)? Coyote chow? Valhalla?

Whatever the answer to that question, it is clear that in seven published novels, a dozen published volumes of nonfiction and the manuscript of Hayduke Lives! he left behind a body of work both distinguished and undervalued.

That his last novel is not his best -- that honor goes to The Fool's Progress -- matters not at all to the many and devoted fans of The Monkey Wrench Gang, the 1975 novel in which Abbey introduced George Washington Hayduke, prickly embodiment of the eco-warrior, God's outlaw. For us, it is enough that Hayduke lives.

Hayduke Lives! is a darker novel than is The Monkey Wrench Gang. The earlier outing is an anarchic roller coaster of a novel, a tale told by a merry prankster out to pillory the greedheads threatening to turn the last vestiges of wilderness into denatured outposts of the prevailing industrial culture.

I guffawed my way through several readings of that novel, took gleeful note of the best way to disable a bulldozer, cheered out loud as Doc Sarvis, Bonnie Abzug, Seldom Seen Smith and Hayduke himself outwitted the philistines, and wept when it appeared that our unsavory hero was lost.

The book is unquestionably a good read, but it also struck a nerve. It made a lot of us wonder whey we were standing by while the planet plunderers were out there in our backyard busily reducing the untraveled wastes to wasteland.

It was the right question at the right time and it got results. Five years later Earth First! was founded. The relationship between those two events was not coincidence but cause and affect.

Among those who read and took to heart Abbey's "breakthrough" novel (in terms of units sold) was Dave Foreman, a Tucsonan like Abbey, who had labored for years in the mainstream environmental movement as chief lobbyist for the venerable Wilderness Society. It was Foreman who in 1980 helped found Earth First! and who in 1985 published Ecodefense: A Guide to Monkeywrenching.

Thanks to Abbey and his admirer, a new verb had entered the language.

Which brings our story thus far full circle. In Hayduke Lives!, both Earth First! and Foreman turn up as characters, cast in supporting roles to Hayduke and that old gang of his.

The villain of the story is, appropriately, a machine: Goliath, G.E.M. (Giant Earth Mover) of Arizona, Bucyrus-Erie's 4250-W Walking Dragline, a behemoth programmed to walk to work in the canyon-and-plateau country north of the Grand Canyon and, once there, to strip-mine that eccentric wilderness into profitability.

Hayduke, as you will have guessed, takes the part of David, ably assisted by Jack Burns, a post-modern, one-eyed version of the Lone Ranger with a pocketful of peppered chicken entrails -- for throwing tracking dogs off the scent, of course.

And where are Doc? Bonnie? Seldom? Turned respectable, it seems. The truth, however, is that Bonnie is haunted by the feeling that someone is watching her; that Doc, despite the joys of wife and baby (call Bonnie Mrs. Sarvis if you'd like a poke in the jaw), is restless, and that Goliath is giving Seldom Seen Smith nightmares, real screamers in which his trusty pistol/pizzle gets turned to warm taffy by the machine's cyclopean eye.

This crew is ripe for the picking; once that's established, the not-really-dead Hayduke goes mythic, gathering the reluctant heroes for one last battle.

Arrayed against them are their old adversaries, Mormon Bishop J. Dudley Love and his pistol-packing Landfill County, Utah, Search and Rescue Team, as well as the FBI, an airborne SWAT team out of Flagstaff and the faceless mega-conglomerate behind the uranium mining scheme. Oh, and public opinion, too. Jobs! Golf courses! Tourist dollars!

It's a potent mix, just like old times. But in Hayduke Lives! Abbey's mood is darker -- there's a body count to be reckoned with, for one thing -- which lends an elegiac edge to this leg of the crew's freewheeling doomed joyride.

One reason for the sequel's dark turn is the era that produced it. After eight years of increasingly depressing environmental news from the Reagan White House, there was a new anger abroad in the land. Made bold by deregulation and sweetheart tax deals, the advocates of profit at any cost had run amok and Earth First!ers were not the only ones feeling personally threatened.

Which doesn't mean there isn't a quite a lot of fine and joyful writing here. The best of it is in the tradition Abbey established 21 years earlier with Desert Solitaire, a classic of natural history and honest invective destined to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in future readers' esteem with Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, John Muir's sierra-inspired rhapsodies, and Walden.

Larry McMurtry, in fact, dubbed Abbey "the Thoreau of the American West," a fitting tribute but one that must have exasperated a man who did his cantankerous best to disown the nature writer's badge that his masterpiece pinned to his lapel.

Abbey considered himself a writer, period -- no qualifiers, please -- and the truth is that he began and ended as a novelist. If along the way, in novels, essays, meditations and combative letters to editors near and far, he imbued a generation with his own bone-deep respect for the power and grace of nature untrammeled, as well as his "wholesome contempt for the wretched human race," so much the better.

John Bancroft, a consultant to World Wide Web publishers in the U.S. and Europe, is editor and publisher of TW3.

Buy The Book @ A Discount: Edward Abbey's books may be purchased at a discount from The Bookstall.

The Guest Shot Archive:

Jack Moore on Saul Bellow's The Actual
Jack Moore on Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History
Bill Sheldon on Bill Gates' The Road Ahead

---

A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of
Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers