Edward Abbey’s passing didn’t go exactly as planned when, twenty years ago this coming Friday night, a small contingent of family and friends hauled him out and propped him up in the desert outside Tucson.
Previously that day, they had kept a long-standing promise to not allow “Cactus Ed” to die in a hospital. The somewhat clandestine operation featured the removal of wires and tubes and the smuggling of the old curmudgeon out the back door. His sacred desert beckoned.
Taking his final breaths where he and two of his favorite stars, Regulus and Spica, could keep an eye on each other seemed a rather fitting exit strategy for one whose main drive in life had become the honoring of Mother Earth and her extended family.
What no one had counted upon, including the old monkeywrencher himself, was that hanging out with his stellar compadres had produced a modest healing effect. He got to feeling better. So they hauled him back to the ranch and laid him out best they could in his writing cabin where he said his final goodbyes. By morning on March 14, 1989, his spirit had gone on to other things.
Word of Abbey’s passing spread, as they say, like wildfire. Or like a quickly expanding crack in Glen Canyon Dam. Or like the ripples radiating from the splash of a sinking Caterpillar bulldozer in the upper reaches of Lake Powell. Let’s just say that the word spread.
My favorite is the quote attributed to C. L. Rawlings in James Bishop’s spirited Abbey biography, “Epitaph For a Desert Anarchist.” The opening stanza cuts to the chase:
“I’d like to say that coyotes passed the word along, that leafless willows dreamed it up the roots of cottonwood and sage along each muddy stream. I’d like to say the Colorado told the Green, the Escalante, the San Juan, that grief rose up each tributary to the melting snow.”
It wasn’t that Abbey’s exit prompted such exalted prose from everyone. Many who felt the butt of his tirades like those against ranging cattle upon federal lands in the West or extracting resources from wilderness, whether designated or not, probably said “good riddance!”
“No more cars in national parks” was another Abbey maxim. “Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs anything but keep the automobiles and motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins.”
One of my favorite Abbey quotes, however, occurred when he, as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Monument back in the day, responded to a tourist inquiry as to when they were going to pave the road from the highway back into the arches, fins, balanced rocks, and spires that gave the landscape such singular fame. “The day before I leave,” was his curt reply.
Another trademark caper would have to be when, as editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine “The Thunderbird,” he attributed a quote on its March 1951 cover to Louisa May Alcott: “Man Will Never Be Free Until the Last King Is Strangled With the Entrails of the Last Priest.” Suffice to say, it cost him his gig and made page one of his FBI file.
Abbey’s mission statement, for the most part, did not include making friends. The process of endearing himself to a wider demographic never seemed to occupy all that much of his time. Influencing people, however, especially if it involved direct action against the power elite, gave him and his shipmates much joy.
Admittedly, there were others, including many who saw themselves as “serious” writers and critics, who viewed Abbey, as Bishop quite succinctly put it, “as a misanthropic, sexist, elitest, cranky, barbarian, creeping Fascist hyena.” Yeah, and what’s their point?
As far as his death was concerned, he saw it coming, of course, and plotted continuously to influence the proceedings. In the next life he would become a soaring turkey vulture. “No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.”
In fact, following his death, after his sworn-to-secrecy inner circle of friends and family had committed him to the sacred earth of the vast Cabeza Prieta, most any sighting of a turkey vulture was greeted with a “Hi Ed, what’s going on, you ornery old buzzard?”
Many who do not “get” Ed see his precious desert landscape as too daunting or just uninteresting, Abbey as usual, gets the last word.
“To those that see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noon day sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently.”
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of “Cactus Ed’s” passing, Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake is hosting a gathering of friends and kindred spirits this Saturday at 7 p.m. a “buzzard watch,” as it were.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.