The Best of Edward Abbey (33 page)

They are wrong. Even a rock is a being, a thing with character and a kind of spirit, an existence worthy of our love. To disparage the world we know for the sake of grand abstractions, whether they are called mesons and electrons or the vibrations of an endlessly slumbering and reawakening Brahma, is to be false to the mother who sustains us. The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to disavow and deny this lone but gracious planet on which we voyage through the cold void of space. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow’s reality. Be true to the earth, said Nietzsche.

For what do we really know? I think of a lightning-blasted but still living shagbark hickory in the pasture back home on my father’s farm in Pennsylvania; I think of a twisted juniper on a ledge of sandstone at Cape Solitude, far above the Colorado
River; I think of the pelicans that sail along the shores of the Sea of Cortez; I think of a thousand other places I have known and loved, east and west, in North America and Australia and Europe, and all the creatures great and small that live there—each a part of a greater whole but each an individual as well, one and unique, never to be known again, here or anywhere, each as precious as the vivid moment in which it first appeared on earth.

Don’t talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents, or invisible realms—I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. I stopped to look. And what I saw was the moon—the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We were there. We
are
. That is what we know. This is all we can know. And each such moment holds all that we could possibly need—if only we can see.

T
here’s a town in Arizona called Glob. Named for a nugget. It’s a mining town, specializing formerly in gold and silver, now devoted to copper. The smog produced daily by the local smelter poisons the air for fifty miles downwind. The smell is like that of a decomposing jellyfish. Nobody here seems to mind. The Glob businessmen have built their golf course and country club at the foot of the 300-foot-high tailings dump. They are proud of the dump. When the wind blows the air is filled with fine white powder. The golfers inhale the powder and the gases and swell with pleasure. Mention pollution and they say, “Son, that smells like money to me.” Aha!—where did I hear that line before?

Of course they’re right. I like Glob myself. You get used to the stink. I drop in there every other week to pick up my mail, buy some groceries, and have a drink or two before heading back to my job in the mountains. For instance:

I had a late lunch at the U-Et-Yet? Café, then parked my ‘68 VW Fastback in front of the Broad Street Social Club. Closed. The only hippie bar in town—closed. Probably because of my friend Greenspan, who played here last week. Bob Greenspan and the Monkey Wrench Gang. His new song, “Big Tits, Braces and Zits,” a ballad of adolescent passion, had been a hit. But as usual he overdosed on ego and bourbon and insulted first the management, then the audience, then the Glob law enforcement people. Not a wise thing to do. Now, I suppose, he was back in Boulder.

I drove on up the street, following the parade of gleaming
new welfare-financed pickup trucks. Every Chicano, Navajo, and redneck Anglo in the state drives a pickup. They can’t afford condoms, diaphragms, or birth control pills—but they all seem to find the financing for a $10,000 Ford Ranger or Chev Apache or Dodge Power Wagon. Wish I could do it. My poor old Nazi folk’s wagon is burning oil, has a slipping clutch, no shocks, squealing brakes, the floor corroded by battery acid, and a sprung hood that I have to tie down with rope.

The bumper sticker in front of me reads: Ass, Gas, or Grass—Nobody Rides for Free. I liked that sentiment better than what I saw when I pulled into a slot close to the Ruins Bar. The sticker on the rear of a tractorlike pickup truck—gun rack in the cab—said: Did the Coyotes Get Your Deer? Being an old-time coyote lover, I resented the bigotry and yokel ignorance of that remark. There was a broad-tipped marking pen in my car. With heavy strokes of indelible black ink I wrote across the windshield of the truck: Did the Rednecks Get Your Coyote? Like Nietzsche says, Live Dangerous. He was a mountain man too.

I straightened the yellow nylon carnation on the hood of my VW (every sporty car should wear a boutonniere) and felt my way into the bar. Out of the dazzling desert sun into the darkness of the cave. I ordered a tall double gin screwdriver with lots of orange juice. A healthy drink. A man should take care of himself. The body is the temple of the soul. I braced my foot on the rail, steadied my right hand with my left, and drank. Feeling better, I ordered a second and smiled at the half dozen gloomy, mean, hostile, ravaged faces ranged around the bar, staring at me. “Why do they call this place the Ruins?” I said.

Nobody answered. None of them even laughed. I’m not going to get out of here alive, I thought. Unless I crawl out on my hands and knees, feeling along the wall for the door. Maybe not then. Silently, the bartender served me another screwdriver, took my money, leaned back with folded arms. A baseball bat stood in the corner. Ignoring me now, the regulars resumed their mumbling conversation. Two hardhats, two cowboy hats, and two crew cuts. The bartender was bald—a tough egg. He
smoked an economical cigar, which had at least this virtue: It neutralized the all-pervasive stench of the copper smelter. But not the smell of hatred. I rubbed my hairy jaws, then sidled off to the jukebox to check out the musical values of this here metallurgical community.

As I’d suspected, there was no Gustav Mahler available. No Purcell. No Palestrina. Not even filthy Mozart. Nothing but the standard country-western stuff from a big city in the East called Nashville. Music to hammer out fenders by at the Shade Tree Body Shop. Music to vomit by after a shift in the copper pits. Take this job and shove it. I picked out a couple of Johnny Paycheck numbers and retired for a minute to the men’s pissoir. I read the writing on the wall. The voice of the people:

Suggests the political situation in these southwestern states. But what about this one?

Grub for thought there. I looked at myself—quickly—in the cracked fragment of mirror screwed to the wall. Found consolation in the fact that I still didn’t look as bad as I felt. Or feel as bad as I looked. I returned to my friends at the bar. None of them spoke or looked at me. I studied the placards tacked to the wall above the ranks of bottles:

Finishing my second health drink, it occurred to me that more and more we communicate with one another as indirectly as
possible. Through wall placards. Through graffiti. Through bumper stickers, headgear, lapel buttons, T-shirts … anything but face-to-face exchange. Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else for a long time. Perhaps I’ve been living too long in the mountains. Perhaps I should rejoin what they call civilization. If there is one. I’m willing to listen to reason. If I hear any.

Direct communication. I turned to the morose face on my right, a new arrival. He was wearing a baseball cap with the legend
BEEF
stitched on the forepeak. His mate’s cap said
CAT
. Mr. Beef and Mr. Cat.

“Where you fellas from?” I asked politely.

Mr. Beef stared at me for a while. “Flat Rock,” he finally said.

“Where’s that?”

The long stare. “East of here.”

“Why do they call it Flat Rock?” Careful, I thought; you’re not getting out of here alive if you’re not careful. Receiving no immediate answer, I repeated the question. “Why Flat Rock?” Live dangerous.

Mr. Beef exchanged a glance with this taciturn friend. Mr. Cat nodded. Mr. Beef said, “Because of the rain.”

“Because of the
rain?”
I paused for a moment. “What do you mean, because of the rain?” I pushed my empty glass toward the bartender.

“The way it comes down.”

“The way it comes down?”

“Yeah.” Mr. Beef toyed with his can of Coors, scowling at his thumbs. “Like a cow.”

The bartender brought me my third drink. The turning of the screw. I had a momentary feeling of vertigo. But I plunged recklessly ahead. “The rain comes down like a cow?”

“That’s right.” Mr. Cat raised his head. The two men stared at me solemnly. “Like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” Mr. Beef said.

I paid for the next round and recorded the story, for posterity, in my cerebral files. What do I have against rednecks? Nothing. I am here to defend them. My father has been a sidehill farmer, a logger, a schoolbus driver most of his life. My little brother is a
construction worker and truck driver. Another is now a cop in L.A. I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors. Like my neighbor Marvin Bundy says (he lives on the other side of Wolf Hole Mountain), like Marvin says, “Us poor folks got to stick together.”

A few words about my neighbor. Marvin Bundy is a poet and female liberationist. “Wummin?” says Marvin. “I liberate a wummin ever’ chanct I git. Wummin’s place is in mah arms. The destiny of her anatomy is in mah hands.” True enough, Marvin; us nature mystics got to stick together. However it is with Mr. Bundy’s poetry that I am here primarily concerned. The other day he came over the gap and asked me to read his “latest masterpiece.”

“Well, Marvin,” I said, “I have yet to see your first.”

“Read this,” he said, “and I don’t need no smart-aleck criticism.”

Invictus

Marvin is a special case, a coy and crafty yeoman, not a standardized rustic. More common, perhaps, is a young fellow I once worked with in the Coronado National Forest, down along the Mexican border in Arizona. I’ll call him Calvin. We patrolled the woods and collected garbage from the public campgrounds. Dumping our load one afternoon at the forest landfill site, we saw a large chulu, or coatimundi, picking its way across a mound of garbage looking for something to eat. The chulu is a rare
animal on the American side of the border; it looks like a hybrid mix of bear, anteater, and raccoon. A strange and interesting creature. Calvin’s immediate reaction when we spotted the animal was, “Gee, I wish I had my gun.”

I argued with him but it was a waste of time. Like most rednecks, rural or urban, he could see nothing of interest in the world of nature unless he was trying to shoot it or set a hook in its throat or trap it and skin it. Same with humans. After work that evening, I suggested to Calvin that we go into Nogales and pick up a couple of women. Calvin shrugged. “Ah haint too interested in girls,” he mumbled. Then he gave me a shy, sly, sidelong look: “But you oughta see mah gun collection.”

Not that I’m against guns. As I’ve said elsewhere, I keep a few myself. The freeborn American’s right to own and bear firearms must remain inviolate. Nor am I against hunting and fishing when the prey is abundant and the primary object of the pursuit is to put meat on the table—or in the skillet. I do think we should take it easy, out here in the West, on our dwindling deer population: The mountain lions need those deer more than we do.