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Show EDWARD ABBEY: A Life An Excerpt from... By James Cahalan — | : The following excerpt from Edward Abbey: A Life, by James M. Cahalan, to be published in Fall In summer 1974 he and his young fourth wife, Renéée, bought twenty acres near Green 2001 by the University of Arizona Press. Copyright ©© 2001 Arizona Board of Regents is reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. www.uapress.arizona.edu. River for $3,000--a "watermelon and gopher ranch"--and he and Sleight acquired some EDWARD ABBEY: THE BARD OF MOAB, 1974-78 During the mid to late 1970s, Ed Abbey attracted new fame and notoriety as author of The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), the book in which he successfully synthesized his serious politics, his comic fiction-writing abilities, and his friendships. The notion that politics is personal had grown out of such movements as feminism and Black Power--thus developed in contexts quite different from Abbey’s point of view--but he made politics personal in his own inimitable way. The Monkey Wrench Gang was'a very timely book. In the years following its appearance, it was read by large numbers of readers, some of whom were wilderness activists who were becoming increasingly disenchanted with mainstream politics and looking for new kinds of environmental activism. Dave Foreman, who had not yet met Abbey but whose activism had been spurred, beginning in 1971, by his work in Santa Fe for the Black Mesa Defense Fund (begun by Jack Loeffler), would go to Washington in the late 1970s as a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. But there he would find himself frustrated by how comparatively few acres of western wilderness were designated for protection by such conventional legislative measures as RARE IL, the U. S. Forest Service’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation project. Having read Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang with escalating admiration for Abbey and anger against business as usual, by 1980 Foreman would resign his Wilderness Society job and begin Earth First!, a radical action group inspired by Abbey's books. For Abbey himself, The Monkey Wrench Gang not only articulated his politics and brought him heightened attention as a writer, but also turned him intoa cult figure in ways that had significant effects on his personal life. Having lost his Aravaipa ranger job, he retreated to the scenic and congenial Utah town of Moab....At first, life in Moab was great. Abbey felt comfortable there not only because he loved the canyon country, but also since he already had a number of friends in the area, dating from his 1956, 1957, and 1965 ranger _ Seasons in the area and many other visits. Ken Sleight had moved to nearby Green River in 1969.... Pe er . additional ranchland nearby at Willow Bend. They socialized and played poker with Sleight’s fellow river-runners in Green River, the Quist brothers, Bob and Clair. Abbey and Sleight liked the idea of getting back to the land, returning to farm settings like where they had grown up, but by November 1974 Abbey had decided that he had actually been “swindled” for the land that he had earlier thought a bargain, and eventually he and Sleight had to sell their land because they both traveled too much to be able to take adequate care of it. Abbey also joined a circle of newer friends in Moab during this period, including Bill Benge, whom he had met at the Needles area of Canyonlands National Park in fall 1971 and who became his attorney in Moab; Tom Arnold, whose "Volkswagen museum" he had first visited for repairs in 1972; Bob Greenspan, a musician who had journeyed to Aravaipa in April 1973 to meet him; and Roger Grette, a fellow wilderness wanderer who first encountered him in the company of Abbey’s close friend John De Puy, while hiking around Navajo Mountain, on the Utah-Arizona border, in May 1973. After settling in Moab, Ed and Renéée also befriended Marilyn and Karilyn McElheney, twin sisters living nearby who dated (respectively) Greenspan and Grette, and whose phone Abbey regularly used because he didn’t want to have one himself; Jim Stiles, a park ranger, writer, and illustrator from Kentucky; Owen Severance, a crusty park worker and wilderness activist; Gil Preston, a doctor and part-time writer from the East who had fallen in love with the West; and (after her move there in March 1977) Laura Lee Houck, their next-door neighbor, who often babysat Susie. ‘Many of Abbey’s friends in Moab, and later in Tucson, were the proud possessors of books that he gave them, both his own and others’; he read continually and delighted in sharing what he read. He remained attached enough to his Moab friends that he made a point of putting most of them into his books, even years after he had moved away from Moab. For example, in Desert Images (1979) he described how Tom Arnold, who regularly flew him around the Southwest during the 1970s, let him steer his plane all the way to Las Vegas in 1978 while Arnold read Playboy. In April 1979 Bob Greenspan was surprised to hear that he and his song "Big Tits, Braces, and Zits," which Abbey described as "a song adolescent passion," were highlighted in that month’s issue of Penthouse, and he rushed out |
