James Gaitis © 2009

Here’s my understatement of the day:  In a literary sense, it is an exceedingly difficult challenge for all but the very best of naturalist writers to follow in the heavy bootworn footsteps of Edward Abbey.

Abbey, whom Larry McMurtry called “the Thoreau of the American West,” was so radically original in technique and delivery, so aggressively sincere in his unwavering belief in the value of wilderness and all that is wild, so sure of the validity of his perspective, that his works are probably viewed as too confrontational and too threatening for the vast majority of the contemporary green and greening crowd. “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth” was the cry of many an environmentalist in the early ‘80s. A far cry from today’s conservative post-9/11 ideology that tells us only to “Be afraid. Very afraid.” Why worry about the survival of a few endangered species, the last few unroaded areas, the last stands of oldgrowth when we have borders to protect and independence to preserve?

Having conceded the inevitability of Abbey’s superior abilities to dissect and declare the pathology of the American West, I am personally left with having to be satisfied with the fact that by serendipitous circumstance I seem to have followed in Abbey’s footsteps in a far more literal sense. By happy coincidence, so it seems. And perhaps due to having just a little in common.

Yes, like so many others, I’ve been to Arches and have walked under and around and through the same windcut desert architecture where Abbey once lived and of which he wrote of in the first pages of Desert Solitaire. And, like many another who were lucky enough to win a permit in the lottery draw, I’ve kayaked down the San Juan more or less as Abbey did to see the same remote petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and carved river canyons as he wrote about in Down the River. Like Abbey, I decry the ever-burgeoning increase in human population, unnecessary wars, uncontrolled consumption, the utter failure to maintain a long-term perspective relating to that which can only be preserved with the long term in mind. But there is more than that between Abbey and me. Call it geographical or, better yet, topographical, if you will.

As I now work on a series of essays (meant ultimately to be book length once compiled together) of my twelve winters off the grid in the remote North Fork in Northwest Montana—where grizzlies and wolves and lynx still roam—I find myself reminded again and again that Abbey spent a summer up in the Numa Lookout on the west flank of Glacier Park fifteen years before I arrived at that same place, on the other side of the river. I remind myself that for twelve years and more there were only three buildings I could see from my mountain home (all fire lookout towers) and that one of them for a time was Abbey’s home. I open my worn copy of The Journey Home and reread his account of his summer looming high above the pristine glacier-stained waters of Bowman Lake with Numa Peak and Rainbow, Square and Reuter, towering above, rereading his words of warning and defiance against the varied forces that would tame and erode and slowly destroy the last of our diminishing wilderness. I see again, am reminded by words written aggressively and with little regard for consequence, that we agree on many things. And I want to follow his steps in more than just a literal way.

And as I write, I reflect on my time living in the deserts and the mountains of New Mexico, in the staid beauty of bonny Scotland and I cannot help wonder what coincidence is this that brought both Abbey and me to these places also, and other mutual places as well. I open my battered copy of The Monkey Wrench Game, and the words jump off the page to offer combative explanations. To remind me of where my commitments should lay. Why I remain out West even though, like Abbey, I was raised east of the Mississippi.

And now, here on the very edge of Tucson where the deer and bobcat, coyote, javelina, snake and ringtail, coati and raccoon, an occasional bear and lion no doubt, scorpion and gila monster creep and play, where the owls great and pygmy and vultures and hawks and opportunistic birds large and small (the cardinal, the mocking bird, thrashers and hummers and giant cactus wren and woodpeckers of various size and oddly shaped) soar and swoop around the periphery of my house in search of another meal a measure of shade a respite from the heat, I find myself somehow again in Abbey’s Country. Up into the mountains just above Tucson, into the corkbacr fir and mountain maple, the tall ponderosa and high island skies that Abbey, too, knew all too well. And into the desert the canyons the arroyos, looking mostly to the ground but also into the trees always into the mountains that surround these places just as they surrounded Abbey not too many years ago.

And I think, perhaps I should go in search of Abbey’s grave, which I know is somewhere out in this desert, hidden somewhere in the sometimes shadows of these very mountains, laid down into the hard brittle soil beneath worn rock and blowing sand, just where he asked to be placed when he knew his time had come.

Which is where I leave off, where I start up anew. Searching for Abbey’s grave just as we all are in search of some place where we can be both calm and exhilarated at the same moment in time. Wanting to follow in Abbey’s footsteps, if only for a while.

James Gaitis

On Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ1Tan929SQ

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)