The Best of Edward Abbey (49 page)

Be of good cheer. All may yet be well. There’s many a fork, I think, in the road from here to destruction. Despite the jet-set androids who visit our mountain West on their cyclic tours from St. Tropez to Key West to Vail to Montana to Santa Fe, where they buy their hobby ranches, ski-town condos, adobe villas, and settle in, telling us how much they love the West. But will not lift a finger to help defend it. Will not lend a hand or grab ahold. Dante had a special place for these ESTers, esthetes, temporizers, and castrate fence-straddlers; he locked them in the vestibule of Hell. They’re worse than the simple industrial developer, whose only objective, while pretending to “create jobs,” is to create for himself a fortune in paper money. The developer is what he is; no further punishment is necessary.

As for politicians, those lambs and rabbits—

“Watch it!”

Missed that one by a cat hair. As for the politicians—forget them. We scrape by the next on the portside, a fang of limestone under a furl of glossy water. Vicious loveliness, hissing at my ear. I glide into a trough between two petrified crocodiles and slide down the rapid’s glassy tongue into a moderate maelstrom. I center my attention on the huge waves walloping toward us. We
ride them out in good form, bow foremost, with only a stroke now on one oar, now on the other, to keep the raft straight.

We leave the forest, descending mile after mile through a winding slickrock canyon toward tableland country. It is like Glen Canyon once again, in miniature, submerged but not forgotten Glen Canyon. The old grief will not go away. Like the loss of a wife, brother, sister, the ache in the heart dulls with time but never dissolves entirely.

We camp one night at a place called Coyote Wash, a broad opening—almost a valley—in the canyon world. After dark one member of the crew, a deadly pyromantic, climbs a thousand-foot bluff above camp and builds a bonfire of old juniper and piñon pine. He is joined by a second dark figure, dancing around the flames. As the flames die the two shove the mound of glowing coals over the edge. A cascade of fire streams down the face of the cliff. Clouds of sparks float on the darkness, flickering out as they sink into oblivion. A few spot-fires burn among the boulders at the base of the cliff, then fade. The end of something. A gesture—but symbolizing what?

Maybe we should everyone stay home for a season, give our little Western wilderness some relief from Vibram soles, rubber boats, hang gliders, deer rifles and fly rods. But where is home? Surely not the walled-in prison of the cities, under that low ceiling of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides and acid rain—the leaky malaise of an overdeveloped, overcrowded, self-destroying civilization—where most people are compelled to serve their time and please the wardens if they can. For many, for more and more of us, the out-of-doors is our true ancestral estate. For a mere five thousand years we have grubbed in the soil and laid brick upon brick to build the cities; but for a million years before that we lived the leisurely, free, and adventurous life of hunters and gatherers, warriors and tamers of horses. How can we pluck
that
deep root of feeling from the racial consciousness? Impossible. When in doubt, jump out. Withdraw.

Ah yes, you say, but what about Mozart? Punk Rock? Astrophysics? Flush toilets? Potato chips? Silicon chips? Oral
surgery? The Super Bowl and the World Series? Our coming journey to the stars? Vital projects, I agree, and I support them all. (On a voluntary basis only.) But why not a compromise? Why not—both? Why can’t we have a moderate number of small cities, bright islands of electricity and kultur and industry surrounded by shoals of farmland, cow range, and timberland, set in the midst of a great unbounded sea of primitive forest, unbroken mountains, virgin desert? The human reason can conceive of such a free and spacious world; why can’t we allow it to become—again—our home?

The American Indians had no word for what we call “wilderness.” For them the wilderness was home.

Another day, another dolor. The dampness of the river has soaked into my brain, giving it the consistency of tapioca. My crackpot dreams fade with the dawn. Too many questions, not enough answers. Enough of this theopneustic glossolalia.

We are approaching Snaggletooth Rapid at last. A steady roar fills the canyon. My passengers, a new set today, life jackets snug to their chins, cling with white knuckles to the lashings of our baggage as I steer my ponderous craft down the tongue of the rapid, into the maw of the mad waters. I try to remember Preston’s instructions: ferry to the right, avoiding that boat-eating Hole beyond the giant waves; then a quick pull to the left to avoid wrapping the boat upon Snaggletooth itself, a brute chunk of limestone rough as a broken axehead, gashing the heart of the current.

I grip the oars and shut my eyes. For a moment. The shock of cold water in the face recalls me to duty. A huge wave is rising over the port bow, about to topple. Pull to the right. The wave crashes, half-filling the boat. We ride down past the side of the Hole, carried through by momentum. The Tooth looms beyond my starboard bow, an ugly shark’s fin of immovable stone. Pull to the left. We slip by it, barely
touching
—dumb luck combined with blind natural talent. The boat wallows over the vigorous vee-waves beyond. Wake up. I’m drifting beyond the beaching point. I strain at the oars—oh, it’s hard, it’s hard—and tug this
lumpen-bourgeois river rig through the water and into the safety of an eddy. My swamper jumps ashore, bowline in hand. We drag the raft onto the sand and tie up to a willow tree.

Safely on the beach I watch (with secret satisfaction) the mishaps of the other oarsmen. And oarswomen. Nobody loses or overturns a boat but several hit the Tooth, hang there for awesome seconds, minutes, while tons of water beat upon their backs. They struggle. Hesitation: then the boats slide off, some into the current on the wrong side of the rock to go ashore on the wrong side of the canyon. No matter; nobody is hurt, or even dumped in the river, and no baggage is lost.

Recovered, reassembled, we eat lunch. We stare at the mighty rapids. We talk, meditate, reload the boats and push out, once again, onto the river.

Quietly exultant, we drift on together, not a team but a family, a human family bound by human love, through the golden canyons of the River of Sorrows. So named, it appears, by a Spanish priest three centuries ago, a man of God who saw in our physical world (is there another?) only a theater of suffering. He was right! He was wrong! Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

On and on and on we float, down the river, day after day, down to the trip’s end, to our takeout point, a lonely place in far western Colorado called Bedrock. Next door to Paradox. There is nothing here but a few small alfalfa farms and one gaunt, weathered, bleak old country store. The store is well stocked, though, with Budweiser (next morning we’ll find among us a number of sadder Budweiser men), and also a regional brew known as—Cures? Yes, Cures beer, a weak, pallid provincial liquescence brewed, they say, from pure Rocky Mountain spigot water. Take a twelve-pack home tonight. Those who drink from these poptop tins will be, in the words of B. Traven, America’s greatest writer, “forever freed from pain.”

Three of the boat people are going on down the Dolores to its
junction with the Colorado, and from there to the Land of Moab in Darkest Utah. My heart breaks to see them go without me. But I have a promise to keep. Preston Ellsworth has business waiting in Durango; the others elsewhere. Must all voyages end in separation? Powell lost three of his men at Separation Rapids, far down there in
The
Canyon. And Christopher Columbus, after his third voyage to the Indies, got in trouble with his royal masters and was sent back to Spain in chains, leaving his men behind on Hispaniola.

Which made no difference. There will always be a 1492. There will always be a Grand Canyon. There will always be a Rio Dolores, dam or no dam. There will always be one more voyage down the river to Bedrock, Colorado, in that high lonesome valley the pioneers named Paradox. A paradox because—anomaly—the river flows across, not through, the valley, apparently violating both geo-logic and common sense. Not even a plateau could stop the river. Their dams will go down like dominoes. And another river be reborn.

There will always be one more river. The journey goes on forever on our little living ship of stone and soil and water and vapor, this delicate planet circling round the sun which humankind call Earth.

Joy shipmates joy
.

The Rites of Spring

Editor’s note:
This is the last of Abbey’s original selections for this reader. The novel from which it is excerpted was ultimately published under the title
The Fool’s Progress
. (Part of a later chapter from that novel is also included in this volume.) This selection was heavily edited for publication as Chapter 4, “April 1942: The Rites of Spring,” in
The Fool’s Progress
. Abbey readers will find it interesting to compare the earlier and later versions.

Stump Creek, West Virginia, April, 1942
.

T
he war? What war? Henry Lightcap, fifteen years old and lean and green as a willow sapling, had deeper things in mind. Henry loved the chant of the Spring peepers, 10,000 tiny titillated frogs chanting in chorus from the pasture, down in the marshy bottoms by the crick, that music of moonlight and fearful desire, that plainsong, that Te Deum Laudamus, that Missa Solemnis deep as creation that filled the twilight evenings with a song as old (at least) as the carboniferous coal beds beneath his homeland. (Grandfather Lightcap had signed a broad form deed to the mineral rights in 1892, but nothing ever came of it. Or ever would, thought Paw.)

Henry detested highschool with a sharp absolute loathing keen as his knifeblade but loved getting on the bus behind Wilma Fetterman, watching as she climbed the high steps, her short skirt riding up, his eyes fixed on the twin tendons behind her knees, the sweet virgin untouchable gloss of her forever inaccessible thighs. Henry, virgin himself, thought that he understood the mechanical principle of the human sexual connection but also believed, with the hopeless sorrow of his youth, that he himself would never, never, never be capable of the act because—well, because his penis, when excited and erect, rose hard and rigid as bone against his bellybutton. There was no room in there, no space whatsoever, for a female of his own species. The thing could not be forced down to a horizontal approach, as he assumed was necessary, without breaking off like the joint of a cornstalk. He told no one of his deformity. Not
even his mother. But though it was hopeless, he continued to love watching Wilma Fetterman climb the schoolbus steps.

He loved the lament of the mourning doves, echoing his own heartache, when they returned each Spring from wherever they went in winter. He loved the soft green of the linwood trees, the bright green of the Osage orange, against the morning sun. He loved the red-dog road that meandered through the smoky hills, beside the sulfur-colored creek, into and through the covered bridge and up the hollow that led, beyond the last split-rail fence, toward the barn, the pigpen, the wagon shed, the ice house, the springhouse, and the gray good gothic two-story clapboard farmhouse that remained, after a century, still the Lightcap family home.

He loved his Berkshire pigs. He loved the beagle hounds that ran to meet him each evening. He loved—but intuitively, not consciously—the sight of the family wash hanging from the line, the sound of his father’s axe in the woodyard as the old man split kindling for the kitchen stove. He even loved the arrogant whistling of his older brother Will—hated rival—as Will brought the horses up from the half-plowed cornfield, the team harnessed but unhitched, their traces dragging, their chains jingling, over the stony lane to the barn.

But most of all, and above all, and always in April, Henry loved the sound of a hardball smacking into leather. The
whack!
of fat bat connecting solidly with ball. And better yet, when he was pitching, Henry loved the swish of air and grunt of batter lunging for and cleanly missing Henry’s fast one, low and outside, after he’s brushed the hitter back with two consecutive speedballs to the ear.

He loved his brandnew Joe “Ducky” Medwick glove, personally autographed (at the Spalding factory) by Joe himself. He loved the feel and heft and fine-grained integrity of his sole uncracked Louisville Slugger, autographed by baseball’s one and only active .400 hitter, the great and immortal Ted Williams.

Brother Will liked the game too, in his calm complacent way, but never lay awake at night dreaming about it, never dawdled
away hours composing elaborate box scores of imaginary games in a fantasy league that existed only in the mind of Henry Lightcap.

Henry had his reasons. The rail-fence league was real.

Blacklick, a coal-mining town, was coming to Stump Creek for the first game of the season. Henry, self-appointed captain and prime organizer, had scheduled the game by ringing Koval-chick’s Store—two longs and a short—one evening after school. He heard the click of receivers coming off the hooks up and down the line, then after a time the surly voice of old man Kovalchick coming to him through the miracle of the telephone from seven miles away.