The Monkey Wrench Gang

by Edward Abbey

  “I throw beer cans along the fucking highways,” Hayduke said. “Why the fuck shouldn’t I throw fucking beer cans along the fucking highways?”

  “Now, now. Don’t be so defensive.”

  “Hell,” Smith said, “I do it too. Any road I wasn’t consulted about that I don’t like, I litter. It’s my religion.”

  “Right,” Hayduke said. “Litter the shit out of them.”

  “Well now,” the doctor said. “I hadn’t thought about that. Stockpile the stuff along the highways. Throw it out the window. Well … why not?”

  “Doc,” said Hayduke, “it’s liberation.”

  The night. The stars. The river. Dr. Sarvis told his comrades about a great Englishman named Ned. Ned Ludd. They called him a lunatic but he saw the enemy clearly. Saw what was coming and acted directly. And about the wooden shoes, les sabots. The spanner in the works. Monkey business. The rebellion of the meek. Little old ladies in oaken clogs.

  “Do we know what we’re doing and why?”

  “No.”

  “Do we care?”

  “We’ll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.”

  The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.

  “We need a guide,” the doctor said.

  “I know the country,” Smith said.

  “We need a professional killer.”

  “That’s me,” Hayduke said. “Murder’s my specialty.”

  “Every man has his weakness.” Pause. “Mine,” added Doc, “is Baskin-Robbins girls.”

  “Hold on here,” Smith said, “I ain’t going along with that kind of talk.”

  “Not people, Captain,” the doctor said. “We’re talking about bulldozers. Power shovels. Draglines. Earthmovers.”

  “Machines,” said Hayduke.

  A pause in the planning, again.

  “Are you certain this canyon is not bugged?” the doctor asked. “I have the feeling that others are listening in to every word we say.”

  “I know that feeling,” Hayduke said, “but that’s not what I’m thinking about right now. I’m thinking—”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking: Why the fuck should we trust each other? I never even met you two guys before today.”

  Silence. The three men stared into the fire. The oversize surgeon. The elongated riverman. The brute from the Green Berets. A sigh. They looked at each other. And one thought: What the hell. And one thought: They look honest to me. And one thought: Men are not the enemy. Nor women either. Nor little children.

  Not in sequence but in unison, as one, they smiled. At each other. The bottle made its penultimate round.

  “What the hell,” Smith said, “we’re only talkin’.”

  6

  The Raid at Comb Wash

  Their preparations were thorough.

  First, at Captain Smith’s suggestion, they cached supplies at various points all over their projected field of operations: the canyon country, southeast Utah and northern Arizona. The stores consisted of (1) food: tinned goods, dried meats, fruits, beans, powdered milk, sealed drinking water; (2) field equipment: medical kits, tarps and ponchos, fire starters, topographical maps, moleskin and Rip-Stop, sleeping bags, canteens, hunting and fishing equipment, cooking gear, rope, tape, nylon cord; and (3) the basic ingredients: monkey wrenches, wrecking bars, heavy-duty wirecutters, bolt cutters, trenching tools, siphon hoses, sugars and syrups, oil and petrol, steel wedges, blasting caps, detonating cord, safety fuse, cap crimpers, fuse lighters and adequate quantities of Du Pont Straight and Du Pont Red Cross Extra. Most of the work was carried out by Smith and Hayduke. Sometimes they were assisted by the doctor and Ms. Abbzug, flying up from Albuquerque. Hayduke objected, for a while, to the presence of the girl.

  “No fucking girls,” he hollered. “This is man’s work.”

  “Don’t talk like a pig,” said Bonnie.

  “Here now, here now,” the doctor said. “Peace.”

  “I thought we were gonna keep the cell down to three men,” Hayduke insisted. “No girls.”

  “I’m no girl,” Bonnie said. “I’m a grown-up woman. I’m twenty-eight and a half years old.”

  Seldom Seen Smith stood somewhat aside, smiling, rubbing the blond furze on his long jaw.

  “We agreed on only three people,” Hayduke said.

  “I know,” the doctor said, “and I’m sorry. But I want Bonnie with us. Whither I goest Bonnie goeth. Or vice versa. I don’t function very well without her.”

  “What kind of a man are you?”

  “Dependent.”

  Hayduke turned to Smith. “What do you say?”

  “Well,” he said, “you know, I kinda like this little girl. I think it’s kinda nice to have her around. I say let’s keep her with us.”

  “Then she has to take the blood oath.”

  “I’m not a child,” said Bonnie, “and I refuse to take any blood oaths or play any little-boy games. You’ll just have to trust me. If you don’t I’ll turn you all in to the Bureau of Land Management.”

  “She’s got us by the balls,” Smith said.

  “And no vulgarity either,” she said.

  “Testicles,” he said.

  “Grab ’em by the testicles, and their hearts and minds will follow,” the doctor said.

  “I don’t like it,” Hayduke said.

  “Tough,” Bonnie said. “You’re outvoted three to one.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Peace,” the doctor said. “I assure you she’ll be very useful.”

  The doctor had the last word. After all, it was he who would be financing the campaign. He was the angel. Avenging angel. Hayduke knew it. And the expense was great. Ninety dollars for a decent sleeping bag. Forty dollars for a good pair of boots. Even the price of pinto beans had gone up to 89 cents a pound. By far the biggest expense, however, was not supplies but simply transportation over the immense, rugged and intricate expanses of the Southwest, with gasoline selling at 49 to 55 cents per gallon and a new truck tire (six-ply heavy duty) at least $55. Plus the air fare for the doctor and his Bonnie—$42.45 each, one way, Albuquerque to Page.

  Many of these expenditures could be itemized as business expenses, tax deductible, by Smith (Back of Beyond Expeditions), but even so the initial outlay was heavy. The good doctor provided the cash, which Smith seldom had available, and wrote most of the checks. Explosives, of course, were tax write-offs; Doc would list them on his IRS return as ranch improvement costs—for the little 225-acre tax shelter he owned out in the Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque—and as assessment work on a cluster of mining claims he also held, in the same area.

  “Gloves!” Hayduke demanded. “Gloves! No fucking monkey business without gloves!”

  So Doc bought everyone in the crew three pair each of top-quality buckskin gloves.

  “Sno-Seal!” (For boots.)

  He bought Sno-Seal.

  “Sidearms!”

  “No.”

  “Guns!”

  “No.”

  “Peanut butter!” said Bonnie.

  “Guns and peanut butter!” Hayduke roared.

  “Peanut butter, yes. Guns, no.”

  “We gotta defend our fucking selves.”

  “No guns.” Doc could be stubborn.

  “Them fuckers’ll be shooting at us!”

  “No violence.”

  “We gotta shoot back.”

  “No bloodshed.” The doctor stood fast.

  Again Hayduke was outvoted, again by a vote of three to one. So for the time being he kept his own weap
ons concealed, as best he could, and carried only the revolver hidden in the inner pocket of his pack.

  Doc bought six cases of Deaf Smith organic peanut butter, an unblanched, unhydrogenated product manufactured from sun-dried peanuts grown on composted soil without benefit of herbicides, pesticides or county agents. Seldom Seen Smith (no relation) and Hayduke distributed the peanut butter strategically about the Colorado Plateau, a jar here, a jar there, all the way from Onion Creek to Pakoon Spring, from Pucker Pass to Tin Cup Mesa, from Tavaputs, Utah, to Moenkopi, Arizona. Rich brown peanut butter.

  Once, early in the campaign, filling their fuel tanks at a gas station, Doc was about to pay with his credit card. Hayduke pulled him aside. No credit cards, he said.

  No credit cards?

  No fucking credit cards; you want to leave a fucking documented trail one mile wide with your fucking signature on it everywhere we go?

  I see, said Doc. Of course. Pay cash, let the credit go. Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.

  Nor did they actually steal, buy or use explosives, at first. Hayduke urged their use immediately, energetically and massively, but the other three opposed him. The doctor was afraid of dynamite; it suggested anarchy, and anarchy is not the answer. Abbzug pointed out that any type of fireworks was illegal in all the Southwestern states; she had also heard that blasting caps could cause cervical cancer. The doctor reminded Hayduke that the use of explosives for illegal (however constructive) purposes was a felony, as well as being a Federal offense where bridges and highways were concerned, whereas simply pouring a little Karo syrup into the fuel tank and sand or emery powder into the oil intake of a dump truck was merely a harmless misdemeanor, hardly more than a Hallowe’en prank.

  It became a question of subtle, sophisticated harassment techniques versus blatant and outrageous industrial sabotage. Hayduke favored the blatant, the outrageous. The others the other. Outvoted as usual, Hayduke fumed but consoled himself with the reflection that things would get thicker as operations proceeded. For every action a bigger reaction. From one damn thing to another worse. After all, he was a veteran of Vietnam. He knew how the system worked. Time, lapsing and collapsing from day to day, advanced on his side.

  Each cache of provisions was made with scrupulous care. All edible, potable or otherwise perishable or destructible items were placed in metal footlockers. Tools were sharpened, oiled, sheathed or cased and wrapped in canvas. Everything was buried, if possible, or well covered with rocks and brush. The sites were camouflaged and tracks swept away with broom or bough. No cache was considered satisfactory until it passed inspection by both Hayduke and Smith, senior military advisers to the—the Foxpack? Sixpack? Wilderness Avengers? Wooden Shoe Mob? They couldn’t even agree on a name for themselves. Peanut Butter Cabal? Raiders of the Purple Sage? Young Americans for Freedom? Woman’s Christian Temperance Union? Couldn’t agree. Who’s in charge here? We’re all in charge here, Bonnie says. Nobody’s in charge here, says Doc. Lousy way to run a fucking revolution, Hayduke complained; he suffered from a faint authoritarian streak, ex-Sgt. Geo. Wash. Hayduke.

  “Peace, please, pax vobiscum,” Doc said. But his own excitement was growing too. Look what happened, for example, at the fifty-million-dollar new University Medical Center, in one of the new Bauhaus million-dollar classroom buildings. The building smelled of raw cement. The windows, long and narrow and few, looked like gunports in a pillbox. The air-conditioning system was of the very latest design. When Dr. Sarvis entered the classroom where he was to give a lecture one day—“Industrial Pollution & Respiratory Illness”—he found the room overheated, the air stale. The students seemed sleepier than usual, but unconcerned.

  Need some air in here, the doctor grumbled. A student shrugged. The rest were nodding—not in agreement but in slumber. Doc went to the nearest window and tried to open it. But how? There didn’t seem to be any sort of hinge, sash, latch, catch, crank or handle. How do you open this window? he asked the nearest student. Don’t know, sir, the student said. Another said, You can’t open it; this’s an air-conditioned building. Suppose we need air? the doctor asked, calm and reasonable. You’re not supposed to open the windows in an air-conditioned building, the student said. It screws up the system. I see, Doc said; but we need fresh air. (Outside, below, in the sunshine, little birds were singing in the forsythia, fornicating in the hydrangea.) What do we do? he asked. I guess you could complain to the Administration, another student said, a remark always good for a laugh. I see, said Dr. Sarvis. Still calm and reasonable, he walked to the steel-framed desk by the blackboard, picked up the steel-legged chair waiting behind the desk and, holding it by seat and back, punched out the window glass. All of it. Thoroughly. The students watched in quiet approval and when he was finished gave him a sitting ovation. Doc brushed his hands. We’ll skip rollcall today, he said.

  One fine day in early June, bearing west from Blanding, Utah, on their way to cache more goods, the gang paused at the summit of Comb Ridge for a look at the world below. They were riding four abreast in the wide cab of Seldom’s 4×4 pickup truck. It was lunch-time. He pulled off the dusty road—Utah State Road 95—and turned south on a jeep track that followed close to the rim. Comb Ridge is a great monocline, rising gradually on the east side, dropping off at an angle close to 90 degrees on the west side. The drop-off from the rim is about five hundred feet straight down, with another three hundred feet or more of steeply sloping talus below the cliff. Like many other canyons, mesas and monoclines in southeast Utah, Comb Ridge forms a serious barrier to east-west land travel. Or it used to. God meant it to.

  Smith pulled the truck up onto a shelf of slickrock within twenty feet of the rim and stopped. Everybody got out, gratefully, and walked close to the edge. The sun stood high in the clouds; the air was still and warm. Flowers grew from cracks in the rock—globe mallow, crownbeard, gilia, rock cress—and flowering shrubs—cliff-rose, Apache plume, chamisa, others. Doc was delighted.

  “Look,” he said, “Arabis pulchra. Fallugia paradoxa. Cowania mexicana, by God.”

  “What’s this?” Bonnie said, pointing to little purplish things in the shade of a pinyon pine.

  “Pedicularis centranthera.”

  “Yeah, okay, but what is it?”

  “What is it?” Doc paused. “What it is, no man knows, but men call it … wood betony.”

  “Don’t be a wise-ass.”

  “Also known as lousewort. A child came to me saying, ‘What is the lousewort?’ And I said, ‘Perhaps it is the handkerchief of the Lord.’ ”

  “Nobody loves a wise-ass.”

  “I know,” he admitted.

  Smith and Hayduke stood on the brink of five hundred feet of naked gravity. That yawning abyss which calls men to sleep. But they were looking not down at death but southward at life, or at least at a turmoil of dust and activity. Whine of motors, snort and growl of distant diesels.

  “The new road,” Smith explained.

  “Uh huh.” Hayduke raised his field glasses and studied the scene, some three miles off. “Big operation,” he mumbled. “Euclids, D-Nines, haulers, scrapers, loaders, backhoes, drills, tankers. What a beautiful fucking layout.”

  Doc and Bonnie came up, flowers in their hair. Far off south in the dust, sunlight flashed on glass, on bright steel.

  “What’s going on down there?” Doc said.

  “That’s the new road they’re working on,” Smith said.

  “What’s wrong with the old road?”

  “The old road is too old,” Smith explained. “It crawls up and down hills and goes in and out of draws and works around the head of canyons and it ain’t paved and it generally takes too long to get anywhere. This new road will save folks ten minutes from Blanding to Natural Bridges.”

  “It’s a county road?” Doc asked.

  “It’s built for the benefit of certain companies that operate in this county, but it’s not a county road, it’s a state road. It’s to help out the poor fellas that own the uranium mines a
nd the truck fleets and the marinas on Lake Powell, that’s what it’s for. They gotta eat too.”

  “I see,” said Doc. “Let me have a look, George.”

  Hayduke passed the field glasses to the doctor, who took a long look, puffing on his Marsh-Wheeling.

  “Busy busy busy,” he said. He returned the glasses to Hayduke. “Men, we have work to do tonight.”

  “Me too,” Bonnie said.

  “You too.”

  One thin scream came floating down, like a feather, from the silver-clouded sky. Hawk. Redtail, solitaire, one hawk passing far above the red reef, above the waves of Triassic sandstone, with a live snake clutched in its talons. The snake wriggled, casually, as it was borne away to a different world. Lunchtime.

  After a little something themselves the gang got back in Smith’s truck and drove two miles closer, over the rock and through the brush, in low range and four-wheel drive, to a high point overlooking the project more directly. Smith parked the truck in the shade of the largest pinyon pine available, which was not big enough to effectively conceal it.

  Netting, Hayduke thought; we need camouflage netting. He made a note in his notebook.

  Now the three men and the girl worked their way to the rim again, to the edge of the big drop-off. Out of habit Hayduke led the way, crawling forward on hands and knees, then on his belly the last few yards to their observation point. Were such precautions necessary? Probably not, so early in their game; the Enemy, after all, was not aware yet that Hayduke & Co. existed. The Enemy, in fact, still fondly imagined that he enjoyed the favor of the American public, with no exceptions.

  Incorrect. They lay on their stomachs on the warm sandstone, under the soft and pearly sky, and peered down seven hundred vertical feet and half a mile by line of sight to where the iron dinosaurs romped and roared in their pit of sand. There was love in neither head nor heart of Abbzug, Hayduke, Smith and Sarvis. No sympathy. But considerable involuntary admiration for all that power, all that controlled and directed superhuman force.

  Their vantage point gave them a view of the heart, not the whole, of the project. The surveying crews, far ahead of the big machines, had finished weeks earlier, but evidence of their work remained: the Day-Glo ribbon, shocking pink, that waved from the boughs of juniper trees, the beribboned stakes planted in the earth marking center line and shoulder of the coming road, the steel pins hammered into the ground as reference points.