by Edward Abbey
She closed her eyes, allowing the radiant light to diffuse her mind. The cat lay still between her legs. From outside, transmuted by the walls, she heard only a remote murmur, the pullulation of the city’s restless hive. She closed off the sound gradually, concentrating on inner reality.
The city became unreal. Doc Sarvis peered at her still, though, from the periphery of her consciousness, like Kilroy over a fence, red nose and all. She stopped thinking about him; he became nil, null and void. The last vibrations of the freeway died in her nerves. Step by step she emptied and composed her mind, removing one by one all images stamped by the day—the shopping tour, the pimply adolescent, the strange cargo in Doc’s station wagon, the way he had stared at the cocktail waitress’s legs, the pointless talk, the drive to the hospital, his shambling bulk disappearing into those endless corridors of pain, the fur of the cat between her shaven calves, the sound of Shankar’s sitar, the odor of the incense. All passed, faded, glided off into nothingness as she concentrated on her own, her secret, her private, her personal (cost $50) meditation word….
But. A speck, an irritant, grew like a seed pearl in one corner of that cornerless consciousness. Eyes shut, nerves still, brain at rest, she saw nevertheless a thatch of sun-bleached hair, a pair of green bright jack-Mormon eyes, a nose like a buzzard’s beak, beaming at her down telepathic microwaves. Behind the beak, off to one side, a finely reticulated pattern of dancing microdots resolved themselves into the image, transient but true, of a bearded bum with eyes like twin piss-holes in a snowbank, confronting her.
Bonnie opened her eyes. The cat stirred lazily. She stared at the smooth-rotating record on the still-turning faintly cambered turntable—she heard the steady, languorous, mesmeric whine, twang, drone and singsong of Ravi Shankar and his Hindu zither, accompanied by the pitter-patter of little brown hands bouncing on the taut cowskin (cow skin?) of an Advaita-Vedantist shakti-yoga bongo drum. (Lo, the poor Hindu, he does the best he can do.)
Well, shee-it, thought Ms. Abbzug. Well Jesus jumping blue Christ, she thought. She got up. The cat writhed around her leg, purring. She kicked it, not too hard, into a pile of cushions. Holy motherfuck, Bonnie thought, I am bored. Am I bored! Her lips moved.
“I want some action,” she said softly, into the quiet womb-dome.
There was no immediate reply.
Loudly, definitely, defiantly, she said, “It’s time to get fucking back to work!”
11
Back to Work
It seemed wiser to leave Utah for a while. When Smith had completed his Henry Mountain trip, he and Hay duke sped west by night from Hanksville, around the west side of the mountains, and south down a dirt road along the Waterpocket Fold. Nobody lives there. They reached Burr Pass and climbed the switchbacks, fifteen hundred feet, to the top of the Fold. Halfway to the summit they found a defenseless Highway Dept. Bulldozer, Cat D-7, parked on the shoulder of the road. They paused for rest and refreshment.
It only took a few minutes. The work was developing into a smooth routine. While Smith stood watch from the top of the hill, Hayduke performed the drill perfected in Comb Wash, adding a last step: Siphon fuel from fuel tank into can; pour fuel over engine block, track carriage and operator’s compartment; set machine on fire.
Smith didn’t entirely approve of the last step. “That there’s just likely to catch the eye of some sonofabitch up in the sky in an airy-plane,” he complained.
He looked up; the kindly stars looked down. One space capsule jam-packed with astronauts and other filler material glided across the field of stars, entered earth’s shadow and disappeared. One TWA jetliner at 29,000 feet, L.A. to Chicago, passed across the southern sky, visible only by its running lights. No one else was mucking about this time of night. The nearest town was Boulder, Utah, pop. 150, thirty-five miles to the west. Nobody lived any nearer.
“Besides,” Smith went on, “it don’t do much good. All you’re doing is burning the paint off.”
“Well, shit,” Hayduke gasped, too winded for debate. “Shit … whew! … I just like … hah! … to sort of … hah! … clean things up good.” The pyromantic.
From within the fiery glow of the dying machine, a terminal case, came the muffled report of a small explosion. Followed by another. A fountain of sparks and gobs of burning grease lofted into the night.
Smith shrugged. “Let’s get out of here.”
They passed through the village of Boulder in the middle of the night. Sleepers stirred at the sound of the truck but no one saw them. They turned south and followed the ridge road between forks of the Escalante River, dropped down into the canyon, up the yonder side, among the pale domes—hundreds of feet high—of cross-bedded sandstone. The ancient dunes that turned to rock some years previous. Five miles east of the town of Escalante, Smith hung a left onto the Hole-in-the-Rock road.
“Where we going?”
“A shortcut to Glen Canyon City. We’re gonna go up over the middle of the Kaiparowits Plateau.”
“I didn’t know there was any road up there.”
“You might call it that.”
The lights of drill-rig towers glimmered in the distance, far off across the uninhabited immensities of the Escalante benchlands. They passed, from time to time, familiar names on little metal signs at turn-offs along the road: Conoco, Arco, Texaco, Gulf, Exxon, Cities Service.
“The bastards are everywhere,” Hayduke grumbled. “Let’s go get those rigs.”
“There’s men out there a-workin’. Out there in the cold at four in the morning slaving away to provide us with oil and gas for this here truck so we can help sabotage the world planetary maggot-machine. Show a little gratitude.”
The light of dawn found them rolling southeast under the façade of the Fifty Mile Cliffs. Hole-in-the-Rock was a dead end (for motor vehicles) but their route lay another way, up a connecting jeep trail over the plateau.
Hayduke spotted geophones along the road. “Stop!”
Smith stopped. Hayduke jumped out and tore the nearest geophone out of the dirt, along with the cable that connected it to a series. Geophones mean seismic exploration, the search for mineral deposits by means of analysis of vibration patterns—seismographs—in the subsurface rock, the vibrations created by explosive charges set off in the bottom of drill holes. Hayduke wrapped a loop of the cable around the rear bumper of the truck and got back in the cab.
“Okay.” He opened a beer. “Christ, I’m hungry.”
Smith drove forward. Behind them, as the cable tightened, the geophones began popping from the ground and scuttling along behind the truck, dancing in the dust. Dozens of them, expensive little instruments, ripped untimely from the earth. As they proceeded the truck yanked still more out of the ground, the whole lot.
“Soon as the sun comes up,” Smith promised, “we’ll fix some breakfast. Soon as we get out of the open and up in the woods.”
They reached the jeep road and turned right, southward, toward the high cliffs. Hayduke saw something else. “Stop.”
Reluctantly Smith stopped the truck. In the cold blue dawn they gazed across a half mile of sagebrush toward what seemed to be an unmanned drilling rig. No lights, no movement, no motor vehicles. Hayduke groped for the field glasses, found them and studied the scene.
“Seldom, there’s nobody there. Nobody.”
Smith looked eastward. The clouds that way were slowly turning salmon-pink. “George, we’re right out in the open. If anybody comes …”
“Seldom, there’s work to do.”
“I don’t like it too much here. We ain’t got no cover a-tall.”
“It’s our duty.”
“It’s our first duty not to get ourselves strung up.”
Hayduke reflected. That was true. There was truth in that statement. “But this is too beautiful to pass up. Look at that thing. A nice big jackknife oil rig and not an oilman in ten miles.”
“They might come driving by most any time.”
“Seldom, I got to do
it. I’ll get out here, walk over to it. You drive the truck on up into that canyon out of sight. Get breakfast started. Lots of coffee. I’ll be with you in an hour.”
“George—”
“I feel safer on foot anyhow. If anybody comes I hide in the sagebrush and wait for night. If I don’t show up in, say, two hours, you go on up into the woods and wait for me there. Leave sign beside the road so I don’t miss your turnoff. I’ll take my pack.”
“Well, George, goldammit …”
“Don’t worry.”
Hayduke got out and took his backpack containing food, water, tools, sleeping bag—all packed and ready—from the bed of the truck. From the rear bumper, looking back, he could see about half a mile and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of geophones strung out in the dust, waiting for disposal.
“The geophones and that cable …”he said.
“I’ll get rid of ’em,” Smith said.
Hayduke took off through the waist-high brush. Smith drove away, dragging the oil company equipment up the road. A fine fog of dust rose into the air, floating like spun gold against the light.
Halfway to his objective Hayduke came upon the truck road leading to the drill rig. He broke into a jog, the backpack belted firmly to his hips. He was tired, hungry, overloaded with beer, sick in the stomach and light in the head, but adrenaline and excitement and a high and noble purpose kept him going.
The rig. Nobody there. He climbed the steel gangway to the drilling platform. Racks of six-inch steel pipe stood in one corner of the drill tower. The pipe tongs swung from their chains. The drill hole was empty, covered only by a steel lid which he lifted off. He looked down into the blackness of the casing. Some of these holes, he knew, went six miles into the earth’s mantle, over 30,000 feet, deeper than Everest is high. He reached for the nearest loose object, a two-foot pipe wrench, and dropped it into the opening.
He bent his ear to the hole and listened. The falling wrench made a hissing noise, growing fainter as it rose in pitch toward the intensity of a scream. He imagined, involuntarily, a living creature falling down that awful pipe, feet first let us say, looking up at the dwindling point of light that meant hope and air and space and life. He did not hear or could not hear the wrench hit bottom.
Hayduke looked about for other missiles. He found wrenches, chains, drill bits, pipe fittings, nuts, bolts, crowbars, broken pipe and drill steel and dropped them all down the black hole. Whatever would fit, everything he could find, went whistling down the casing. He even took one of the hanging pipe tongs and tried to wrestle a length of drill pipe into the casing but that was too much for one man. Needed the tower man, on the little catwalk eighty feet above, to manage the other end.
Tired of dropping things, he turned his attention to the big Gardner-Denver diesel engines that powered the rotary drilling unit. He broke open the driller’s toolbox, found the end wrench he needed, crawled on his back under the engines and turned the crankcase plug in each, draining the oil. Then he started the engines and let them run.
There was nothing much more he could do with his bare hands. If he had thermite he could burn the legs off the drill tower; if he had explosives he could blow it up. He had neither.
Hayduke left his signature in the sand: NEMO. He took a drink of water from his canteen and looked about. The desert world appeared empty of all human life but himself. Black-throated sparrows sang reedily in the sagebrush. The edge of the sun flamed at the rim of the Hole-in-the-Rock. Holy country; which is exactly why he had to do the work he had exactly done. Because somebody had to do it.
He walked toward the canyon and cliffs, angling toward the road that Smith had taken. (The drill-rig engines whined in the rear, dying.) As he walked he plucked sprigs of sagebrush and crushed the powdery leaves, silver-blue and gray-green, between his fingers. He loved the spicy fragrance of sage, that rare and troubling odor which evoked, in itself, the whole Southwestern world of canyon, mesa and mountainside, of charged sunlight and visionary vistas.
Okay big-foot, all right wise-ass, here’s the jeep trail; now we’re entering the vagina of the canyon into the womb of the plateau and where’s our asshole buddy Seldom Smith?
The answer appeared around the bend after next: the tail-end geophone of a half-mile string of geophones, property of Standard Oil of California, lying in the dust and rocks. He gathered them up as he walked, following the string into a grove of jack pine to the truck. Nobody there. But the smell of cowboy coffee boiled to its rich embittered essence, the smell of frying bacon, gave away Smith’s location.
“You forgot something,” Hayduke said, dragging the immense tangle of cable and geophones into camp.
Smith rose from the fire. “Jesus Christ!” The bacon sizzles. The coffee smokes. “Plumb dumb forgot,” he said.
They stashed the stuff in the lee of a boulder in the wash below, where the next flash flood would bury it all under tons of sand and gravel.
After breakfast, still feeling not quite immune from discovery and interrogation, they drove to the summit of the plateau, a rolling woodland of yellow pine and scrub oak, high and cool. They turned off the main road onto a dead-end side road (erasing their track with broom and bough) and lay down in the sunlight, on pine needles, indifferent to the busy ants, the scrabbling squirrels, the crested jays, the galaxies of midges dancing in the sunrays, and slept.
They rose at the crack of noon and lunched on longhorn cheese and crackers, washed down the gullet with a good cheap working-man’s beer. Not Coors. On the road again, driving through the woods, they munched apples for dessert.
Hayduke, who had never been on the Kaiparowits Plateau before, who had never seen it except from below and across various canyon systems, was surprised to discover what a vast, forested, fragrant and lovely island of land it really is. However, protected only by that limber reed that supple straw that trembling twig the U.S. Department of the Interior, and coveted by several consortia of oil companies, power companies, coal companies, road builders and land developers, the Kaiparowits Plateau, like Black Mesa, like the high plains of Wyoming and Montana, faced the same attack which had devastated Appalachia.
Into other parts. The clouds passed, in phrases and paragraphs, like incomprehensible messages of troubling import, overhead across the forested ridges, above the unsealed cliffs, beyond the uninhabited fields of lonely mesas, followed by their faithful shadows flowing with effortless adaptation over each crack, crevice, crease and crag on the wrinkled skin of the Utahn earth.
“We’re still in Utah?”
“That’s right, pardner.”
“Have another beer.”
“Not till we cross that Arizona line.”
The road clung to the spine of the ridge, sidewinding in sinuous loops toward the blue smokes of Smoky Mountain where deposits of coal, ignited by lightning some long-gone summer afternoon a thousand—ten thousand?—years before, smoldered beneath the surface of the mountain’s shoulders.
There seemed to be no pursuit. But why should there be? They hadn’t done anything wrong. So far they had done everything right.
Down on the alkali flats where only saltbush, cholla and snakeweed grew, they met a small herd of baldface cows ambling up to the higher country. Beef on the hoof, looking for trouble. What Smith liked to call “slow elk,” regarding them with satisfaction as a reliable outdoor meat supply in hard times. How did they survive, these wasteland cattle? It was these cattle which had created the wasteland. Hayduke and Smith dallied several times to get out the old pliers and cut fence.
“You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” Smith would say. “Especially sheep fence.” (Clunk!) “But cow fence too. Any fence.”
“Who invented barbed wire anyhow?” Hayduke asked. (Plunk!)
“It was a man named J. F. Glidden done it; took out his patent back in 1874.”
An immediate success, that barbwire. Now the antelope die by the thousands, the bighorn sheep perish by the hundreds every winter from Alberta down to
Arizona, because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought. And coyotes too, and golden eagles, and peasant soldiers on the coils of concertina wire, victims of the same fat evil the wide world over, hang dead on the barbed and tetanous steel.
“You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) “Always cut fence. That’s the law west of the hundredth meridian. East of that don’t matter none. Back there it’s all lost anyhow. But west, cut fence.” (Plang!)
They came to Glen Canyon City, pop. 45 counting dogs. The single store in town was closed and the hopeful sign now hung by one rusty nail to the doorjamb, swinging with the wind. It would soon fall. Only the café and a gasoline station remained open. Smith and Hay duke stopped to refuel.
“When you gonna get that forty-million-dollar power plant built, Pop?” Hayduke asked the old man at the pump. (Texaco, 55¢ per gallon; a rip-off at half the price.) The old man, lank of jaw and phlegmy-eyed, looked at him with distrust. Hayduke’s shaggy beard full of wildlife, his wild hair, the greasy leather sombrero: enough to inspire suspicion in anyone.
“Don’t exackly know yet,” the old man says. “Them goldamn envirn-meddlers is a-holdin’ things up.”
“They won’t let you degrade the quality of the fucking air, is that the trouble?”
“Why them ignorant sonsabitches. Why we got more air around here’n ary man can breathe.” He waves one skinny arm at the sky. “Looky up there. More air’n you could shake your pecker at. How much you want?”
“Fill her up.”