by Edward Abbey
“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said. “You look after those idiots, make sure they get their vitamin pellets and brush their teeth after every meal. Don’t let George drink himself to death. See that Seldom Seen gets back to his wives now and then.”
“Of course, Doc.” She sobbed between his lapels, her bosom pressed against his stately paunch.
“Be careful. Never tell George you needed help with the blaster. He doesn’t know. Make those maniacs exercise some restraint. Don’t cry, darling. I love you. Are you listening to me?”
She nodded within his arms, still crying.
“Okay. Stay out of trouble until I get back. Do your work but make sure nobody gets hurt. And make sure you don’t get caught.”
She nodded. The pilot revved his engines. The shattering roar surged out in waves to Tower Butte, Vermilion Cliffs, Lone Rock and back, an insane clatter of lunatic pistons. Passengers were filing out the gate: cowboys with briefcases; rich hippies more beaded and banded than Ute or Paiute, on their way to the banks of the Ganges to find a new guru; U.S. Bureau of Wrecklamation officials with heads like turnips and eyes like pellets of rat poison, clutching snap-brims through the backwash of the props; sweet little old ladies in shawls bound for Phoenix to baby-sit the kids (Phoebe Sue’s getting a divorce again)—half of Page, it seemed that day, was bound for elsewhere and who could blame them? Any town with more Baptists than Indians. With more beer drinkers than winos. With more motorboats than birchbark canoes. With more sunshine than sensibility….
“Better go now.”
He kissed her tear-streaked face, the fragrant mouth, the heavy lashes of her closed eyes.
“Doc …?”
“Yes …?”
“Still love you, Doc, you know….”
“Sure, Bonnie….”
“See you….”
“Sure….”
Dr. Sarvis, satchel, newspaper and topcoat in hand, hurries for the gangway, fumbling for his ticket as he goes. He pauses, theatrically, at the top of the steps, turning to wave—not farewell but so long for now—to his friends and comrades. Bonnie, leaning against Seldom Seen’s thin frame, dabs at her cheeks with a red bandanna and waves back.
They watched the plane go rumbling down the runway, engines howling like beasts in pain, saw airfoils work their magic one more time, the wheels rise from asphalt and fold into the nest of the wings as the awkward tin bird lurched over the power line beyond (barely clearing it) and rose and banked toward the blind stare of the sun.
Feeling vaguely amputated, they retired for consultation to the dim recesses of a familiar Page bar. Happy hour: the dive was full of thirsty men, including a table ringed with six leather-faced cowboys and their bouffant girl friends. Bonnie slipped a quarter into the jukebox, picked her favorites—first some nouveau-riche hard rock band from England. This was patiently endured. Then followed another rock group, surmounted by the hysteric stridulations of an imitation-Afro female vocalist, one Janis Joplin of martyred memory. Too much. The nearest cowboy rose to his feet—about six foot eight, he took some time to unlimber his full height—and walked on legs like calipers to the jukebox and kicked it, hard, and when this didn’t work he kicked it again, harder. That worked. The needle slid crosswise against the groovy grain of the vinyl disc; a hideous squawk electronically amplified snaked like aural lightning through the ears, brains and central nervous systems of everybody present. Strong men cringed. The juke’s reflexes, activated, moved swiftly into automatic servo-mechanism: the retrieval arm grasped the hated record and filed it back in the mute rack. As the cowboy slid another quarter in, there was a moment of that golden stuff, silence.
Only a moment.
“Hey!” yelled Bonnie Abbzug in her rawest Bronx snarl, “that was my record you kicked, you bowlegged sonofabitch.”
Politely the cowboy ignored her. Calmly scanning the console, he pushed the Merle Haggard button, the Hank Snow button and (good God!) the Andy Williams button. He shoved another quarter in.
Bonnie jumped up. “You get my Janis back on there!” Ignoring her, the cowboy searched for three more selections. Bonnie leaned on him, tried to shoulder him aside. He gave her a shove.
Hayduke rose, three shooters of Beam and a quart of Coors gurgling in his gut. He felt the moment had come. Rising to his full five foot eight he reached up and tapped the cowboy on the shoulder. The cowboy turned.
“Hi,” said Hayduke, grinning. “I’m a hippie.” He swung for the stomach; the cowboy staggered back against the wall. Hayduke faced the five other cowboys (and their heifers) at the table. They were rising too, all smiles. He began his number.
“My name’s Hayduke,” he roared, “George Hayduke, and I’m happy to be here. I hear that sex revolution has finally come to Page Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County. All I want to say is it’s high fucking time. Why I hear even cowboys can get laid now. I hear—”
Well. Shit. Wrong cowboys this time.
Hayduke came back, gradually, painfully, through dreams and memories, a maze of nightmares and hallucinations in the middle of a roaring headache, to find himself in what appeared to be (good Christ!) a motel room. With gentle hands on his head and face, swabbing his wounds with a warm wet cloth. Her face, sweet and lovely as an angel’s, gazed down at him through his pink mist of hurt and pain….
“Idiot,” she seemed to be saying, “you could have got yourself killed. There were six of them, only three of us.”
Three who? Six of what?
“Poor old Seldom,” Bonnie went on, “nearly got himself beaten up getting you out of there. They wanted to kill him too.”
Who? He tried to rise. She leaned on him, pushed him back into the pillows.
“Relax, I’m not finished.” She picked glass from the gash in his scalp. “We’ll have to get this sewed up.”
“Where’s Seldom?” he croaked.
“In the bathroom soaking his bruises. He’s all right, don’t worry about him. You’re the one got the worse of it. They mashed your head against the corner of the jukebox.”
Jukebox? Jukebox…. Ahhhhh, now he began to remember. The Janis Jalopy record. A bit of a scuffle in a bar. Cowboys ten feet tall with eyes like falcons looming over him. Yeah. The wrong cowboys. About eighteen of them, maybe forty. All over the joint.
Seldom Seen Smith emerged from the bath, a towel wrapped around his lean torso, on what he called his face a crooked grin, one purple eyelid and an apparent deviated septum. Nostrils packed with blood-soaked cotton. Walking out on his extenuated legs he looked, more than ever, like some kind of bird—a talking buzzard, maybe, a blond vulture from the canyon rims.
“What’s on the Monday Night Movie?” he says, turning on the television.
“The Saturday Night Movie,” Bonnie says.
They spent the evening there in the stucco box of the Shady Rest Motel, an elderly economy lodge (no pool) but Page’s pride. The air cooler rumbled, the TV maundered on and on. Smith stitched up Hayduke’s scalp wound and taped on a bandage compress. He and Bonnie dressed the lesser wounds, then helped Hayduke into a warm bath. Smith went out for beer and food. Bonnie bathed Hayduke with tender hands and when his penis rose up in majesty, as it surely did, she caressed it with loving fingers, praised it with generous words. He was recovering rapidly. Hayduke knew, despite his battered stupor, that he had been chosen. Nothing he could do about it now. Beaten but grateful, he surrendered.
Smith returned. They ate. A tactful man, Smith withdrew when the movie was over, went out into the desert with his truck and bedroll, slept under the stars, on the sand with tarantulas and sidewinders for company, and dreamed no doubt of his neglected wives.
Abbzug and Hayduke, alone at last, crashed into one another like boxcars coupling in a railway yard. No one kept score that night but the rickety motel bed rocked on its legs and clattered against the wall more times than strictly seemly; the sound of Bonnie’s cries and outcries rang out through the dark at unpredictable but frequent
intervals, causing unfavorable comment in adjoining rooms.
Late next morning, at checkout time, after a grand finale, one replete the other depleted, they lay limp as kelp on a wet beach and listened for quite some time, before answering, to the gentle rapping of Smith’s knuckles on the hollow-core plywood door. That door where the printed notice hung, tacked in a frame.
NOTICE
Check Out Time 10 A.M.
All Contents This Room
Were Itemized and Counted
Before Rental to You.
Your Name, Address &
License Number Will Be
Retained in Our Permanent
Files. Enjoy Your Stay
And—COME AGAIN!
The Mgmt.
Shady Rest Motel
17
The American Logging Industry:
Plans and Problems
He said he was going home for a while. He said he had thought about it a lot during the night and decided he really should visit wives and kids, sort his mail and other business and reschedule some boat trips down the Green before rejoining them. Besides, he was afraid that Bishop Love and the Search and Rescue Team would still be on the watch for him in San Juan and Garfield counties. He asked Abbzug and Hayduke to delay the next operation for at least a week.
The three had breakfast together in Mom’s Café. An economy eatery (nothing fit to eat) and one of Page’s finest. They drank the chlorinated orange “drink,” ate the premixed frozen glue-and-cotton pancakes and the sodium-nitrate sodium-nitrite sausages and drank the carbolic coffee. Typical Page breakfast, they agreed, and “not half bad.” It was all bad. They agreed as well on the contents of the near future.
Smith would make his four-hundred-mile all-Utah conjugal rounds, fulfilling his domestic obligations. Then they would reunite for the projected attack upon the Utah State Highway Department and its latest works.
And Bonnie and George? Well, George admitted he had plans for a premature premarital honeymoon in the cool high North Rim forests above Grand Canyon, a declivity of sorts which Bonnie wished to check out from above. Also, he wanted to investigate current activities of the U.S. Forest Service and the logging companies on the Kaibab Plateau.
The men locked wrists, à la Mallory and Irvine on Everest ‘24. Bonnie embraced Smith. They parted, Smith in his truck bound for Cedar City, Bountiful and Green River, George and Bonnie in the jeep driving from Page toward the Echo Cliffs, Marble Canyon and points beyond.
Bonnie remembered the last time she had been this way, headed for Lee’s Ferry and the now historic river trip down through the Canyon. How could she forget the bearded bum on the beach? the rapids? the campfire conspiracy which had thickened from day to day, night after night, down there in the earth’s Precambrian bowels, all the way from Lee’s Ferry to Temple Bar? On the beach near Separation Wash the men swore to one another the pledge of eternal comradeship, sealing the oath with bourbon and with blood drawn by the nick of Hayduke’s Buck knife from their outstretched palms. Bonnie, aloof in the empyrean of her weed, smiled at the ceremony but was tacitly included nonetheless. By campfire under midnight stars three thousand feet below the rim of the Shivwits Plateau the Monkey Wrench Gang was born….
The lovers dropped through the notch, hung a hard right at Bitter Springs, sped north through the edge of Good-bye Come Again Navajoland to Marble Canyon Bridge (“this one, too, someday,” Hay duke mused) and across into the Arizona Strip. Westward they raced in Hayduke’s jeep, under the face of Paria Plateau and the Vermilion Cliffs, past Cliff Dwellers Lodge into Houserock Valley, through the red inferno of stone and heat waves, past the gateway to Buffalo Ranch and up the limestone bulk (like a beached whale on the desert plain) of the East Kaibab Monocline. Here the jeep climbed, laboring upward four thousand feet to the yellow pine and grassy meadows of Kaibab National Forest.
They paused like all good tourists at Jacob Lake for gasoline, for coffee and pie and take-out beer. The air was clean and sweet with the smell of sunshine, pine tars and grama grass, cool despite the awful desert heat waiting below. The translucent leaves of the aspen shimmered in the light, the slim white-barked trunks of this tree so ladylike against the dark background of conifers.
At Jacob Lake they turned south on the road which dead-ends at the North Rim of Grand Canyon. Bonnie had love and scenery and a cabin in the pines in mind; Hayduke, also a romantic and a dreamer, thought mostly of masochistic machinery, steel in pain, iron under unnatural duress, the multiple images of what he called “creative destruction.” One way or another they were going to slow if not halt the advance of Technocracy, the growth of Growth, the spread of the ideology of the cancer cell. “I have sworn upon the altar of God,” Hayduke bellows into the roaring wind (for the jeep’s rag top is down), and he blinks, trying to remember Jefferson’s words, “eternal hostility against every fucking form of tyranny”—getting it slightly wrong but absolutely right—“over the life of man.”
“What about the life of woman?” screams Abbzug.
“Fuck woman,” hollers Hayduke joyfully. And come to think of it—“And come to think of it,” he adds, turning off the highway down a rare little lane into the woods, under the pines and tinkling aspens, out of sight of the road to the edge of a sunny meadow dappled with cow dung, “let’s!”
He stopped the jeep, shut off the engine, grabbed her and dragged her down to the grass. She resisted manfully, clawing at his hair, tearing his shirt, trying to get her knee between his legs.
“You bitch,” he snarls, “I’m going to fuck you.”
“Yeah,” she says, “you try it you degenerate bastard.”
They rolled over and over on the cow-cropped meadow grass, over the fallen leaves, the pine needles, the neurotic and panicked ants.
She almost escaped. He tackled her, pulled her down again, crushed her in his big arms, buried his eyes his mouth his face in the fragrance of her hair, bit her on the nape of the neck, drawing blood, nibbled on the lobe of her ear….
“Fucking fat Jewish bitch.”
“You red-neck honky uncircumcised swine of a goy.”
“Fucking bitch.”
“High school dropout. Verbal paraplegic. Unemployed veteran.”
“I want it.”
“No good at Scrabble.”
“Right now!”
“All right. So all right.” But she was on top. “Your head’s in a pile of cowshit, you know. You don’t care. Of course not. All right. Okay. Where is it? Can’t find it. This? You mean this? Hello, Mom, is that you? This is Sylvia. Yeah. Listen, Mom, I won’t be able to make it for Chanukah. Yeah, that’s what I said. Well, because my boyfriend—remember Ichabod Ignatz?—he blew up the airport. He’s some kind of a—oooh!—a nut….”
He plunged into her. She ingulfed him. The winds wailed through the yellow pines, the aspens shivered, leaves dancing with a sound like many minor waterfalls. The discreet chatter of little birds, the barking of a gray fox, the swish of tires on the distant paved road, all such normal, sane, moderate sounds were swept away over the edge of the world, lost in the rush.
Up and down, in and out of forest and meadow, past sinks and pits and bowls in the rolling terrain of the limestone plateau (riddled like a sponge with endless cavern systems), he piloted the jeep on, southward, toward the logging industry, its hopes and fears. She nestled against him, half upon him, long hair streaming like a banner in the wind.
They paused once again, near the north end of a meadow called Pleasant Valley, to edit and beautify an official U.S. Forest Service Smokey Bear sign. The sign was a life-size simulacrum of the notorious ursine bore, complete with ranger hat, blue jeans and shovel, and it said what these signs always say, to wit, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”
Out with the paints again. They added a yellow mustache, which certainly improved Smokey’s bland muzzle, and touched up his eyeballs with a hangover hue of red. He began to look like Robert Red-ford as the Sundance Kid. Bonnie unbuttoned Smokey’s
fly, pictorially speaking, and painted onto his crotch a limp pet-cock with hairy but shriveled balls. To Smokey’s homily on fire prevention Hayduke attached an asterisk and footnote: “Smokey Bear is full of shit.” (Most fires of course are caused by that vaporous hominoid in the sky, God; disguised, i.e., as lightning.)
Very funny. However, in 1968, the United States Congress made it a Federal offense to desecrate, mutilate or otherwise improve any official representation of Smokey the Bear. Aware of this legislation, Bonnie bullied Hayduke back into the jeep and out of there before he could carry out his urge to hang Smokey by the neck to any nearby tree, such as a Pinus ponderosa, and elevate likewise the bear’s penis from flaccid pendency to full in rigor extremis erection.
“Enough,” explained Abbzug, and she was right, as usual.
Four miles north of the entrance to the North Rim District of Grand Canyon National Park, they came to an intersection in the road. The sign said WATCH FOR TRUCKS. Hayduke turned left at this point, onto the unpaved but broad logging road which led eastward into the forest, and a new scene.
During the entire forty-mile drive from Jacob Lake they had seen nothing so far but green meadows decorated with herds of cattle and deer, and beyond the meadows the aspen, pine, spruce and fir of what appeared to be, uncut and intact, a people’s national forest. Façade. Behind the false front of standing trees, a fringe of virgin growth a quarter mile deep, was the real business of the national forest: timber farms, lumber plantations, field factories for the joist, board, pulp and plywood industry.
Bonnie was astonished. She had never seen a clear-cut logging operation before.
“What happened to the trees?”
“What trees?” says Hayduke.
“That’s what I mean.”
He stopped the jeep. In silence they looked around at a scene of devastation. Within an area of half a square mile the forest had been stripped of every tree, big or small, healthy or diseased, seedling or ancient snag. Everything gone but the stumps. Where trees had been were now huge heaps of slash waiting to be burned when the winter snows arrived. A network of truck, skidder and bulldozer tracks wound among the total amputees.