The Fool's Progress

by Edward Abbey

  Well, we’re thirty years behind the East. That means thirty years of hope.

  Hope for what?

  Henry shuffled through the brown weeds along the fence, staring ahead, watching for rabbit. Hope for what? he echoed. Well—hope that something big will happen. Earthquakes, maybe, with volcanic eruptions here and there. A fast, efficient and painless plague. Desertification. A return of the Ice Age. I don’t know, Will. But something better happen soon.

  Something happened right here. Will pointed to a gap in the fence, the split rails knocked aside by the forcible entry of some kind of machine. The tracks were plain to see: wide knobby-treaded tires, three of them, that entered the field and circled and left again through the same gap.

  What the hell is this? Will said in exasperation. Three wheels? Some kind of oversize goddamn tricycle? With a goddamn motor?

  It’s what they call an ATV, said Henry. Where you been, Will? ATV: all-terrain vehicle.

  All-terrain vermin, if you ask me.

  They repaired the break in the fence, Will grumbling, then followed a deer path into the woods. The trail led past a salt block sculptured into softly rounded form by delicate velveteen tongues. Henry paused, looking at Will. Will pointed upward, grinning, and Henry saw a ladder of railroad spikes leading up the trunk of a poplar to a small platform of planks lashed to a pair of parallel limbs.

  Deer never look up, Will said.

  I know that and so does any game warden. So now you’ve sunk to poaching venison.

  Tastes better that way. Anyhow—Will led on, following the heart-shaped hoofprints—it’s our property.

  Yeah, but Fish & Game claims the wildlife.

  They heard the sound of shooting below, over the brow of the hill. The crack of a rifle: one, two, three shots.

  Come on, Will said. He hurried down the trail. Henry checked the load in his shotgun and followed. They could hear a high keen screaming in the distance, as of a child. Will began to run and Henry had to hustle to keep pace with him. The orange of the sun winked through the screen of passing trees. He heard another shot. They passed a second break in the fence, Will not stopping, and saw again the tracks of the three-wheeled machine plowing through the brush, grass and dead leaves, churning up the earth.

  They came abruptly to a clearing in the woods and there it was, the red gleaming miniature tractor with three grotesquely bloated rubber tires, a plastic-covered saddle big enough for two and on the fuel tank the name Honda. Two teenage boys in jackets and billed caps stared at them. One boy held a rifle in his hand and a dead marsh hawk by the legs, its breast a bloody mess of flesh and feathers. Overhead a second hawk soared in circles, the mate screaming again and again in outraged useless protest. Hawks like eagles mate for life.

  The boys looked frightened when Will tramped toward them, his rifle cradled in one arm. He smiled his broad, reassuring smile, showing big teeth inside the black beard, but the little red glint of anger in his eyes lacked charm. Henry stopped at a strategic distance, twenty feet off.

  Hello boys, Will said, what do you got there, a hawk? Pretty good shooting. Let me see that thing.

  The boy with the hawk started to hand it over.

  No, I don’t mean that, Will said, I mean your gun. I want to see your gun. The boy hesitated; Will snatched it from his grasp. The boys glanced at each other. They looked like brothers or even twins—each about eighteen or nineteen years old, with sallow complexions, eyes set close together above long damp noses, the pink flush of acne showing through their adolescent whiskers. But they were well-fed heavy-limbed hulking louts, fully grown from the feet to the neck.

  Will laid down his .22 and checked out the boy’s rifle. Pretty nice, he said, a brand-new lever-action Winchester, what do you know? You get this at Sears Roebuck? Huh? Or Monkey Ward’s? Hey?

  No answer. The boys stared at Will, then at Henry with his shotgun a few yards beyond. Will jacked the remaining cartridges out of the boy’s rifle, made sure the firing chamber was empty and reversed his grip, holding the rifle by the end of its barrel. Where you boys from? he said, looking around.

  Clarksburg, one of them muttered.

  Clarksburg? You come sixty miles to shoot a hawk? On that three-wheeled contraption? He stepped toward a young hickory.

  We got a pickup too, the boy said. We’re just having fun.

  Will smashed the rifle across the trunk of the tree. The boys froze. Will offered the broken-backed ruin to its owner, shoving it into his face. The boy cowered back. Take it, Will said, it’s yours, ain’t it? Take it and get the hell out. Go home. Don’t never come back here.

  Holding the broken rifle, the boy and his mate slouched toward the Honda ATV. They climbed on the double saddle, started the engine and rumbled away, leaving behind the elephant tracks and a blue smudge of exhaust gases. From a safe distance, out of sight, came the inevitable yelping of insults.

  Should of bashed up their goddamn machine for them too, Will muttered. Got half a mind to do it yet. We could cut them off down in Ginter Hollow.

  Henry put a hand on his brother’s thick forearm. You punished them enough.

  The hell I did. That hawk is worth a thousand trashy punks like them.

  Now now, that’s no way to feel. You know what they say in more advanced circles.

  What’s that?

  All men are brothers.

  Bullshit.

  That’s what they say in more advanced circles.

  Those punks ain’t men. They never will be.

  They’re the new breed, Will. Not exactly men, not exactly women, but something in between they call “guys.”

  I’ve heard of them. Will looked at the light dying beyond the trees, listened to the fading whine of the three-wheeler. There was no other sound but the faint and intermittent screaming in the sky—that lonely cry soaring higher, farther away, toward the western sun. In Europe by this time of day there’d be a tolling of church bells across the fields reminding the faithful of the Annunciation. Angelus time. But this was Stump Crick, Shawnee County, West Virginia, Appalachia, in our United States of North America. The brothers looked at the torn and mortal marsh hawk lying in the weeds, its blood already drying, the first exploratory black ants coming near. Fifty feet up in the dead branches of a nearby snag was a tangled thicket of twigs the size of a bushel basket: the hawks’ perennial home, with streaks of white lime on nest and branch and limb.

  All right, goddamnit, Will said. He grinned at Henry. Don’t stand there like a stump. Let’s go back to the house, see if we can get the women to cook this rabbit for supper. He patted the bulge in his game pocket.

  They marched off through the trees, through the gold and purple evening toward the wagon road, the cornfield, the ungrazed pasture, the bright stream meandering in bights and bends across the bottom, the lightning-blasted but still living shagbark hickory beside the stream, the vacant hogpen, the black creosoted barn with its weathered legend barely legible—CHEW MAIL POUCH TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST—and past the barn, the corncrib, the workshop and smithy, the icehouse, the wagonshed, the little whitewashed privy surrounded by sunflowers and hollyhocks gone to seed, the stone springhouse above, the giant and ancient sugar maple tree with auto tire dangling by one rope to the main branch, and came at last to the farmhouse itself, the two-story peaked-roof gray gothic frame dwelling with attic above and basement below that had sheltered the Lightcap family, or what remained of it, for sixty-five years. Home, you might say. And as the brothers walked toward it, they saw the glow of lamps through the curtained downstairs windows, woodsmoke rising from the kitchen stovepipe, and the brilliant flare of sunset on the glass of the attic window. Welcome….

  Henry paused, hearing the brittle clash of splitting wood, the blows of an ax. Their father!

  Will tramped on but Henry stopped, dazzled and dismayed by the sensation of eternal return. Had he not seen all of this before, heard that sound a hundred times, a thousand times, twenty thirty forty years ago? He looked again and
saw that the stocky fellow cleaving wood near the cellar door was not the old man, not his father, but young Joe, Will’s grown-up but youngest son, returned at evening from his hunt along Crooked Creek. And yet they were very much alike, the vanished father, the present grandson. Almost the same. And the dogs that came running and barking toward Will, delirious with delight, were they not the same hounds that Henry and Will had hunted for rabbit with back in the forties, in the thirties? They were; they were not. They were a new generation. They were the same.

  23

  Into the Shade

  I

  Now. Now is dogmatically now. Each moment I am reincarnated into another self, myself, the same reluctant predictable self. My belly aches from the pinch of a crab’s claw and the engine is loping—PSI: 24—losing power mile by mile. Next truck stop we must buy a case of cheap fifty-weight high sulfur oil, keep that weary motor alive. Five hundred miles yet to go. I believe. I guess. I hope. Only ten hours driving if all goes well. If we don’t have to grind up the hills of Kentucky in reverse. (My most powerful gear ratio.)

  Southern Illinois finally lies behind. Solstice the dog permits herself a sigh of relief. We cross the Wabash River into the fine rich bountiful state of Indiana and through the town of New Harmony. One of Robert Owen’s nineteenth-century experiments, a community for celibate and commonweal living. The founders called themselves Rappites, after their leader the Reverend George Rapp. They were farmers—what else? The men and women lived in separate houses, forbidden to mingle. Recruitment of new members failed to replace defunct virgins, the experiment collapsed, the communal property became private property. But they tried, those Owenites and Rappites, from 1814 until 1825 before surrendering to biology and reality. You can’t change human nature without mutilating human beings.

  Onward, eastward toward Louisville, through the gloomy green of Hoosier National Forest. A forest with farms however, former grain farms now given over to beef ranching—and why not? Pastoralize the country, I say. There are more beef cattle in little Indiana than in the whole sagebrush empire of Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah combined. This is where the grass grows. Here is where the people live.

  I pause in Carefree Indiana for gas and oil, adding sixteen gallons of regular to the fuel tank and three quarts of lowgrade to the crankcase. That should help I hope. Eventually we’ll be driven to adding sawdust, rolled oats, Bull Durham tobacco—anything to maintain piston pressure.

  I walk to the cashier’s box in the center of the fuel-pump islands—this is another self-serve station—and push my credit card through the opening in the bulletproof Plexiglas wall. The bat-eared wire-haired rat-faced woman inside checks the number of my card against the numbers near the bottom of a long list on her wall. I smell trouble. Sure enough, she frowns and says,

  “You’ll have to surrender this card, sir.” I can hear the schadenfreude in her voice: she’s caught a malefactor, a cheat, a swindler.

  Feigning cold outrage, I thrust my hand through the speakhole. “Give me that card.”

  “No sir. You’ll have to pay cash.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “So will I.”

  A file of three men stand behind me, waiting, listening with interest to this dialogue. Too late for MasterGun®. I consider, reconsider, and say, “What’s wrong with my card?” But I can guess.

  “The number’s on the default list.”

  Of course it is. And whose fault is that? I’m inclined to argue with her, to inflame this bitch’s bleeding ulcer, ratchet up her hypertension, grease her slide into a well-deserved grave—but pause. Have charity, man. Be kind. Give the lady a break. She too is caught in the techno-industrial stress & pressure lab, like two hundred million others. Enduring her slavery by trying to ignore it. Pay up and get out.

  “What do I owe?”

  She glances at the digits of electronic red on her digital-display console. Megatrend country.

  “Sixteen dollars and thirty-two cents.”

  I pay and walk back to my truck, still a free man anyhow. I count my money. About forty honky pesos left. May have to get out the “leetle robber hose,” my Hispanic credit card, or never see Stump Crick again. Or else walk.

  I drive away from the hateful gas station, park in the gloom under some trees in a roadside garbage dump—the same roadside dump that extends along a thousand coordinates from San Diego Cal to Caribou Maine, from Coral Gables Florida to Cape Flattery Wash—and feed and water the dog, give her the pill, let her nose among the trash piles and do her squat and pee. And then, feeling the old bite in the entrails I rummage through my pharmaceuticals from aspirin to Zomac, choose Demerol over Dilaudid this time, and dose myself. Nothing less can ease the pang now. It’s nearly bedtime anyhow, a gaudy sunset shaping up in the west, and when I ease onto Interstate 64 I feel once more at ease in the world. This world, such as it is. The time is short, the distance far, but I must see Will and the green green grass of home one more time. I slip into the vacuum drag behind a forty-ton Bekins moving van. Into the night at seventy mph. A decent pace. In thirty minutes we’re entering the suburbs of a big city as the full moon rises beyond the Ohio River and the Belle of Louisville. We roll into the valley, bridge the river in a torrent of mad motors, pass beneath glittering towers of babylonic splendor, hanging gardens of electricity, and debouch minutes later like riffraff from a whirlpool into the open bluegrass country beyond.

  Mild qualms of regret. Would have liked to visit the factory where Louisville Sluggers are made—I think of heroes: Ted Williams, Roger Maris, Roberto Clemente, Henry Aaron—and dogleg south for a leisurely tour of the Barton Museum of Whiskey History; God knows I owe that place some homage—but I don’t. Caught in the mainstream of eastbound traffic, hypnotized by flaring lights and the scream of the wind past my elbow, towed along by the racing caravans of monster tractor-trailer rigs, I let the machine master my impulses.

  Until weariness overcomes me, the bliss of dozing followed a moment later by the shock of alarm as I awake to find my Dodge edging toward the shoulder of the highway. Frightened, chastened, I turn right at the next exit, wander down a blacktop road between white fences, find a lane into a copse of trees and bed down for the night. The moon glares on frosty stubble. Nightbirds croak. The giant trucks driven by sleepless maniacs on Dexedrine keep roaring past, all night long, down the asphalt trail to Hell…

  II

  North-central Kentucky. Through Simpsonville, Shelbyville, Veachland and Bridgeport. Past billboards proclaiming JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS. Ain’t that the truth. They don’t make Jews like Jesus anymore. Into the valley of the Kentucky River and through the old frontier town of Frankfort by another maze of freeways. There’s the gray Roman dome of the capitol building. Rust-red factories with idle smokestacks stand by the river. Hard times for somebody. For everybody. Rising out of the bowl we find the graveyards on top of the hills. Daniel Boone lies buried here. Surveyor, settler, legislator, sheriff, trailblazer, warrior against both the Indians and the British. At one time he claimed possession of 100,000 Kentucky acres—all for himself. Could not maintain the claim, kept moving farther west every time he saw smoke from a neighbor’s chimney. Good idea.

  Into the manorlands. Long-legged thoroughbreds range the bluegrass pastures. Black Angus on the hillsides. White board fences and walls of fieldstone line curving driveways of gray gravel leading to three-story red brick châteaux with stone doorframes and Corinthian columns. The pride and pleasures of the rich—I hope they enjoy them while they can, the swine.

  Bourbon County: through Georgetown, Newtown, Centreville and Paris—the narrow crowded one-way streets of Paris. The first hillbilly town—a rough and wary look on every face. Through North Middletown, Sideview, Mount Sterling, Camargo and Jeffersonville. Funny little conical hills begin to appear through the haze of afternoon. Pointy hills each topped with a ragged fringe of black pine, red maple, dogwood, wild cherry. The foothills of Appalachia at last. Now we’re getting somewhere. I r
efill the gas tank, add two more quarts of heavyweight oil and chug onward into the low-class hinterlands. Twenty dollars in my britches, a crazy crackpot wonder in my heart, the clenching talons at my gut.

  The road becomes narrow and crooked, ascending past black barns, tobacco sheds, housetrailers, junkyards and tarpaper shanties into the hills. A chicken scuttles across the road, squawking under my wheels. Missed—and a good thing too. This is shotgun country, redneck territory, hillbilly heaven. A lounging sullen homicidal primitive in every doorway. My people.

  Each backyard sports a clothesline strung with the honest tattered garments of the poor. Why are poor folks always doing so much laundry? Because they have so many children. And why do they have so many children? Because they are poor. Because they are ignorant. Because they are sex-crazed. Because they just don’t give a damn.

  Damn truck lurching up the grade, engine sputtering, oil pressure down to 21. What happened to this steel horse of mine anyhow? Did I blow a gasket racing across southern Illinois? Should stop and pull the sparkplugs, gauge the gaps, clean the points—but that won’t help the oil pressure. Fact is the piston rings are going. I’ve known it, felt it, for a thousand miles. There’s something fundamentally wrong, an organic disorder, deep in the entrails of my laboring machine.

  Never mind. We soldier on.

  We soldier on by Gawd. Too late to pause for technical refreshment now. Too late the phalarope. Too late to rethink, regroup, rephrase the great endeavor. Myra my Mishkin where are you now? Where’s my Elaine? Where’s my Ellsworth? Where’s my Claire?…

  Seized by compulsion I stop at the village up ahead—a quaint rural slum called Ezel—you’ll find one every three four miles now—locate a phone and dial a familiar Manhattan number. She won’t be there, of course, or she won’t answer or I’ll get the answering machine or she’ll refuse to take my call but no harm in trying. Will ease my conscience anyhow.

  The phone rings three times, is picked up, I hear that harsh sweet Yiddish snarl again: “Yes, Mishkin-Miller here.”