All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

by David Gessner

  The reason this land I was driving through was so vulnerable, to mining and driving and the tires of mountain bikes, to people in general, is that it is so dry. And like dry skin, it cracks easily and heals slowly.

  Ravens hopped across the road, casually getting out of the way of the car. I passed no one, which excited me. At Arches I had grumbled about wanting to be alone, and now I had my chance. No one else, I supposed, was brave or maybe stupid enough to camp here on a stormy day in monsoon season. At the moment I wasn’t worried. Great mythic slabs of rock, red monuments, lined the road to the north. Bulging ramparts, with orange and yellow-red scree sloping down at their feet. As I drove on and downward the valley opened up and I entered the land of rock needles, towers shooting up eight hundred feet into the sky, spires and pinnacles. I stopped and got out before the entrance to the park proper. The sun broke through as I took out my binoculars and stared across at the canyon walls of Chesler Park.

  It was then I saw what I had hoped for: silver streaks running down the troughs of orange cliffs. Waterfalls. Not one, not two, but half a dozen. Silver water against red rock. Water in a dry land.

  I turned off a mile before the park entrance and followed the dirt road onto Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. My usual campground, the one I camped at with Nina before we got married, and with my friend Mark Honerkamp, was down by Indian Creek, but it would not be wise to descend all that way to the creek given the weather. With enough rain the creek would not be content to stay within its bed. So instead I set up my tent at Hamburger Rock, which matched its name almost exactly, an H. R. Pufnstuf village of bulbous sandstone where I could sleep under a ledge during what might be a wet night. There was still some light, so with the tent up, I decided to bike down to the creek. Muddy red water flowed over pockmarked rock before dropping over falls. I looked up to where I knew I’d see an Anasazi kiva and, sure enough, there it was. Farther up was the ledge where Honerkamp, Nina, and I once climbed to watch the lunar eclipse. (“That’s the last sight we’ll ever see,” Hones said when the sky went dark, leaving us blind atop a rock cliff.) I rode my bike down into one of the side canyons, got lost, fretted that I had not brought along a first-aid or snake-bite kit. I was learning that as you get older there is more to be afraid of, or at least more to worry about. But I made it back to camp in time to drink a beer on top of Hamburger Rock and watch the last glimmer of sun. I sat out on a ledge roughly the shape of the head of a loggerhead turtle. Small junipers gnarled out of rock.

  I realized how much I’d missed the place. If the West really “faces you like a dare” as Stegner said, then here it was. I was happy to be without phone or Internet, just scribbling down my thoughts in my journal, but then decided it was time for bed when the winds picked up and the first streaks of lightning blazed across the southern sky. Clouds came alive, illuminated from the inside by the lightning. I was a little worried about getting soaked, but between my tarp and the ledge of rock I thought I’d be okay. To my surprise I slept deeply. At least until I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak and heard the close howling of coyotes. The sand was wet, but overhead patches of stars blazed between the clouds. I suspected I would live until morning.

  I woke alone in the desert. My tent was dry but evidence of rain was readily available. When I went exploring I found red froth churning down Indian Creek. This is what this red, parched land spends most of the year waiting for. The sound of running water filled me with a bubbly Champagne happiness that almost counteracted the lack of coffee. I took a morning bath below the falls, though it didn’t leave me clean so much as coated. To an outsider—there were none, fortunately—it might have looked like I was wearing a red, caked onesie, even tighter on my skin than yesterday’s Lycra.

  I took a long bike ride—three hours—through the dry land. I headed north on the dirt path toward Moab. I saw no one, just red dirt and red rock, tower after tower after tower. My environmental outrage upon seeing the crowds the previous day was somewhat tempered by the fact that I had now not encountered a human being in close to twenty-four hours.

  The night before I had been nervous while riding into the side canyon, but while I was in essentially the same circumstances that morning—all alone with no first aid—I felt nothing but exhilarated. Maybe that was stupid. And maybe it was stupid to keep pedaling and pedaling, farther and farther away from camp. But my “keep going around the next corner” gene had been engaged. Pumping my legs, sweating, I stared out at sights I felt privileged to see. All alone, I felt immensely happy and looking back I still do. How wonderful that once you shut down your nagging brain, moments like these are still available. I rode over red rock, out to an overlook of the Needles, feeling like I had eaten hallucinogens, not a granola bar, for breakfast.

  We pay a lot of lip service to the word freedom. But for me the essence of the word comes from these moments. Just you and the beautiful world and a long day ahead to do whatever the hell you want. It was what pulled in Abbey, and a million others, too.

  It is also the reason so many of us are resistant to restraint, to regulating and policing our public lands. “Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be in the West,” wrote Stegner. Yes: we come west for that feeling of wildness, of lawlessness, the sense that we can do what we want and do it on our own.

  The problem comes, however, when one person’s freedom impedes another’s. This problem is exemplified, in southeast Utah at least, by the rise of the off-road vehicles (ORVs). As alone as I felt right then, I knew there were days when this same road was a motor course, and the quiet filled with the roar of a speedway. I could see it right there in front of me in the many tire treads in the sand.

  During my trip four years earlier I had spoken with Liz Thomas of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Mining and drilling are the biggest environmental issues in northern Utah,” she told me. “But off-highway vehicles are the biggest issue in southeastern Utah, hands-down. Right now there are twenty thousand miles of route in Utah. If you look at a BLM map it looks like a bloodshot eye.”

  The public BLM lands are the lands I had slept on the night before, the lands I was riding through, and they are the lands that for many of us—from hiker to mountain biker to rancher to ORV user—make up the real essence of what is left of wild Utah.

  Bike tires can cause damage too, it’s true, and mountain bikers aren’t somehow morally superior to ORV users. I understand that I am rightfully open to charges of hypocrisy as I go about indicting my fellow recreators. But unlike our ex-president, I have no interest in opening up trails in national parks and other public lands to biking, and if someone told me I had to keep my bike off these trails, I’d be okay with that, too. What I want to preserve are not just beautiful places but the possibility that an individual can, in this overheated, overcrowded world, find a place to be quiet and alone. To have their own freedom. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn’t there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines?

  Quiet recreation—mountain biking, hiking, river rafting, backpacking, fishing, even, relatively speaking, hunting—bring almost a billion dollars into Utah each year. We can start there if we like, though anyone who has spent time here knows that this red rock has a lot more to offer than financial gain. In his famous “Wilderness Letter,” Wallace Stegner, writing to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in 1960, extolled the spiritual resources of wilderness land beyond any obvious uses for recreation or extraction or development. Stegner wrote of this wilderness ideal: “Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded—but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.” He urged the commission to consider “some other criteria than commercial” when it came to putting aside wilderness lands, stressing open spaces not just as a counterbalance to “our insane lives,” but as something integral, and vital, to our national characte
r.

  You could argue that responsible drivers of ORVs are following the better impulses that Stegner describes, and many of them are. But the problem of motorized recreation is one of sheer scope. The increased use of Bureau of Land Management land for ORVing, and the great range of the new motorized users, has led to the destruction of thousands of acres and hundreds of Native American archaeological sites. The dry land cracks under those wheels and the dry land doesn’t heal.

  If one person’s freedom can destroy another’s, consider the roaring freedom of off-road vehicles, which make up only 7 percent of the Moab area’s recreators but have access to 81 percent of BLM land. Those who stay on the existing roads do minimal damage, but since freedom and exploration are central to the activity’s appeal, heading off-trail and splashing down riverbeds, for instance, is common. As for sheriffing the motorists, or the bikers and hikers for that matter, the last time I had been here there had been two BLM agents in the Moab office in charge of overseeing the area’s 10 million acres.

  During that trip, I had a long talk with Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust.

  “If you go out on just the absolutely legitimate roads, you could drive every day for the rest of your life,” Hedden said. “The problem is that Moab invites everybody in the world to come here and go crazy for these festivals. Whole families in campers towing four ORVs. Then their kids ride out into the desert and create a zone of destruction. And the desert doesn’t heal.”

  Earlier that year Hedden had accompanied Jon Huntsman, then Utah’s governor, out to Canyonlands National Park. Afterward, the governor, an ORV user himself, called damage done by off-road vehicles that did not stick to set trails “an abomination.”

  For 93 percent of Moab’s visitors, who have come to encounter not motors but nature, ORVs do not mean freedom but its opposite. Many of us can’t shake the feeling that loud, motorized vehicles don’t belong in the wilderness. Ranchers and other Old Westerners, and now ORV drivers, have long resented having the government tell them what they can or can’t do on public land. But with greater numbers and greater use, it may just be that championing regulation and restraint, while not quite as sexy as championing freedom, is the key to preserving the smaller freedoms that are left. Conversely, allow for unregulated freedom and you end up with Moab or worse. Not the freedom of the wild but that of raw commercialism.

  So what is to be done? If to think deeply is to think practically, then mere fretting or hand-wringing doesn’t help. One solution that Bill Hedden has proposed is a massive zoning of BLM’s millions of acres, some areas being designated for off-roading, some for biking and hiking, and others preserved as pockets of true wilderness. This might have rankled Ed Abbey’s old-time sense of freedom, as it clearly rankles the drivers of ORVs, who don’t like the word no. Working against any effort to zone is the determination to open it all up, and the local government’s old-school belief that the lands are theirs to do with as they will. In other words, as Stegner well knew, the wild-man myth is working to destroy the last wild lands.

  The other obstacle is getting people to really believe that this is a land in crisis. This is a hard concept to get your head around if you, like me, were at the moment alone in a spectacularly beautiful place without another human being around for miles. But this was the old beginner’s problem of judging the West by eastern standards. We wonder: how can this giant really be threatened by us, the few and the puny?

  It can because this giant—and the animals and plants that live on it—is already involved in a daily precarious daily fight for survival. It can because this giant is perpetually dehydrated, starved for water, and easily scarred.

  LATER THAT DAY I packed up the tent and threw my bike on the rack, bidding adieu to Hamburger Rock. Soon I was driving north up 191, heading toward the La Sal Mountains in hopes of talking to a man whom I first knew as a character in a novel. I decided not to call Ken Sleight ahead of time but rather to ambush him. Sleight was the eighty-three-year-old former river rafter and horseman who was the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, the adventurous and laconic “Jack Mormon” who co-starred in Abbey’s best-known novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Seldom Seen was one of the band of eco-saboteurs who roamed the western landscape protecting its beautiful places by whatever means necessary, none of them legal. Ever since the book had been published over thirty years before, people had sought out Ken Sleight in hopes of meeting Seldom Seen, so if anyone knew about the confusion of fiction and nonfiction, reality and myth, it was Sleight.

  I had first met Ken Sleight on my trip here four years earlier, and I think it’s fair to say we hit it off. That day started at around nine in the morning, when I went to interview him in the aluminum-roofed bunker above his horse pasture—he offered me a Milwaukee’s Best after cracking one of his own—and ended many hours later with both of us yelling at the TV as Sarah Palin prattled on during the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden.

  I pulled into Pack Creek Ranch—fjord-green in summer—with its aspens and pines, and pastures of goats and horses, all with views of red-rock towers and arches below. Huge thunderheads collected above, up atop the majestic La Sal range. No wonder this had been one of the places Ed Abbey loved. After I parked, I talked briefly with the new caretakers, who generously showed me the cabin where Abbey wrote when he stayed there. They pointed out that Abbey, a tall man, must have bumped his head a lot on the low roof. I thanked them and wandered up past the chickens in an open field to the “shop,” the Quonset hut where Ken held court. I found him in basically the same spot where I’d left him four years before, as if he hadn’t moved since. He was sipping whiskey out of a coffee cup, sitting behind a desk that was cluttered with papers, old computer files, and two computers, one defunct or at least unplugged. Despite the heat, he wore a blue checkered flannel shirt with a blue dungaree shirt over it, and he smiled widely upon my arrival. True, he looked a little older, but basically none the worse for the wear: shaggy white eyebrows, hunched shoulders, ears that stuck out like jug handles, a big thatch of white hair. Best of all, he even seemed to vaguely remember who I was.

  This time no beer was offered, which was fine with me with a long drive ahead. I apologized for taking him by surprise, telling him I just wanted to say hi before leaving town. He suggested I take a seat and so I did, across the desk from him in the cluttered office. And then, with just a little prompting, he was off and reminiscing about his old friend.

  “I knew about Abbey for a while when he worked at Arches, but I didn’t meet him there. Then he got laid off at Arches and the Park Service hired him for Lees Ferry. When I came down to put my boats in at Lees Ferry, there he was. He came over to talk to me and my girlfriend. He helped us rig out. We sat on the edge of that boat talking until two or three in the morning. Talking about how we would get rid of that damn dam. That was the beginning of The Monkey Wrench Gang, I think.”

  It was the Glen Canyon Dam that he was referring to, the dam that Abbey hated more than any other. I asked Ken about his fictional alter ego, Seldom Seen Smith.

  “It’s a novel. It’s not all that Abbey believed just because he put it down on paper. Seldom Seen had some parts of me, but he wasn’t me. It was a caricature, but I didn’t mind. I knew it wasn’t me.

  “He liked to take a lot of notes, see. How many he threw away I don’t know. But he would gather the sense of the thing.

  “He had a kind manner about him. But he would turn away from people. Especially after he got sick. You can’t do everything. Sometimes he wouldn’t respond to people the way they wanted him to respond. He would get criticized for that.

  “He did a lot of writing right here in my roadside cabin. And in the little cabin next to it. If I came up and heard him typing, I would stay the hell away. And I’d try to keep other people away. Everyone wanted to know Ed, and Ed appreciated my buffer. That I would push people off. A couple times I really did have to push. If he wanted to he could have done one interview after another.
But that way he would never get any work done.

  “But he was a kind man. A good friend. Of course he had his opinions. He got out in front. On the front lines. He liked antagonizing people. He criticized the environmental community. Some of them loved it. Others didn’t. And of course he antagonized the ranchers. He wrote a letter to the editor here about raising cattle on the mountain, called cows ‘stinking bovine.’ The editor got over thirty letters back.”

  Ken paused, rubbed his chin, and stared back at me with an expression you could describe as a friendly glare.

  “‘Are they thinking?’ That’s what he would always say. What he wanted to know is ‘Are they really thinking?’ Regardless of what they think of me, I want them to think.”

  The best times with Abbey, he added, were by the campfire while on the river.

  “He could speak around the campfire with no inhibition. We were close, like we were in the same family. Like brothers. Just speak what you feel. That’s what he did. I would speak too, but he knew so damn much more than me. He was a mentor to me, a teacher. You don’t hear that too much, but he was to a lot of people. He had a way of bringing you into these conversations, and when it was over you realized you had learned a hell of a lot. He could be serious, could be playful. He changed all the time, and quick. But I always knew which Abbey I was talking to.”

  To me it sounded a lot like the way he was on the page, joking one minute and serious the next, all mixed together. I mentioned something I had read recently. How some scientists speculated that gathering around fires was the original unique characteristic of human beings. Not language or metaphor or tool use but the social circle, the gathering around the flame, the place where all those other discoveries were communicated.

  “Yup, that’s right. Around the campfire you have a lot of spirit and it comes out in different ways. Kidding each other, serious thought. Singing. Politics, nature, jokes. Everything mixed, like you say. Campfires are a medium of expression all their own.”