by Edward Abbey
Four summers. Sweet and bitter, bittersweet hilarious seasons in the forest of ponderosa and spruce and fir and trembling aspen trees. The clang of horseshoes in the twilight. The smell of woodsmoke from the cabin. Deep in the darkling pines the flutesong of a hermit thrush. Lightning, distant thunder, and clouds that towered into evening. Rain on the roof in the night.
One day somebody in Park headquarters down on the South Rim of the Canyon, the bad rim, the grim rim, said to somebody else, “Do we really need a fire lookout on North Rim?”
And the other man said, “I didn’t know we had one.”
The lookout was closed at the end of my fourth season and has never been used since. My father had long before returned to his own woods in Pennsylvania where he still lives and works. He is now eighty-three. And Ranger Hendrickson—sweet witty lovely daring Bonnie—she had gone back to California where, I’ve heard, she married well, to a man with a steady job, property, money, prospects, a head on his shoulders. Not a fire lookout. Not by a long shot.
The Sorrows of Travel
When I think of travel I think of certain women I have known. So many of my own journeys have been made in pursuit of love. In pursuit of pain. And in flight from both.
Landscape and women. Whenever I discover a natural scene that pleases me, that I find beautiful, my first thought is: What a place to bring a girl! And our world is so rich in both—beautiful places, lovely women. We should all be as happy as birds. How clever of the inventor of this scheme to create from such abundant, glorious materials so tangled a web of confusion and misery. The medieval Schoolmen in proving God’s existence overlooked this potent variation on the argument from design: The world’s disorder, cruelty, and desperation could not possibly have resulted from chance alone.
Scene One: On the northbound bus from Fort McClellan, Alabama. During the war. My first furlough after completing basic training. In the fertile darkness of the crowded bus I find myself seated beside a young woman, a stranger, a Southerner. I am eighteen, a virgin, shy as a doe; she is perhaps five years older, married, lonely. Her husband, she tells me, is in Italy, has survived Sicily, the disastrous landing at Salerno, the battle of Monte Cassino. She prays for his safety and longs for his return. As she tells me about him her hand comes to rest on mine; she takes my hand and places it on her silken knee. She asks me to tell her about myself.
What have I to tell her? My life is nothing. All I know is my own homesickness. I am sick for home. I think of the hills of Appalachia—the red-dog dirt road that winds beside the crooked creek, under the massed transpiring greenness of the trees, toward a gray farmhouse where a kerosene lamp glows behind the curtains of the windows that face the road. But I cannot tell her what that scene means to me. She leans close and kisses me and lifts that inert, ignorant hand of mine to her breasts. Kiss me back, she whispers. Touch me. Touch me! And we fumble at each other’s bodies in the constrained plush gloom of the rumbling bus, make love with our hands, in a fashion, through the awkward obstacles of buttons, snaps, garters (this was long ago).
The bus enters the outskirts of a city. Clasping my left hand between her thighs, trapping it where she wants it, she whispers in my ear: “Stay with me tonight. I have a place here.” And when I make no reply, she repeats: “Please. Stay with me. Just tonight.”
That was some time ago. Writing these funny sentences, I pause now and then to perform other duties. I get up from this small table, step out the door, and pace the catwalk that forms a complete balcony around the four glass walls of my one-room house. My house stands fifty feet above the ground on a skeletal tower of steel, and it belongs to the United States Forest Service. Unlike most writers I work for my living. I watch for forest fires and when I see one I do something about it.
This tower is 8,000 feet above sea level and the view is good. When the air is clear I can see the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff and the desert ranges south to the border of Mexico. There are many black bear in the wilderness that surrounds me; also whitetail deer, coyotes, a few mountain lions, vultures, hawks, falcons, and odd creatures like the javelina and black rattlesnakes with yellow lateral bands. Right now the blackberries are ripe; the clownish bears shamble through the forest with stains of red juice streaking their muzzles, paws, summer fur. A bear does not pick berries with a little tin pail; instead, the bear grasps an entire blackberry branch between its paws, bends it down and into the mouth, and strips it clean of berries, thorns, leaves, bugs, spiders, everything. The bear rolls this mix around for a while in its mouth, looking thoughtful, like a wine lover sampling a new wine, makes distinctions, spits out the leaves and thorns, and grabs another branch.
And the woman on the bus? I did a cruel thing. As cruel as it was stupid. I declined the lady’s invitation. I let her leave that bus, in that midnight southern city, without me. I rode on into the cold North alone, simple and single-minded, bound for home. For that sin I shall pay, all my life, in the cheap coin of regret. It has not escaped my reflections on the incident that the young woman may have been a prostitute, or part-time prostitute, conning a country boy—an easy trick. I don’t think she was; I believed in her then and I believe in her now. What she wanted, I imagine, was to hold me in her arms while thinking of her husband. It makes no difference. My rejection of her remains, in my eyes, unforgivable.
At present I am alone here. In the evening I descend from my tower and walk through the forest. Nearby is an escarpment of sandstone, a kind of natural promontory projecting above the canyons, nearly flat but tilted slightly, like the deck of a listing ship. A few yellow pines have taken root in the fissures of the stone, along with some stunted, twisted Arizona white oaks, and a few mescal or century plants—that odd member of the amaryllis family that resembles a rosette of bowie knives planted hilt-first in the ground. Like a girl the mescal blossoms splendidly but only once, and much more briefly, in its lifetime.
On the rim of the scarp sits a weathered figure of rock, semihuman in form; you might think some Druid priest had seated himself there 5,000 years ago, resolving never to move again, and allowed himself to petrify, cell by cell, through the centuries. Each time I approach this sacred grove with its white rock and quiet, listening trees, I am reminded of the Mediterranean. I think of Delphi and half expect that stone figure to rise at last and confront me, prepared—after appropriate sacrifice—to answer the question I have been seeking, all my life, to learn how to ask.
But the figure does not stir. Not yet. I gaze across its shoulders, through the trees, at the vast sea beyond. Not the blue sea of the Mediterranean but the rust red sea, the lilac purple sea, the wave-wrinkled but static sea of the desert. On that motionless immensity ride enchanted ships: Table Mountain, Four Peaks, Haystack Butte, Aztec Peak, Battle Mountain, Heliograph Peak, the Superstition Mountains. And others, many others, floating on waves of haze at distances we measure but do not comprehend. Contemplating this picture (but picture of what?), I feel again the vague but poignant urge to grasp it, embrace it, know it all at once and all in all; but the harder I strive for such a consummation the more elusive and mysterious that it becomes, slipping like a dream through my arms. Can this desire be satisfied only in death? Something in our human consciousness seems to make us forever spectators of the world we live in. Maybe some of my crackpot, occultist friends are right; maybe we really are aliens here on earth, our spirits born on some other, simpler, more human planet. But why then were we sent here? What is our mission, comrades, and when do we get paid?
A writer’s epitaph: He fell in love with the planet earth but the affair was never consummated.
Edinburgh. The Firth of Forth. The dank, dark, medieval walls of the university, inside the old quad. In midwinter I escape the miasmal shades of Hume, Reid, Boswell, Scott, Burns by fleeing to the Arlberg, Saint Anton in the Tyrol, Austria. In a company of British students—ruddy young folk but very proper—I take a room in a pension or hostel, here in this fairytale village high in the magic mountains. I don’t
waste much time in the pension among those severe Scots and stern Anglais; the Austrians seem livelier and the Germans more romantic, in their usual sinister but comic way—stock villains from a Nazi melodrama. One of them, a sturdy young fellow named Kurt or Wolfgang or Helmut, I forget which, becomes my daily skiing companion. We like each other; or at least we interest each other. Like me, he is a university student, a would-be intellectual, and very competitive. We ski all day; he is the better skier; we eat and play chess in the cafés in the evening—he always wins—and drink together and dance with the girls until closing time. We talk about the war, of course, and agree that it was a most regrettable affair; like me, he was too young to have taken any direct part in it. But the war is not over, never over, when two young males discover the same likely female.
Her name was Penelope Duval-Holmes; she came not from England, however, but from South Africa, a smart, witty, liberal South African of the Nadine Gordimer variety (one could talk with her). She was traveling Europe alone and she was very beautiful. Very beautiful? Well, a bit short in the leg—her tragic flaw—but beautiful all the same. Long, soft, light brown hair; great violet eyes with coal black lashes; breasts like two fawn at play in a garden of roses; a superior assembly of delectable parts. Wolfgang and I spotted her our third day together and bore down like twin schussboomers grooved for collision.
She seemed to like us both. Too wise and too amused to accept one and cast off the other, Penelope kept the three of us playing together. We skied as a threesome, picnicked together high on the snowfields under the alpine crags, dined and talked and drank and danced together every evening. Wolfgang proved each time, in his droll Continental manner, that he could out-ski me, out-drink me, was the better dancer, knew more songs and sang better, knew more languages, had read more books, and knew more about music than I ever would. Defeated, all I could do was make surly jokes about Ludwig van B. and His Viennese Jug Band, Amadeus and the Wolfgang, Tony Bruckner and The Tyroleans.
Getting nowhere. Each night Penelope said goodnight to the two of us, but her eyes seemed always to linger last on my charming rival; I knew that I was losing and that one night soon she was going to invite Wolfgang—not me—to her hotel room. That room on the second floor, with balcony, above the frozen snowbanks of a narrow sidestreet. Yes, I knew well enough where her room was; I’d spent several chilly interludes between closing time at the bar and my cold bed at the pension standing in the street watching Penelope’s light go on, the blinds come down, the light, after a time, go out again. My futile and hungry love.
A week passed in concealed but intense competition for the favor of a girl—an aristocrat—much too good for either of us. In another week I would have to return to Edinburgh. I made overtures to other women, even to one of those clean, bright, prim English girls in the tour group, but my heart was not with it. I thought of cutting my vacation short; back to the bloody books, the charcoal fire in my cold tiny digs on Prince’s Street, bloodsausages for breakfast, scones and cakes at teatime.
One night I prepared to give up. Sitting at a little table in the bar of Penelope’s hotel, sipping my fifth or sixth double schnapps, I watched Wolfgang and my sweetheart embraced in dance, some lush slow romantic Viennese number, the last dance—as the bandleader had announced—of the night. Wolfgang whispered in her ear; she was smiling. She nodded in assent to his obvious question. One possible gesture remained; a graceful surrender on my part. I slipped out before the dance was over, so drunk I could hardly see; or was I weeping? Or both?
Once in the street, however, I was overcome by the agony of jealousy. I could not suppress the self-torturing need to watch my defeat made plain before my eyes. I leaned on a corner wall below her room and waited and watched. I was freezing, no doubt, and drunk, but despair kept me warm.
Finally her light went on. I could see, through gauzy curtains, Penelope enter her room. My heart jumped. She was alone. She closed and locked her door, began to undress. Then remembered to lower the blinds. As she came to the French windows of her balcony, peering, it seemed to me, down into the street, I shrank back into the shadows. She lowered the blinds. A moment later the light went out.
I stared at the darkened room. The balcony. The high-piled bank of hardened snow, reaching to within two or three feet of the balcony’s supporting members. Yes. Why not? Remember—Siegfried! I scrambled up the frozen snow, found a hold on the balcony supports, pulled myself up, got a leg over the railing, fell inside, scrabbled on my knees to the French windows, tried the handles—locked. “Penny,” I groaned.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, me.”
She opened the doors. “Edward, what are you doing out there? Idiot. Get in here before you freeze.” I staggered into the warm room, into her even warmer arms—she was wearing, I remember, some kind of slippery little nightie. She guided me to the billowy luxury of an Austrian feather bed, tucked me under the quilt, crawled in beside me. I reached for her—and passed out.
But all turned out well next morning. Then we rested. “My God, Penny,” I said, “I’ve been wanting to do this—since the first moment I saw you. For a week!”
She replied, “Why didn’t you ask?”
Later I said, “Did Wolfgang … did he ask?”
“Oh yes, the very first night. And every night since. He’s been very persistent. Of course he is a gentleman and so sweet about it but—oh dear, he is so very persistent. So awfully—tenacious. Let’s go to Vienna.”
“And you turned him down?”
“Of course. Shall we go to Vienna?”
I could not refrain from probing further. Savoring my victory. “But why?”
“Why go to Vienna?”
“Why did you turn him down?”
“I don’t like Nazis.”
“Nazi! Wolfgang? But he’s a Christian Democrat—whatever that is. And a gentleman. You said so yourself.”
“He would have been a Nazi.”
I thought that over. A Nazi and a gentleman? Both? After a moment I said, “Guess I’m lucky.”
“Yes,” she said, “you are. But you deserve it.”
“Maybe I’d rather be a goddamned gentleman.”
She laughed. “Dear Edward, that you’ll never be. And besides—we’ve seen so many of those.”
1400 hours (forest time) on the lookout tower. 2 P.M. I sit here chuffing on a cheap cigar, watching the cumulonimbi gather above. Rumbles of discontent—shattered molecules of air—sound from overhead. Penelope Duval-Holmes, where are you now? I was a happy man that week. We went to Vienna, where I fell asleep during a performance of the Saint Matthew Passion. We said goodby in Paris. I never saw her again. Oh lovely and patient Penelope, how are you now? Back in Johannesburg, no doubt. Married, I suppose, with two or three babies. What is your husband like? Does he keep a shotgun in the bedroom? What will become of your children when the Zulus and Bantus overrun your beloved country? Whose beloved country? Dear Penelope, how are you now?
A rattle of hail on the tin roof. A jagged bolt of lightning plunges into the forest below, where I have counted eleven different shades of green. A puff of pine dust and a twist of blue smoke rise in the air and drift away. I disconnect the short-wave radio. Incommunicado now. Through a mist of rain to the north, less than a mile away, I see pink lightning vibrate, an illuminated nerve, between cloud and mountain. Five seconds later comes the crash, the sound like toppling masonry. I shut the windows, close the door—lightning follows air currents.
The storm clouds hover close above me, dark as death ships. From the steel legs and struts of this tower rises a curious singing, the thin, high, metallic tremolo of billions of agitated electrons. I sit inside a little cabin mounted on the negative pole of a high-voltage open circuit; at any moment, unpredictable but certain, a gigantic spark—lightning—is going to leap the gap. As long as I stay inside I’m safe; the tower is completely grounded, with a resistance, say the electrical engineers, of ten ohms. It doesn’t sound sufficient but
it is.
This tower has been struck several times with me inside it, and so far as I can tell I’m no crazier now than before taking up this lonely trade. In any case there is no escape; I can only wait while the screaming of electrons in distress builds gradually in intensity toward the unendurable climax. Another bolt strikes below, through the rain, a fireball dangling at its tip. My turn. Here. Now. The crack! of a whip above my head, the flash of blue light, a smell of ozone followed by waves of thunder reverberating outward—the noise suggests the sound of something rugged, immense, and rigid being ripped apart by hands of unimaginable force. A huge limb wrenched from a giant oak.
After the storm, in the twilight of a misty rain, work day over, I walk again through the forest. A pint of Foster’s Aussie lager settles in my gut. A buzz in my brain. Out on the prow of my listing sandstone ship, beyond the sacred grove, the stone priest still sits in contemplation, rain dripping from his weathered head and eroded shoulders. No sign. I walk down the trail deep into the woods, under the ponderosa pine, the spruce, the white fir, the Douglas fir, the aspen, and smell the fragrance of wet weeds, pine needles, rotting logs, the soaked and respirating earth. Glowworms shine in the rich corruption, like foxfire in Appalachia.
Other girls, other places. Sandy and Death Valley, our camp at Texas Springs—she betrayed me by running off with a cheap movie actor. Bonnie Claire and our idyll on the rim of the Grand Canyon—she betrayed me by running off with her husband. And Ingrid in Berlin. Rita and Provincetown. Judy in New York, her little room in the hospital—Mount Sinai!—and the two of us listening to Mozart on the radio while firecrackers sputtered like frying grease in the streets below; my God, it was the Fourth of July; and I betrayed her by letting her die. By letting it happen. By finding no way—no way—to stop the thing that was destroying her. I loved and still love all of them.