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269 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
"I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk - walk - WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!"
Be of good cheer & ignore the critics. Disregard the best-selling paperbacks with flashy, embossed covers in the supermarkets, high-rent bookstores & airport shops. When we want money from the rich, we'll take it by force. The honorable way. Death before dishonor, as it were. Live free or die. The best of our brother novelists & sister poets are in prison or in hiding or in exile. So, scribble on, honor life & praise the divine beauty of the world.
shoe a horse, rope & brand & castrate a calf, fix a flat tire, stretch barbed-wire, dynamite a beaver dam & lay out an irrigation ditch--a good liberal education. Viviano's English is 50% profanity & he can sing, play the guitar & read your fortune in cards. He is short, dark & savage, like most good Basques, with large glamorous eyes that seem to appeal to the ladies from 13 to 35, all of whom he pursues.Among other things, with every day being irregular, the trio ends up freeing a cow from quicksand while cursing the bovine creature for having caused them to spend an uncommon amount of effort on a single, stray animal.
rented a horse from some Havasupai Indians, bought a slab of bacon, 6 cans of beans & proceeded down the canyon to an old mining camp 5 miles below the village, remaining alone for the next 35 days, except for the ghosts, finding a pool of water below a waterfall 120 feet high, thundering over caverns & canopies of solidified travertine rock, with the "white noise" of the waterfall as soothing as hypnosis.Yes, there is a mystical quality about Edward Abbey, someone who reveled in the commonplace but also admired & even exalted so many things beyond the reach of easy description.
What did I do during those 5 weeks in Eden? Nothing, or nearly nothing. I caught rainbow trout & lived in the nude, though once a week or so, I put on my pants & walked up to a small Indian village to buy bacon, canned beans & Argentine beef, which was all the Indians had in stock at the store. To vary my diet just a bit, I used the telephone to order more exotic foods from the supermarket at Grand Canyon Village, including sweet corn, figs & peaches. There was nothing that had to be done.
I listened to many voices--vague & distant but astonishingly human & the creaking doors of the old forgotten cabins. I went native & dreamed away days on the shore of the cottonwoods, inspecting the cactus gardens.
The days became wild, strange, ambiguous--a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. I lived narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chaung-tse, I worried about butterflies, saw a serpent, a red racer living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there, slipping among the stones or pausing to spellbind me with his suggestive tongue & cloudy, haunted, primeval eyes.
I thought of Debussy, of Keats & Blake. I went for walks & on the last of those, regained everything that seemed to be ebbing away.
I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert-colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself through the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening--a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierrra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.
At the main entrance to each National Park we should erect a Billboard 100' high 200' wide courageously filigreed in brilliant neon and outlined with blinker lights, exploding stars, flashing prayer wheels and great Byzantine phallic symbols that gush like geysers every 30 seconds. (You could set your watch by them.) Behind the fireworks will loom the figure of Smokey the Bear, taller than a pine tree, with eyes in his head that swivel back-and-forth watching you, and ears that actually twitch. Push a button and Smokey will recite, for the benefit of children and government officials who might otherwise have trouble with some of the big words, in a voice ursine, loud and clear, the message spelled out in the face of the Billboard: 'Howdy folks! Please park your motorized vehicle in the world's biggest parking lot behind the comfort station immediately to your rear. Now get out of your motorized vehicle. Get on your horse, mule, bicycle or feet and come on in. Enjoy yourselves! This here park is for people only.
No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs - anything - but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.p 65 (Chapter 5: Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks)