As the book’s shepherd, Walter had persuaded artist Peter Parnall to scratch out handsome pictographlike line drawings to add a touch of timeless mystery to each chapter opening page. These drawings were “based on the author’s copies of prehistoric Indian petroglyphs and pictographs found in southern Utah and northern Arizona,” as noted on the book’s copyright page.

The legendary Krutch, desert rat to the core, formerly the drama critic of the New York Times, had this to say on the book’s jacket: “Some years ago, Edward Abbey sought solitude and reflection as an isolated ranger in Arches National Monument. But he had hardly got settled before the advance guard of ‘developers’ began to arrive. His book is a passionate celebration of what he sought and a hymn of hate against those who deprived him of it. He is eloquent, bitter, and extravagant, but those of us on his side will not like him any less for that.”

Soon after publication, the book died a silent death, or so it seemed.

Ed Abbey had come by to see me at Dutton soon after Desert Solitaire’s publication. Until I took him downstairs to Max’s Kansas City, a hip nighttime dive that offered the previous evening’s stale smoke and grime as its lunchtime ambience, Abbey had said almost nothing. Awakened by steak and eggs, chick-peas and liberal servings of Jack Daniel’s, he and I talked of words and writers, especially about Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, whom I was publishing in English. Sweet, shy, polite—courtly, in fact—Ed in person was a different man from the Abbey persona in print.

It wasn’t long before he agreed to write a book on the Appalachian wilderness (two chapters are included in part II), the first of nine books we were to publish together. A relationship developed that was close but guarded—Ed’s way; we roamed the rocky gorge known as Aravaipa Canyon near Ed’s trailer, took trips together, drank from the same bottle; stayed up until dawn around my kitchen table in Rockland County, gabbing with Willie Gaddis, one of Ed’s favorite novelists, or with Bill Eastlake in Tucson.

Another friend of Ed’s, the writer Edward Hoagland, identified what’s special about Abbey’s writing in a telephone conversation we had five years after Ed’s death: “He’ll outlast all the others,” Hoagland began, without a stutter. “The others—Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, Dillard, Lopez, they’re all good writers, but it’s character that distinguishes Abbey. The cranky, authentic personality comes through. That’s why he’ll last.”

J.M.

From Black Sun

GATLIN, YOU BUM, where the hell are you?” The great voice thunders through the woods as Art Ballantine marches into the clearing. Red curls on his forehead, a red fat neck, the curly hairs of his chest revealed in the open collar above the loosened tie. Panting from the climb, he strides to the door of the cabin.

“I say there, Gatlin, for christsake where are you?” He peers into the open door, blinking. “Reveal yourself. Break out the ice, man.”