“The world is big but it is comprehensible,” says R. Buckminster Fuller. But it seems to me that the world is not nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships, in wonder, beauty, mystery, comprehensible only in part. The very existence of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown—not a problem but a mystery.

We will never get to the end of it, never plumb the bottom of it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial and useless and precious a place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption.

IV

Postlude

WHEN TOM MCGUANE wrote in response to galleys of Abbey’s Road: “Abbey’s the original fly in the ointment. Give him money and prizes. Don’t let anything happen to him,” McGuane didn’t really expect Ed to win a major prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, which he did in 1986. Nor did McGuane and other supporters such as Larry McMurtry, Irving Howe, Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry expect him to refuse the prize, with these words: “It’s too late. Besides, prizes are for little boys.” Arrogance? Was Cactus Ed just too prickly for his own good? Abbey believed awards and prizes, “like the air, the sun, like the earth,” as he had written, “belong to everyone—and no one.”

By 1980 Ed Abbey had become a literary divine, like it or not. It was the essays rather than the fiction that had enshrined him, so reported Grace Lichtenstein in the New York Times. Yet it would be unwise to be dismissive of his fiction or to position Abbey’s “fat masterpiece,” as he called The Fool’s Progress, alongside the broadly comic The Monkey Wrench Gang, its sequel, Hayduke Lives!, which was hastily completed only weeks before his death, or Good News, his attack on the military-industrial state—with especial relevance to an MX missile site once proposed for Arizona (after Ed died his friends buried him in an unmarked grave on military land in the desert where he could keep an eye on air force jets screaming overhead; another version places the burial closer to Tucson on land where all four giant cacti grow naturally).

Exuberant, overwrought, oversexed, his fictional alter ego was Abbey’s favorite; readers who want to get closer to his fictive persona can do no better than The Fool’s Progress. John Baker of Publishers Weekly put it this way in the book’s first review: “An epic exploration of Abbey’s passionate loves and hatreds set forth in a wild, picaresque novel that reads at times like a combination of Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac…. Seizes hold of the imagination, as absurdly moving as anything you have read in years.”

But the birth wasn’t easy. Before the novel was put under contract—after I had read several partial drafts—I asked Ed to consider how it should be edited. He knew what I had in mind, but was unresponsive. My only hope was to bribe him. The following clause was added to the contract: “A bonus of Fifteen-thousand Dollars ($15,000.00) against earnings will be paid if the final manuscript conforms to Publisher’s editorial request, as outlined in the letter of May 22, 1985 (copy attached).”