Because the writing represented here covers every style and period of the artist’s life, the collection serves as an Edward Abbey retrospective. The author’s character connects the pieces to each other and to literature, offering what Larry McMurtry has called Abbey’s “fine particularity,” the authority of “a writer who feels a lot and then manages to transcend his own notions of himself.”

J.M.
New York City
August 2, 1994

I

Ned: The Early Years

HE WAS BORN on a farm in the Allegheny Mountains. Mother Mildred was kind, loving, religious. Paul Revere Abbey, her agnostic husband, put what faith he had in his own brand of socialism. Unlike their five spirited children, both parents were lifelong teetotalers.

Nancy, Bill, Howard (you’ll meet him as Will in Abbey’s novel The Fool’s Progress—Ed scrambled the names and ages), and John (Johnny to Ed) were Ed’s siblings. Ned, as he was then called, was the firstborn; he didn’t become Ed until he was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1945. Ed served a year as an MP in occupied Italy (good duty), made corporal, but was busted six months before he was discharged, honorably, in 1947.

Abbey’s first trip west was in 1944—the summer after his high school graduation. His father contributed $20 and a few words of advice. Ed traveled the old-fashioned way: by foot, thumb, bus and boxcar (Abbey offers the details in two pieces, “Hallelujah on the Bum” and “How It Was,”).

The G.I. Bill allowed Ed’s love of the Southwest to blossom. At the University of New Mexico he studied philosophy and girls, he said; in his senior year, August 1950, he married a student named Jean. The following year Abbey won a Fulbright Fellowship, which sent the young couple to Scotland’s Edinburgh University, where two hundred years earlier nominalist David Hume had argued that passions based on human experience, not faith or ideology, are what count. Abbey agreed, but Jean, troubled by his profligate passions, returned to the United States to file for divorce after only three months abroad. (Student Abbey’s interests, as well as his early prose style, are revealed in a section from his 1951 journal,.)

Though Ed preferred the desert above all other landscapes—as you’ll see in many of the pages that follow—his love of the mountains also lasted a lifetime. But before we join him in the Appalachian highlands, let’s first repair to the green grass of his memory and childhood in the misty hills of Home, Pennsylvania, as revealed in the novel The Fool’s Progress.

1927–37: Stump Creek, West Virginia

LORRAINE MY MOTHER lay in bed in the antique gothic farmhouse, in the little bedroom on the second floor where the child was conceived. She was breathing the fumes from an ether-soaked bandana held under her nose by Joe Lightcap her husband, while bald wrinkled Doc Wynkoop pulled the baby gently, fairly easily, from the exit of the womb.

According to the father, a minute before actual birth the baby’s head had emerged from the natal aperture, opened its eyes, took one quick look around—saw the light of the kerosene lamp glimmering on the floral wallpaper, saw Joe’s dark anxious aboriginal face, the red face and bloodshot eyes of the doctor, the ancestral portraits of old Lightcaps, Shawnees, Gatlins and Holyoaks hung on the walls, saw the double-barreled twelve-gauge, loaded, which stood in the corner near the head of the bed, saw the Bible on the night table, Mother’s cedar chest, the wardrobe closet, the lace curtains, etc.—took everything in and then retreated, withdrew, slid right back into the dark radiant chamber of conception.