He checks the road once more, lets up on the gas pedal, leans toward her, smiling, and stares straight into her big solemn hazel-brown eyes with his small red squinty iron-flecked happy eyes and says,

What do you see, Ellie?

She looks hard, concentrating, thinking.

Hey? What do you see?

Dad? Well…you’re crazy as a bedbug.

Yeah yeah, sure, but what else, what else? He glances at the highway again, no traffic in sight, nothing ahead but the firey glow of the city, the glare of the descending sun, the smoke, and returns his gaze to his daughter. What do you see, sweetheart? Look me in the eyeballs ball to ball and tell me what you see.

I see a crazy cuckoo Daddy.

What else?

Her nose is sunburnt, starting to peel, her lips chapped, but she cracks a tiny smile. A growing smile, matching his. I see…lights. Little lights jumping around.

Dancing. He checks the road again, the car slowing, wheels grating on the tincans and gravel of the shoulder, and looks again into the girl’s eyes. What color?

She laughs. Red.

Right. And what does red mean?

She laughs again. Same as always: full speed ahead.

Right, he yells, you got it. He pulls her small body firmly to his side, steers back onto the asphalt, presses the pedal to the floor. The motor grumbles like a lion, hesitating, old, tired, then catches, fires and roars, eight-hearted in its block of iron, driving onward.

A Few Words in Memory of Edward Abbey

The old oak wears new leaves.

It stands for many lives.

Within its veil of green

A singer sings unseen.

Again the living come

To light, and are at home.

And Edward Abbey’s gone.

I pass a cairn of stone

Two arm-lengths long and wide

Piled on the steep hillside

By plowmen years ago.

Now oaks and hickories grow

Where the steel coulter passed.

Where human striving ceased

The Sabbath of the trees

Returns and stands and is.

The leaves shake in the wind.

I think of that dead friend

Here where he never came

Except by thought and name;

I praise the joyous rage

That justified his page.

He would have liked this place

Where spring returns with solace

Of bloom in a dark time,

Larkspur and columbine.

The flute song of the thrush

Sounds of the underbrush.

—Wendell Berry

A Selected Bibliography of Works by Edward Abbey

Abbey’s Road. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979.

Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. Illustrated by Eliot Porter. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970.

Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside. New York: Henry Holt, 1984.

Black Sun. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. Reprint. New York: Avon Books, 1982.

The Brave Cowboy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. Reprint. New York: Avon Books, 1982.

Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951–1989, edited by David Petersen. Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1994.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Reprint. New York: Touchstone Books, 1969.