Don’t stop! Fred shouted. Keep going.

Alan, Bob, me, whoever was driving, kept the wheels spinning as we sashayed across the sand toward the mud bank on the opposite side, a thicket of chamisa, a grove of cottonwoods. We pulled into the shade, rammed a tree trunk, halted. The engine died. We piled out, clutching beer bottles by the neck.

We stared at the sky. Our little auburn-colored dust cloud floated past. Far above, black against blue, redheaded against the infinite darkness of the universe, the solitary vulture cruised in lazy spirals, contemplating life, contemplating us. Where there’s life, the vulture reasons, there is also death. And where there’s death there’s hope.

Bob knelt in the grass and weeds, vomiting. Terrible sounds, terrible, the death rattle of a dying soldier. But he’d feel better when he was finished.

Hot water streamed from the mashed radiator of the car.

Fred opened another beer, handed it to me, opened another for himself and another for Alan. My friends, he said, my good comrades, buddies, pals, compañeros de mi vida, let me tell you something. I want to tell you guys something you will always remember, never forget. I want you to remember this glorious moment, this radiant damn hour, this splendid shining immortal day, for the rest of our miserable lives.

We got home that night, some way. We graduated from that New Mexico cow college a month later. We wandered off in various directions. For a few years we exchanged letters, then postcards, then Christmas cards, then nothing. That was thirty-seven years ago. I don’t know anything about any of them now.

Journal IV

November 10, 1951—Edinburgh, Scotland

OH! FOR LOVE, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzied illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decency, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future—all, (ah!) for love! Let this simple valediction be my benediction, and this nonsense my good sense in this, the latest and God help me the last, of my sordid adventures in humanity…

The grim grimy grisly details can be of little interest; look them up in my official biography. What matters is the heart of the affair, the whistling spirit behind the facade of surface data; guilt, the sense of guilt, and who am I to sacrifice not only my own but perhaps another’s happiness upon the bloody stinking altar of romantic love?

Yes indeed, but here we go despite all. All for love? Again, yes again! Yes.

The harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

From Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951–1989 (1994)

Edinburgh. A soft gray loveliness, fog-shrouded, gray-green, gray-blue, gray-gray, mauve, melting, misting over, grave. And old, with the stench of ages old, built up on packed and repacked mounds of human charnel: excrement, dead bones, blood-woven earth soaked in saltwater urine and piled over high the heaped-up bodies of the dead and dying.