II

Ed: The Early Years

IN DECEMBER of 1952 Ed married Rita Deanin, the mother of his first two sons, Joshua and Aaron. Within a year they were in New Haven in search of Ed’s doctorate in philosophy at Yale (Rita waited tables at a Howard Johnson). They lasted exactly thirteen days.

During the balance of the fifties, Abbey worked at a variety of jobs, earned an M.A., published Jonathan Troy (1954), a less than satisfactory novel about an inconstant and inauthentic writer-anarchist who is an early stand-in for the fictional Abbey; in 1956 he published The Brave Cowboy, in which Ed introduced a more substantial (and longer-lived) anarchist named Jack Burns. Kirk Douglas, who played the Burns character in the movie version, Lonely Are the Brave, considered the maverick antihero Burns, who fights rich and powerful ranchers and government toads, his best movie role. Though Jack Burns is apparently killed escaping the police (he’s run over by a truck carrying plumbing supplies), he returns to star in two later Abbey novels. Good News (1982) and Hayduke Lives! (1990).

Ed’s tumultuous, on-again/off-again marriage to Rita, an artist who became an art historian, took him to Hoboken and New York City (“Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night,”), with longer stops in Utah and Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. He worked as a park ranger, fire lookout, garbage collector, welfare caseworker and school-bus driver (after Rita split). Desert Solitaire recounts Abbey’s passionate impressions of life and beauty (and decay) during three seasons at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park). Written while Ed lived in New Mexico, Hoboken and between runs driving schoolkids in Ash Meadow, Nevada, the book reveals the fullblooded passions of a voice exploring the connections and contradictions, as Abbey put it, “between wildness, wilderness and human community.”

Abbey’s twenty years (almost) as a part-time employee of the feds, as park and forest ranger, could be seen as a continuation of his role as an MP. Smokey the Bear is today an enforcer who packs a .38; Ed’s essay “My Life as a P.I.G., or The True Adventures of Smokey the Cop,”, explains his statement “I’ve never known a serious policeman who had much respect for the law.”

Ed was also railing against the lawlessness of special-interest government. Freedom and wilderness (two necessary parts of the democratic equation) were disappearing. Control of the Republic, he despaired, had moved into the hands of fix-and-favor lobbyists, businessmen and politicians: fat cats—whether in Washington, Wall Street, Aspen or high in the saddle—had turned over government-owned land for private gain at taxpayers’ expense, especially in the eleven western states. Even the good guys, the brothers Udall (Moe and Stew), for example, couldn’t be trusted. Look at the Central Arizona Project, at what happened to the Colorado River, the drowning of Glen Canyon. Abbey’s only answer, the only answer, he would say, quietly and politely, time and time again, is to spread chaos, to follow old Henry David down the road of civil disobedience, vigorously. Wasn’t private property, despite the propaganda about competition and market economics, little more than theft? And what about special-interest socialism, the private uses of public land for timber or cattle barons? Ed’s beliefs were outside “the system,” any system, even his own, and the words were delivered in a voice as personal and distinctive as Emerson’s.