The Serpents of Paradise
If certain ideas and emotions are expressed in these pages with what seems an extreme intransigence, it is not merely because I love an argument and wish to provoke (though I do), but because I am—really am—an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another. That’s the way I like it.
—E.A.
(From the Introduction to The Journey Home)
Contents
Editor’s Note
I. Ned: The Early Years
1927–37: Stump Creek, West Virginia
Hallelujah on the Bum
How It Was
Drunk in the Afternoon
Journal IV: November 10, 1951—Edinburgh, Scotland
II. Ed: The Early Years
From The Fool’s Progress
From The Brave Cowboy
Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night
Author’s Introduction to Desert Solitaire
The First Morning
The Serpents of Paradise
Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks
Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert
Appalachian Pictures
Appalachia, Good-bye
My Life as a P.I.G., or The True Adventures of Smokey the Cop
III. Ed Moves On
From Black Sun
1971–77: Henry in Love—An Interlude
The Wooden Shoe Conspiracy
The Raid at Comb Wash
Death Valley Junk
Meeting the Bear
Aravaipa Canyon
IV. Postlude
A Colorado River Journal
From Good News
Desert Images
The Damnation of a Canyon
Gather at the River
River Solitaire: A Daybook
Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow
Theory of Anarchy
Eco-Defense
A Writer’s Credo
Immigration and Liberal Taboos
Postlude to The Fool’s Progress
“A Few Words in Memory of Edward Abbey” by Wendell Berry
A Selected Bibliography of Works by Edward Abbey
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Note
THIS BOOK is different from any other Edward Abbey book. It includes essays, travel pieces and fictions to reveal Ed’s life directly, in his own words.
The selections gathered here are arranged chronologically by incident, not by date of publication, to offer Edward Abbey’s life from the time he was the boy called Ned in Home, Pennsylvania, until his death in Tucson at age 62. A short note introduces each of the four parts of the book and attempts to identify what’s happening in the author’s life at the time. When relevant, some details of publishing history are provided.
“Abbey was an autobiographer: whether writing fact or fiction, he remains Edward Abbey,” declares the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, “speaking as and for himself, fighting, literally, for dear life. He understands that to defend and conserve oneself as a human being in the fullest, truest sense, one must defend and conserve many others and much else.” Berry believes that Abbey “is fighting for the survival not only of nature, but of human nature, of culture, as only our heritage of works and hopes can define it.”
One of Abbey’s friends, the poet Richard Shelton, has worried publicly that when the underground (read subversive) tag is applied to Abbey’s work, his enemies, especially the boomers and the serpents—those bent on destroying the remnant paradise—are given leave to dismiss it. Shelton writes: “Abbey’s very specific suggestions are aimed at conserving, not destroying. And if, when he makes them, his tone at times is somewhat strident and abrasive, beneath it I always hear the voice of a lover trying desperately to protect the thing he loves.”* Fact is Abbey knew what he was writing about: the details checked out. To confound his vehemence with inaccuracy is a mistake.
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.
No thanks. Thanks but no thanks.
At that point Doc Wynkoop grasped the baby firmly by the ears and head, rotating the body forty-five degrees, and drew it forth. Drew me forth, protesting mightily—no need here for a whack on the rump—and tied off the cord, knotting the umbilicus in a knot that’s held to this very day. He swabbed away the silvery caul, that shining suit of lights, like the garb of a traveler from outer space, smeared the tender parts with unguent oil, and laid the child on his mother’s breast. She took him to suck at once, silencing for a time the howls of indignation. She named the boy Henry.
From The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel (1988)
The doctor passed the afterbirth to Joe, who probably fed it to the hogs. Grandmother Gatlin arrived soon afterward, a little late. Joe passed a five-dollar bill to the doctor and the promise to deliver, within a week, five bushel of potatoes and a home-cured ham.
Doc Wynkoop climbed into his black Model A Ford and drove down the rutted red-dog road through night and falling curtains of snow toward the highway and the town of Shawnee, ten miles south. We had no doctor in Stump Creek. Not since the death of Doctor Jim fifty years before—and Doctor Jim was an Indian, a shaman Shawnee medicine man, not an M.D.
Henry Holyoak Lightcap was the second child. My brother William, about two years older, complained loudly from his crib in the adjoining room, beneath the sloping ceiling of the east roof, under the impression that he’d been temporarily forgotten. Correct.
Winter nights. In frozen February the child lay snug in his mother’s arms. Outside, beyond frost-covered windows, the ice-shagged pines stood under the Appalachian moon, mute with suffering. Frost glittered on crusty waves of snow that covered the pasture, the frozen brook, the stubble of the cornfields. The moonlight tinted the snow with the pale blue tones of skim milk. Through the stillness came the sound of an old oak cracking in the woods, branch split by freezing sap. Then came the wail of the iron locomotive on the C&O line, burning coal as it chugged up grade toward Trimble’s crossing a mile away, pulling fifty-five gondola cars of bituminous coal to the coke ovens of Morgantown and Wheeling and Pittsburgh.
Desolation of the iron cry—Song of the Old 97—loneliness of the silent hills, silvered furl of black smoke and white steam rising toward the moon.
The moon shone down on rigid ice floes in Crooked Creek, on Stump Creek, Rocky Glen and Cherry Run, on the nameless streamlet that drained the wooded hillsides of Lightcap Hollow. The moonlight glanced and glinted on the ice-filled ruts of the road, lay on the granite and sandstone monuments of the Jefferson Church graveyard where tiny American flags hung stiff in the gelid air above brass stars bearing the initials GAR—Grand Army of the Republic. The winter moon was so bright, so clear, you could read the names on the stone, the names of our buried neighbors: Ginter, Gatlin, Hinton, Hankerson, Fetterman, Finley, Rayne, Risheberger, Holyoak, Mears, Lightcap, Clymer, Trumbull, Trimble, Stuart, Stewart, Stitler, Prothrow, Groft, Bennett, Duncan, Dalton…to name but the oldtimers, kinsmen and neighbors, enemies and strangers.
Economists would have called it a “depressed area.” A land of marginal and submarginal farms, small coal-mine operations, third-growth timber cutting, crossroad market towns like Shawnee, seat of Shawnee County. Haunted country—haunted by the ghosts of the Indians who gave the place its title, who left little but their name when they were driven out late in the eighteenth century by a Colonel George Rogers Clark who burned their villages, torched their cornfields and ruined the survivors with smallpox, alcohol and tuberculosis.
Inconsolable Memories:
Pump and pump handle sheathed in ice on winter mornings; my first chore of the day, recalled Henry, was taking a hot kettle from the kitchen stove to thaw and prime that pump and fill the kitchen water buckets.
Herding in the milk cows on frosty mornings, I’d stand where the cows had lain to keep my bare feet warm.
With a green willow stick, whipping a crab apple halfway across the valley, I aimed at my big brother, Will, or at little brother, Paul, or at our baby sister, Marcie.
The smell of the flowering dogwood in April.
Summer: heat lightning. Thunder above the hayfield. Fireflies and lightning bugs. The June bug game. The leap from crossbeam into haymow twenty feet above the floor, high in the dusty air of the barn.
Dumping wooden ashes into the two-hole privy below the house—another of my childhood chores. Will had graduated to harnessing our team of horses to the plow, the spring-tooth harrow, the manure spreader, the seed drill, the cultivator, the mower, the wagon. But Will was a precocious boy, big for his age; he always worked hard. He liked it.
Splitting kindling wood for the kitchen stove, after I’d pumped two buckets of water. Hewer of wood and drawer of water—that was my role for years, until Paul grew big enough to do it in his turn.
Our half-Shawnee grandmother—Milly Cornflower Lightcap—was the daughter of a medicine man known to the whites as Doctor Jim (a condescending honorific) because of his healing arts and herbal lore. Doctor Jim never revealed his secret tribal name, not to any kin of ours; there was dangerous power in the name, easily lost. He lived alone in a one-room cabin in the woods, last of the Shawnee full bloods, and survived for eighty years by trapping, hunting, poaching, by odd jobs, charity and scavenging, and by his medical skills, much in demand locally. When he died he died alone, chanting (we presume) his personal death song, and lamenting the destruction and exile of his people. Never did go to Oklahoma. Never did join the cash nexus. Never did get baptized.
Grandmother Cornflower was half white by ancestry, her mother an indentured servant named Tillie Ostrander who’d run away from a family of Pennsylvania Dutch (Germans) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Tillie crossed over the mountains and allowed herself to become the third or fourth wife (he outlived them all) of Doctor Jim. It was tolerable then for a white man to take an Indian girl as wife—not honorable but tolerable—but for an all-white girl to bed down with an Indian, a buck savage, a male aborigine, a witch doctor, and to love him, stay with him, refuse to leave him even when her brothers came looking for her all the way from beyond the Allegheny Mountains—that was a shameful thing. A thing to be spoken of in whispers. A disgrace near as low—not quite—as Negro blood.
There was talk in Shawnee of lynching Doctor Jim, or at least running him out of the territory, packing him off to Oklahoma with the rest of his drunken, trashy, idle, defeated tribe—those shattered remnants from the Trail of Tears.
Nothing came of it. Doctor Jim defied his enemies, making it clear he would die fighting before he’d leave his homeland. The runaway girl stood with him, beside him, bore him a girl-child and died in the process. My grandfather Jacob Lightcap married the shaman’s daughter, the half-breed girl Cornflower. She was dark-skinned, with rich thick hair of mahogany brown. Her eyes were a bright gray-green, strange to see in the broad face with its high Mongolian cheekbones.
Grandmother Lightcap: Cornflower: I remember you from childhood: short, heavy-bodied, mother of six, your face wrinkled as a dried apple, your easy smile and the dazzling white false teeth you were so proud of, the round little granny glasses you wore about forty years before they became a brief fashion. Grandmaw, I remember your sweet and gentle voice, that voice so soft we had to really listen when you talked or we’d miss the tail on the fable, the moral pinned to the hinder end of your thousand and one stories. How the rabbit got his cottontail. How the toad got his warts. How the bear got his claws and the loon his necklace and the panther his scream and the owl his huge eyes…
She showed us, me and brother Will, her oaken chest full of treasures. The cream-colored doeskin dress, fringed and beaded, with high-top moccasins to match. The bearskin robe old Doctor Jim had dressed and cured and worn for thirty years. Her father’s calumet or ceremonial pipe, the bowl made of clay, the stem of wild cane. The shaman’s deerskin medicine pouch in which he carried his important herbal powders and such sacred objects as a set of bear claws, an eagle feather, a mountain lion’s tooth, the corn pollen, the native tobacco, a witch’s toe, three tiny copper bells and a copper medallion inlaid with turquoise and garnet—objects which had come from central Mexico centuries before, passed and bartered on from hand to hand, tribe to tribe, until finally reaching some Shawnee ancestor in the Appalachian hills, long ago.
Grandmaw gave the pouch to Will, since he was the older of us, obviously the more responsible. To be guarded with his life, she said, and passed on. I was seven years old when she died and so remember her only dimly but sweetly, an ancient gray-haired woman with the sweetest most beguiling voice, the most rich delightful laugh of any woman, any human, I’ve ever known.
She died; our father buried her beside her father, Doctor Jim, on the hillside at the edge of the red oaks near the spring and sunken ruins of the old man’s cabin. Cornflower was a Baptist Christian but only formally. Not spiritually. Like Doctor Jim she was buried where she wanted to be, in a corner of the earth that had sustained her woodland people for maybe—who knows?—one thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years.