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My Friend Ed By Doug Peacock
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Mountain Gazette Library
My Friend Ed By Doug Peacock
Hello and welcome back to the Mountain Gazette Library. I'm John Booster, and this week we're diving into "My Friend Ed" by Doug Peacock, chronicling the adventures and impact of the legendary environmentalist, Edward Abbey. [MUSIC] Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by steel, designed, developed, and tested at the base of the Tetons in Jackson, whole Wyoming. Steel was founded to inspire connection with the outdoors through premium technical apparel for the epic and everyday. Learn more at steel.com, stio.com, steel, let the outside in. The Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by Gordini. Based in Vermont and family run, Gordini has focused on the same mission since 1956 to keep you outside longer. Our gloves, socks, and goggles aren't merely accessories, there are critical pieces of equipment that are built to last season after season. We take our commitment to people and the planet seriously and build that into every detail. From introducing the first-ever down mitts to knitting quilted dual-layer socks, innovation is always done in the spirit of progress. Learn more about what drives our passions and products at Gordini.com, G-O-R-D-I-N-I.com. Mountain Gazette Library is also proudly presented by Visit Idaho and Visit Sun Valley. Discover where adventure meets style in Sun Valley, Idaho. Welcome to America's pioneering mountain town that veers off the beaten path. Explore five distinct mountain races, over 200 miles of single-track mountain biking trails, a myriad of five fishing waters, exciting events, and inviting dining options. Find a summer escape at visit sunvalley.com. My Friend Ed by Doug Peacock. My life, as I had known it, ended in 1968. In February, in the former Republic of South Vietnam, I survived the Tet Offensive and the relative security of a hospital where I was interned with 30 wounded Marines. I spent my brief convalescence in the Don Nong Naval Hospital with other grunts lying under our bunks, listening to the war, mortar and rocket rounds exploding everywhere, gunships screaming overhead, my fingers clutching an illegal 45 automatic. The only defensive weapon on the ward against the platoon of North Vietnamese sappers were blasting through the perimeter wire only 55 yards away. Still knowing, I was infinitely better off than my green beret teammates, who, at the same time, were being cut to ribbons rolled over by NVA tanks near Quezon. Five days after Tet, I returned to my camp in the Central Highlands. There as a senior medic on an A-Team, I pieced together mountain-yard children who had been caught in the crossfire for over a week, until I began to lose my mind. The day I packed my bags for home, March 16, 1968, American soldiers ruthlessly murdered 347 Vietnamese civilians 40 miles to the north and a place called Milai. Back in the world, it was early spring. I bought a jeep and drove west, hoping to look up my two oldest friends from the Midwest. One worked as a teacher on the Navajo reservation. We had been together at the University of Michigan, where I had been associated with civil rights politics and the beginnings of the new left. I had once brought Martin Luther King Jr. to the campus to speak, two weeks after leaving Vietnam, and a day after joining my friend in Fort Defiance, Arizona, Martin Luther King was assassinated. My response to the murder bothered my old friend a great deal. I was not surprised that someone had finally shot him down. I had known that King had powerful enemies, and in 1968, this was what I expected of the world. By the time summer rolled around and Bobby Kennedy was killed, I was beyond the pale of politics. The world had gone quite mad. I had to deal with it, accordingly. The other friend lived in Colorado. This ex-room mate was an intellectual, a city dweller who had never camped out in his life, but by late 1968, the head all changed. My friend was now a big Sierra Club guy, dedicated environmentalist to serious backpacker and a mountain climber. The reason for these changes was a man named Edward Abbey. Earlier that year, he had published a book called "Desert Salater". This book changed lives. That was the first I had heard of Ed Abbey, and I still hadn't gotten around to reading his books when Bill Eastlake called me the next winter in Tucson and told me to come on over. In 1969, William Eastlake was the grand old man of southwestern letters, and so remains despite the poisonous seasonality of New York publishing. I hopped on my motorcycle and drove up and down the desert roads at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains until I located Eastlake's house, which, back then, was beyond the edge of the giant cow plot from the sky that has become Tucson. Some people were there, possibly writer types, but I didn't know them. The winter air had chilled me to the point my hand shook as I pulled out a baggie of bugler tobacco and rolled joint-like cigarette. The cold pulsed my fingers, and I had trouble striking a match. The man sitting next to me gave me a light. He was a tall, rangy man with a short, dark beard, a subject about which he had just written for Life magazine. He worked as a seasonal ranger at Organ Pipe National Monument in southwestern Arizona, and his name was Ed Abbey. He invited me to visit. A week later, I threw my sleeping bag in my jeep and drove down to Organ Pipe-bearing gifts, a six-pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey. That was how you visited people in those days. We had first met William Eastlake in Cuba, New Mexico, nervously knocking at Bill Doar with a bottle of gin in hand. I met up with Ed after work in the government World War II Quonset Hut, which he shared with Bill Hoy and other rangers south of Ajo. From a nearby room, someone nostalgically played Groff's Grand Canyon suite. And Ed noted he was taking a lookout job on the North Rim, one of the four corners of his desert world, staking out the territory the big golds held in his heart. He drank and talked until early in the morning, late for a working man. I was new to that part of the country, and Ed directed me to dripping springs, one of two natural permanent water sources in Organ Pipe. The late winter morning was warm, and deal blossoms of brittle brush were told the approaching spring. I hiked a short trail to a small cave. Within the grotto lay a milky pool, pale and oracular, draining into a brushy draw, swarming with honeybees. I retreated along the well-used foot trail, hard packed by the boots of hundreds of visitors. Abby had told me Organ Pipe, though lush and lovely in desert terms, was relatively tame compared to the great expanse of land adjacent to the west and northwest. The wild and empty valleys and ranges of the Cabeza Prieta. You can't rebuild a life that had no structure to begin with. In 1969, I was still reeling from a year and a half of Vietnam. I had no desire to re-enter society or any talent for reform. The precise problem seemed to be that I wanted a life, but not the world they said I'd have to live in. At twenty-six years of age, my slightly cynical suspicions about the human race had been verified by experience. Though estranged from my own time and without a clue as to how to live a life, I was not lost. I knew that my real homeland, the one I would fight the authentic war over, the one I would die for, was still out there in the wilderness, deserts and mountains of America. This man, Abby, had a distant but deep passion, a humorous fanaticism about defending the wild I found attractive. The next summer, derangement surfaced again as I entertained the notion of going back to Southeast Asia as a photojournalist. I scored a graduate fellowship in Intensive Vietnamese, a language I already knew, and traveled to the University of Hawaii to snorkel and watch fish for three months. While I was there, I heard Ed Abby's wife died of leukemia, so I wrote him a note. Some time went by and he wrote back wondering if I wanted to take a trip into the canyon country. I picked Ed Abby up in Canab. We drove east along the Vermillion Cliffs, turned north on a red dirt road tracing a bench above the parilla, and on into Cottonwood Canyon. We bounced on toward Kodakrome Basin with a dark spine of the kite-wits plateau lying in the gray distance. I had seen southern Utah before, but not much, and never anything like this. Feminine landscapes of bentonite, soft clay hills with lenses of blue and green, badlands disappearing under the coarse angular red scree from the cliffs above. The massive faces of wind-blown Navajo and Wingate sandstone, their dark patina stained and decorated by seeps and runoff. South of Kodakrome Basin, amid a wasteland of rabbit bush and juniper, we pulled off the rutted road to an old drill rig site. The rig was gone and the hole was capped, but part of the frame remained along with the sections of pipe and used bits. The site was deserted, but not abandoned. The drilling outfit was coming back, probably to look for coal deposits to fuel a proposed coal-burning power plant at kite-wits 40 miles to the north. Ed found a spanner that fit the big wrench around the cap and removed it. We dropped in a rock, then pieces of pipe and chain to see how deep the hole was. Nothing, only wind sounds whistling down the casing. Ed found some more junk lying around, and I located a pile of used-up diamond drill bits. All this went down the hole. "Should take them a while to drill through all that junk," said Abby, then he grinned. Everyone has to do it. We passed through the xenophobic nasty little town of Escalante, then turned back south on the sandstone rim rock. We paused at Dance Rock, where Mormon pioneers stopped their wagons to hold a dance in 1879. These men, women, children, and babies, under orders from Brigham Young, left their homes in South Central Utah to establish a new settlement at Bluff, near four corners. The settlers had to lower their wagons and livestock down into Glen Canyon, then up the other side and on to 1,500-foot-high Combs Ridge, finally blasting through with hammers and drills. Those old Mormons were tough, noted Abby, even handed in his credits. We crept southward over the rock toward the heads of Hurricane, Coyote, and Davis Scultures. This 500,000-acre de facto wilderness was not as wild as one might think. We passed a total of four vehicles parked at the heads of the various canyons. They were the rigs of backpackers, we guessed, by the looks of the bumper stickers. Save Black Mesa, think Hopi, and save the whales. Of all those station wagon with Sierra Club stickers and two occupants stopped us from talking, one of them, the man, apparently recognized Ed Abby. I readied my pack for our hike. Cinching up my cheap backpack, I caught the tall Sierra clubber with knobby knees and hairy legs staring at me as I zipped my .357 Ruger Magnum into a particularly accessible side pocket. He looked back quickly to Ed and continued his diatribe. If you hadn't written that book, this place wouldn't be so crowded. Ed was being much too generous in forgiving of this spit dribbler, so I strode over. Back in those days, I couldn't help myself and stuck my finger in his face. "If we want any more shit out of you, I'll squeeze your fucking head," I said. "You don't have to be so violent!" screeched the woman. "True, all true," said Abby. Soon, we parked our rig, scotted the rim rock for routes, then shouldered our packs and edged down a wash that quickly grew into a canyon. Logs of agitized fossil wood washed down from the kite poets littered the upper wash, and some of the logs were a couple of feet across. The annular rings now silicified into lovely red and yellow agate used by the Anasazi to chip arrowheads. The canyon sunk into the slick rock, a deep, narrow slot with the ribbon of sky above. Off to the right, lay an alcove under the stain of a waterfall that coursed in from the rim during the rains. On one side, a horned anthropomorph was carved into the rock between two smaller figures with wide shoulders and tapered bodies. One of the petroglyphs was vandalized by Mormon cowboys who had carved initials over the ancient etchings. They were broke for food and had heated up a can of chilli by propping the can between two suitable rocks and then lighting twigs one at a time under the can. I was impressed with this skill and this stark efficiency and contrast to my own style of wilderness bonfires. Late in the afternoon, we turned up a short box canyon, a creek trickled out, and then the damp sand were tracks of deer and coyotes. We moved upstream above the range of cattle, passing three small beaver dams of willow. This is the last sunlight filtered down into the canyon, we came to a dead end. The sheer cliffs closed in on three sides and at the bottom of the box canyon was a plunge pool of striking beauty, clear water surrounded by cottonwood and canyon ash, an oriental scene of dappled light and stark dendritic shadows cast against the red rock cliffs. The next morning we hiked down the main canyon until the creek turned sluggish, then disappeared under the rising waters of Lake Powell, the man-made outrage visible from space that had drowned the loveliest of all canyons, Glen Canyon. With a floating willow stick I scratched an obscenity against the Bureau of Reclamation in the mud. Abby sat silently on a rock. As we turned to go, Ed asked me if I knew anything about explosives. I replied that I had been cross-trained in demolitions as a green beret and had filled in for our wounded demolition sergeant in Kwangay Province during the summer of 1967. Two days later, we hiked out and sat out a thunderstorm in the international scout I had borrowed from a girlfriend in Tucson. After four dry days of backpacking fare, we wanted drinks and real food. I found some beer in a chocolate bar, Ed came up with some cheese and a bottle of bourbon. After several permutations, we discovered that beer, cheese and crackers were the best compliment, followed by an after-dinner drink of whiskey and a snack of chocolate. I had a cheap little tea player and I slipped in a late quartet of Beethoven's The Transcendent Fifteenth. Thunder crashed and sheets of rain ran down the windshield, beyond, through the mist, lay a ghostly wasteland of dull, red and golden slick rock. Fossilized humics of sand dune dotted here and there with a bush of cliff-rose or juniper tree. Later, I would look back to this time and wonder what the hell it was we saw in one another. Ed was fifteen years older than I, so there was a paternalistic edge to our friendship. He seemed more sullen and grouchy than charismatic to me. And twenty years ago, I was hardly a prize myself. I only smiled when drinking beer and the slightest sudden movement, noise or trauma would bring out what I called the cornered ferret aspect of my otherwise charming personality. Ed was actually tolerant of this erratic conduct, believing it a faded and necessary part of the determined crazy category of wack-o-viet-nam-vet behavior. On the other hand, I had read Desert Solitaire and could see that a big chunk of the modern conservation movement had its origins right here and understand why a land ethic grew out of this southern Utah-slick rock and why its protectors tended to be so militant. Desert Solitaire was something larger than just a book about the desert. It was about the power of the land, of human connections to the earth, an idea of freedom – Ed's book was a call to arms. A month later, Ed was on the eve of a broken heart and about to enter his black sun summer as a fire lookout on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I returned to Tucson, moved into a tiny shack on the edge of the desert, and landed the only real job I ever had after Vietnam – substitute hippie mailman. Five months later, Ed Abby showed up alone at my doorstep, as girlfriend had left him. Ed stayed at my place for a month, sleeping outside in the back of his VW station wagon until he found a stone house to rent at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains. By the time the fall rains arrived, Ed was still crushed and forlorn, and his desperation Ed had sent the ex-girlfriend pictures of his new paramour. A long-legged, lost-vega showgirl and full dancing regalia, in a reckless attempt to win back the woman he was still secretly hooked on. One day, a letter from the girl arrives at the stone house, telling Ed all about her new boyfriend and how he ought to find a woman his own age. The tactic had backfired. Ed was now inconsolable. "How could she be so cruel?" he wondered. I muttered something lame about how maybe you shouldn't have sent the provocative pictures, but he just wasn't listening. I tried cheering him up with some music, putting my favourite Mozart on the turntable, the symphonia concertante, a surpassingly serene piece. Shortly into the slow second movement, Ed stopped the music. "Too sad," he said, "I can't stand it anymore." We took a walk-up Esperato Canyon, the torrential summer rains had scoured the bed of the dry wash, and the bench above the bedrock gorge was covered with green grass. Where the bench terraced out against a low cliff of volcanic regalia, sculpture giant puff balls lay in recesses like misplaced soccer balls. The mushrooms were fresh, and I was thinking about cooking some for supper. But Ed wasn't interested. We continued up the wash, startling a bobcat, an unusual daytime sighting. Ed took out the girlfriend's letter and crumpled it on the bedrock. He struck a match to it. We watched the pages flare and curl with some ceremony. It was still flaming as I turned and headed back down the canyon, already gathering mushrooms for dinner. The 70s were a time of flux. I quit my mailman job and chased a girl to Cape Cod. Ed lived in the Stone House and worked as a writer. I came back and moved into the Stone House with Abby, then flitted off again for Northern California. Ed took up with my old friend, the woman who had lent me the international scout on her Escalante trip. She moved in with Ed for a bit. The three of us went camping in the Cabeza Prieta. Ed and I took backpacking trips into the superstition mountains, the dripping springs mountains, the guillas, and the gariros. We did several more truck camping trips into the Cabeza Prieta. Abby got the two of us a job working for the defenders of wildlife as custodians of a large private wildlife refuge and out of Aipa Canyon. We split the job since both of us wanted at least six months to travel. Actually, it was more a non-job since there was nothing to do but live there. We explored the country, and in November of 1972, I caught a glimpse of the last Arizona Lobo, a wolf with a considerable reputation as an expert hamstringer of cabs. In the end, however, we both found the country tame. I lasted a few months, ed hung on for nearly a year. We were restless. That winter we started taking out billboards and bulldozers and plotting against strip mines, copper smelters, and logging operations. One night in the desert along the I-10, we worked on a giant billboard. It showed four old white guys dressed in golf outfits, laughing over cocktails at the club. The sign said, "Time to relax, and Green Valley Retirement Community." Amid the yucca and bursay, Ed Abby, John DePuy, a landscape artist and Ed Zolda's friend, and I labored against the wooden legs of the billboard, two with a bucksaw, me with an axe. A broken chain saw lay on the ground, DePuy murmured, "drink," and we broke for a quick beer. John whispered, "Time to work," and everybody went back to the sawing and chopping. We dropped our tools and hit the dirt as vehicle lights zoomed by. Parked off the frontage road with the lights off was a 1970 Lincoln Continental. Sitting in Billy Slakes' darkened continental was lovely long-legged Janet, Ed's new girlfriend, busted after by all three friends. The monkey-wrench days had begun, though I was unaware of any larger context for our mischief. As a team, we were careless and ineffective, almost recreational in our sloth abstract in our political theory. It was simply something to do, a fist of anger raised against the blind greed of technology, an anodyne to impotence. The driving force in our misbehavior was probably an idea had for a book he'd just started to write. Ed Abbey gave me a great gift that year, advice about getting a job. Though essentially unemployable, I, too, had to earn a living of sorts. Ed advised applying for seasonal work with the National Park Service, "they give you a quitting date to look forward to," he said. "I got out of the atlas and put in applications for all the places I might want to visit during the summer months, including a new National Park in Washington State called North Cascades." In December of 1974, Abbey and I drove my pickup into the Cabesa Prieta, the last trip we would take out there together for a number of years. At that time, Ed and I were unattached and without families. We had spent a sniffling, lonely Christmas Eve at a topless bar in Tucson drinking whiskey. Hanging we could improve on that one, we packed up and drove 150 miles west over Charlie Bell Pass into the Cabesa Prieta. We sipped a beer all the way from three forks and were a tad plastered by the time we hit Charlie Bell Pass. We got my 66 Ford truck stuck several times creeping down the dark, treacherous road to the well, hanging up the ass end of the truck, jacking it up in the dark, rocking it free, and then dropping down into the Growler Valley. We continued on for one more six-pack around the north end of the Granite Mountains where we got stuck again, finally crawling into our sleeping bag shortly after midnight. Ed and I drove through Montrose well west into the Mohawk Valley. At the low pass, we found big horn sheep tracks which were always a big deal since desert big horn were rare. Later, on New Year's Eve at Eagle Tank, it sleeted and snowed on us, an unusual occurrence. We sat out the rain for two days under a tarp, stoking an iron wood fire. We charted all the desert islands we wanted to visit in the Sea of Cortez. Ed scribbled notes on the new book he was writing, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Ed was especially concerned with the technical credibility of this book. At that time, I didn't know it was a comic novel about environmental saboteurs. I wanted to read accurately to a bulldozer operator, a hard rock miner. Ed said, "I said I could help a bit, but some of this technical stuff was over my head." Mountain Gazette Library is produced by Mountain Gazette, Executive produced by Mike Rogue, produced and hosted by John Bousdard. Austin Holt is our marketing director. No part of this podcast or the magazine can be reproduced or used to train large language models without express written consent from verb cabin LLC. That means you open AI. To learn more about Mountain Gazette, please visit us at MountainGazette.com. [music]