Edward Abbey never met a controversy he didn’t like.
Barroom philosopher, champion of wilderness, critical gadfly: for forty-odd years Ed roamed the American West, a region, he wrote, “robbed by the cattlemen, raped by the miners, insulted by the tourists.” As he traveled, he stirred up trouble by, among other things, poking ungentle and sometimes dangerous fun at cowboys, Indians, women, Mormons, Hispanics, and above all the agents of supposed economic progress—realtors, captains of industry, car dealers. He was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon: liberal and conservative alike felt his wrath, which seemed to grow as the years piled on. And he liked the fight. “Racial, sexual, cultural differences: forbidden ideas; we’re not supposed to think such things, much less say them out loud,” he grumbled in his journals, published in 1994 as Confessions of a Barbarian. “Yet it is fun to bring them up.”
He’s been dead for decades years, felled by a bad pancreas on March 14, 1989, but that shaken-hornet’s-nest legacy of his stands intact. You can start a debate—and even a fistfight—anywhere from Missoula to Mexico City merely by mentioning his name.
By way of example, I once went into a bar in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to grab a soda for the long ride to Jackson. Not long before, Abbey had given a speech at the University of Montana in which, among other things, he said, “Suppose you had to spend most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what it does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised amid the bawling of calves and cows in the spatter of mud and the stink of shit.” Tough words in beef country, not guaranteed to win friends. A bullish cowboy at the bar took a look at my Arizona license plates and my long hair, pulled himself up, and said, “You from Arizona? You know Abbey?” When I said yes, he said, “Get out.” I did.
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