The Best of Edward Abbey (35 page)

The first sensible thing I did at North Rim, before my father appeared, was fall in love with the ranger. Not the Chief Ranger but the one who manned the park entrance station a few miles down the road. Park Ranger Hendrickson (GS-4) was one of those golden Californians from the San Diego area. She wore her sea-bleached hair in a heavy ponytail that fell below her clavicles. Like most girl swimmers she had a well-developed pair of lungs, much admired by the boys. Pretty as a Winesap in
September, she looked especially fetching in her ranger suit: broad-brimmed straw hat, white blouse with Park Service pin, the snug skirt of forest green twill that ended, as was the fashion then, a good six inches above her knees. Like most sexual perverts I’ve always suffered from a fatal weakness for women in uniform—for cheerleaders, majorettes, waitresses, meter maids, prison matrons, etc. On my first meeting with Bonnie Hendrickson (as we shall here name the young woman) I said to her, frankly, “You know—I’ve always wanted to lift a ranger’s skirt.”

“You’ll need a hiking permit,” she replied. A quick-witted girl—with a B.A. in French. We soon became good friends. On my days off I sometimes helped her get through the tedious hours at the entrance station. While she leaned out her little window collecting entrance fees from the tourists, answering questions, chatting about Smokey the Bore and the fire danger, I was kneeling at her feet, unseen from outside, gently rolling down the ranger’s pantyhose. We played various such experiments in self control. I experimented, she displayed the self control. An innocent game, like horseshoes, with similar principles. Top that ringer …

On her days off she would visit me in the lookout tower, assisting me in
my
duties. As I’d be reporting a fire over the Park Service radio system she was unbuttoning my Levi’s. “Fire Dispatch,” I said into the microphone, “this is North Rim Lookout.”

“Yeah?” The Fire Dispatcher had the weary, cynical voice of a police desk sergeant. “What’s your problem now, Abbey?”

“Reporting a smoke, sir.”

“Yeah? And where do you think this one is, Abbey?”

“Well sir, I’ve got a reading of zero-four-two degrees and thirty—oooh, watch those fingernails!—thirty minutes. Near Fredonia.”

“Yeah …” A long pause. Then the weary voice. “I hate to tell you this, Abbey, but that’s the same fire you reported last week. Like I told you then, that’s the Fredonia sawmill and it’s been smoking away in that same spot for fifty years. Ten four?”

“Yes sir, ten four. Oh Christ … oh
yes …!”

“No swearing on the airwaves. These here transmissions are monitored by the Federal Communications Commission.”

One cold rainy afternoon Bonnie and I were down in the cabin on the bed, a fire crackling in the stove, when our experiments were interrupted by a banging on the door. Bonnie ducked beneath the covers, I yanked on my pants and cracked the door open. Two Park Service fire fighters stood there grinning at me through the drizzle, their truck snuggled against the plump round rear of Bonnie’s little car. “Hey Ed,” says one, “we got a report of a hot fire in this area.”

“Get out of here.” I slammed and barred the door. But I don’t want to give the impression that a fire lookout’s life is all work. There was time for play. One night a week we’d drive to the village on the Canyon rim and visit the bar. My Hopi friend would be there, old Sam Banyaca the shaman, and the veteran mule wrangler known only as Walapai, a leathery runt of a half-Indian cowboy who always squatted on top of his barstool, having never learned to sit anything but a horse. Behind the bar was Robert the intellectual bartender, smug smirk on his fat face, about to recite a new limerick. He claimed to be the only living composer of original limericks in America. I still remember two of them. I wish I could forget.

And the other:

“Mundi!”

“Monday!”

“It’s Friday, f’crush sake,” says old Walapai, turning his bleary eyes toward us and swaying on his stool. “You honkies drunk already?” He crashed to the floor.

I spent four sweet summers on that sublime North Rim, not always alone in my tower. During the third summer a thing happened which caused me the deepest grief of my life. So far. The pain of my loss seemed unendurable. I called an old friend, Ann Woodin of Tucson, for comfort. She came to my part of the forest bearing apples, a flagon, black caviar and a magnum of Mumm’s. We sat on a log under the trees at evening, by a fire, and listened to the birds, and talked, and ate the caviar and drank the champagne and talked some more. She helped me very much. A lady with class, that Ann. A lady
of
class. The same who once rescued me at two in the morning from the Phoenix City Jail down in Goldwater country, where the police had locked me up for what they called “negligent driving.” Joseph Wood Krutch, another Tucsonan, dedicated one of his books to Ann Woodin. She is, he wrote, “an ever-present help in time of trouble.”

Four summers. Sweet and bitter, bittersweet hilarious seasons in the forest of ponderosa and spruce and fir and trembling aspen trees. The clang of horseshoes in the twilight. The smell of woodsmoke from the cabin. Deep in the darkling pines the flutesong of a hermit thrush. Lightning, distant thunder, and clouds that towered into evening. Rain on the roof in the night.

One day somebody in Park headquarters down on the South Rim of the Canyon, the bad rim, the grim rim, said to somebody else, “Do we really need a fire lookout on North Rim?”

And the other man said, “I didn’t know we had one.”

The lookout was closed at the end of my fourth season and has never been used since. My father had long before returned to his own woods in Pennsylvania where he still lives and works. He is now eighty-three. And Ranger Hendrickson—sweet witty lovely daring Bonnie—she had gone back to California where,
I’ve heard, she married well, to a man with a steady job, property, money, prospects, a head on his shoulders. Not a fire lookout. Not by a long shot.

W
hen I think of travel I think of certain women I have known. So many of my own journeys have been made in pursuit of love. In pursuit of pain. And in flight from both.

Landscape and women. Whenever I discover a natural scene that pleases me, that I find beautiful, my first thought is: What a place to bring a girl! And our world is so rich in both—beautiful places, lovely women. We should all be as happy as birds. How clever of the inventor of this scheme to create from such abundant, glorious materials so tangled a web of confusion and misery. The medieval Schoolmen in proving God’s existence overlooked this potent variation on the argument from design: The world’s disorder, cruelty, and desperation could not possibly have resulted from chance alone.

Scene One: On the northbound bus from Fort McClellan, Alabama. During the war. My first furlough after completing basic training. In the fertile darkness of the crowded bus I find myself seated beside a young woman, a stranger, a Southerner. I am eighteen, a virgin, shy as a doe; she is perhaps five years older, married, lonely. Her husband, she tells me, is in Italy, has survived Sicily, the disastrous landing at Salerno, the battle of Monte Cassino. She prays for his safety and longs for his return. As she tells me about him her hand comes to rest on mine; she takes my hand and places it on her silken knee. She asks me to tell her about myself.

What have I to tell her? My life is nothing. All I know is my own homesickness. I am sick for home. I think of the hills of
Appalachia—the red-dog dirt road that winds beside the crooked creek, under the massed transpiring greenness of the trees, toward a gray farmhouse where a kerosene lamp glows behind the curtains of the windows that face the road. But I cannot tell her what that scene means to me. She leans close and kisses me and lifts that inert, ignorant hand of mine to her breasts. Kiss me back, she whispers. Touch me. Touch me! And we fumble at each other’s bodies in the constrained plush gloom of the rumbling bus, make love with our hands, in a fashion, through the awkward obstacles of buttons, snaps, garters (this was long ago).

The bus enters the outskirts of a city. Clasping my left hand between her thighs, trapping it where she wants it, she whispers in my ear: “Stay with me tonight. I have a place here.” And when I make no reply, she repeats: “Please. Stay with me. Just tonight.”

That was some time ago. Writing these funny sentences, I pause now and then to perform other duties. I get up from this small table, step out the door, and pace the catwalk that forms a complete balcony around the four glass walls of my one-room house. My house stands fifty feet above the ground on a skeletal tower of steel, and it belongs to the United States Forest Service. Unlike most writers I work for my living. I watch for forest fires and when I see one I do something about it.

This tower is 8,000 feet above sea level and the view is good. When the air is clear I can see the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff and the desert ranges south to the border of Mexico. There are many black bear in the wilderness that surrounds me; also whitetail deer, coyotes, a few mountain lions, vultures, hawks, falcons, and odd creatures like the javelina and black rattlesnakes with yellow lateral bands. Right now the blackberries are ripe; the clownish bears shamble through the forest with stains of red juice streaking their muzzles, paws, summer fur. A bear does not pick berries with a little tin pail; instead, the bear grasps an entire blackberry branch between its paws, bends
it down and into the mouth, and strips it clean of berries, thorns, leaves, bugs, spiders, everything. The bear rolls this mix around for a while in its mouth, looking thoughtful, like a wine lover sampling a new wine, makes distinctions, spits out the leaves and thorns, and grabs another branch.

And the woman on the bus? I did a cruel thing. As cruel as it was stupid. I declined the lady’s invitation. I let her leave that bus, in that midnight southern city, without me. I rode on into the cold North alone, simple and single-minded, bound for home. For that sin I shall pay, all my life, in the cheap coin of regret. It has not escaped my reflections on the incident that the young woman may have been a prostitute, or part-time prostitute, conning a country boy—an easy trick. I don’t think she was; I believed in her then and I believe in her now. What she wanted, I imagine, was to hold me in her arms while thinking of her husband. It makes no difference. My rejection of her remains, in my eyes, unforgivable.

At present I am alone here. In the evening I descend from my tower and walk through the forest. Nearby is an escarpment of sandstone, a kind of natural promontory projecting above the canyons, nearly flat but tilted slightly, like the deck of a listing ship. A few yellow pines have taken root in the fissures of the stone, along with some stunted, twisted Arizona white oaks, and a few mescal or century plants—that odd member of the amaryllis family that resembles a rosette of bowie knives planted hilt-first in the ground. Like a girl the mescal blossoms splendidly but only once, and much more briefly, in its lifetime.

On the rim of the scarp sits a weathered figure of rock, semihuman in form; you might think some Druid priest had seated himself there 5,000 years ago, resolving never to move again, and allowed himself to petrify, cell by cell, through the centuries. Each time I approach this sacred grove with its white rock and quiet, listening trees, I am reminded of the Mediterranean. I think of Delphi and half expect that stone figure to rise
at last and confront me, prepared—after appropriate sacrifice—to answer the question I have been seeking, all my life, to learn how to ask.

But the figure does not stir. Not yet. I gaze across its shoulders, through the trees, at the vast sea beyond. Not the blue sea of the Mediterranean but the rust red sea, the lilac purple sea, the wave-wrinkled but static sea of the desert. On that motionless immensity ride enchanted ships: Table Mountain, Four Peaks, Haystack Butte, Aztec Peak, Battle Mountain, Heliograph Peak, the Superstition Mountains. And others, many others, floating on waves of haze at distances we measure but do not comprehend. Contemplating this picture (but picture of what?), I feel again the vague but poignant urge to grasp it, embrace it,
know
it all at once and all in all; but the harder I strive for such a consummation the more elusive and mysterious that
it
becomes, slipping like a dream through my arms. Can this desire be satisfied only in death? Something in our human consciousness seems to make us forever spectators of the world we live in. Maybe some of my crackpot, occultist friends are right; maybe we really are aliens here on earth, our spirits born on some other, simpler, more human planet. But why then were we sent here? What is our mission, comrades, and when do we get paid?