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Down the River with Edward Abbey

By Ken Wright

"The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience."

- Edward Abbey, from his collected letters

I am healed! Praise the Gorge!
Or the canyon, anyway. The canyon of the San Juan River to be exact.
We've been on the water for only a half an hour. Our four-boat flotilla has just passed under the forlorn steel span connecting the desert outback of Mexican Hat, Utah, with the butte and mesa wayback of Dinetah, the Navajo Nation. Once behind us, the arcing highway bridge swallowed around the canyon corner, we have entered the 65-mile-long meandering trench that will contain us for the next five days. And just this knowledge - no, this bodily awareness, this sensual sensibility - is enough to displace the accumulated detritus and flotsam of daily life, the ennui and tedium and fatigue of the routine tasks and distractions of our fussy times and fabricated world. Back there.
For me, there is no more powerful medicine for our civilized afflictions than the slow silty slide of the snaky San Juan through its great sandstone gorges. And those gathered with me here at the river - my teen-age son sitting on the front of my cataraft, my wife and daughter orbiting us in duckies, and our friends and their kids smattered up and down the river in boats and duckies of their own - know what I'm talking about.
Which is why we on this river trip today launch every summer together with a voyage down the San Juan River. It's a tribal celebration, a seasonal ritual, an annual rite of re-passage for all of us to remind ourselves what's important, what's really real. And for the kids, because we've been doing this trip every year since they were each a year old, the San Juan is their summer camp: that intimate place they revisit with their friends year after year, accumulating memories, experiences, challenges, confidence, tallying the most magical seasons of their childhoods.
Please note that in this case I mean "summer" as defined not by the calendar's demarcation; or not even celestially, by the solar stand-still at its rolling apogee. I mean "summer" as a lifestyle, an attitude, a perspective, a way of being, or even as just a "way," in the Buddhist sense: Summer-do. I mean "summer" like how kids mean it - out of school. I mean summer as that time of year that must devoted to those other, less civilized but equally vital and infinitely older chores: the toughening of one's feet, the tanning of one's torso, and the exploring of the world, out there, beyond the wall of our dutiful duty-full days.
This is a definition of summer that I never managed to give up when I grew up. Hence, though, ariseth my perennially farcical financial situation. Hence my perpetual poker-hand collection of seasonal part-time employments. Hence it is likely I will die with my boots rather than silk slippers on. Hence my and my wife's having chosen to live where there is less job opportunity but more of the kind of countryside that others with more job opportunities consider fine vacation spots. Hence my family's vowing to always and ever more partake in nothing less than absolutely ass-kicking summers.
And hence we begin each of those "summers" with a float into the wilds of the San Juan River, southeastern Utah, the Colorado Plateau.
Praise the Gorge!

I bring up these things - these "hences" to go with how Sarah and I have chosen to live the supposedly "mature" years of our lives - because this is how it's been for twenty years now. And for that, I have to thank the other companion with me on this river trip: Edward Abbey, in the form of a galley-proof of his soon-to-be-released collected letters, Postcards from Ed. I brought this along ostensibly because I'm to write a review of the book; I am finding, though, that this new stash of Abbey's writing is also making me review my own life-story I have written - in actions - over the last twenty years.
I keep bringing up "the last twenty years," by the way, because it was exactly twenty years ago this weekend that my and Sarah's paths first crossed (then entwined, then entangled). In early June 1986 we were both ski bums in the same northern Colorado mountain valley. When we met, it was already ski-bum "summer": I was between seasonal jobs, and was cashing in the fringe benefits of unemployment in the mountains: fishing daily to eat, and toasting those fresh Rocky Mountain trout entrees with pocket-change purchases of Schaefer beer ($1.50 a six pack).
But work was on the horizon: I'd begun spending those high-country mud-season days training to become a river guide. Every morning our little assembly of trainees and instructors would gather to assault various freezing, thumping stretches of whitewater - the Colorado, Blue, and Arkansas rivers - where in trial-by-paddle fashion we learned to read the river; and when we didn't read so good, to high-side, swim rapids, unwrap boats from boulders, and rescue other involuntary swimmers and their crafts from the many hazards of raging snowmelt.
I quickly knew - that bodily awareness and sensual sensibility thing - that I had found my place.
When I first saw Sarah, I was finishing one of those trout dinners on the front porch of the old post office building I was living in. Sarah pulled up driving a roofless Jeep CJ-7 with chrome wheels and a keg strapped into the back seat like a rotund friend. Sarah was the roommate of a fellow river-guide trainee, and she was coming to deliver an invitation to my friend's birthday bash. I accepted promptly: I set down my plate, quaffed my Schaefer, jumped the five steps from porch to roadside and into the idling Jeep, which, she has told me often since, was not what she had in mind. No matter: I didn't get out of that Jeep until she sold it three years and 20,000 miles later.
Sarah soon joined our guiding crew. And so began the hences of our life together.

I was doing this, by the way - this learning to run rivers, yes, but also the ski bumming, the inhabiting little mountain hamlets, the (mostly) voluntary poverty, the fishing a lot, the roaming the West, the country, the world, etc. - in no small part due to the influence of Edward Abbey. His books, I mean; I never actually met the man. But that was quite powerful enough.
Three years before meeting Sarah I had migrated West as a sort of sabbatical from the board-game course in life I'd been navigating - academic to professional to homeowner to family to beer gut to loss of body pigment to mid-life attrition to pension retirement to hip-replacement surgery and, then, if not sooner, unto death. Or something like that. Or so it seemed. Or so it would've gone if I hadn't stalled out somewhere between the "academic" and "professional" segments of my journey. Fortunately. Hence, a friend-motivated diversion West for a season with the aim of refocusing enough so I could get back in the game of Life.
Fortunately, again, my aim was poor. For it wasn't long after my first purifying, hypnotizing, baptismal Rocky Mountain snowfall that I stumbled onto Desert Solitaire, Abbey's rhapsodic, poetic, philosophic treatise on living in a landscape. Which turned out to be just the appetizer, for I quickly acquired an appetite, and soon devoured Ed Abbey's books - Down the River, Abbey's Road, Beyond the Wall, The Monkey Wrench Gang, et al - like the fat guy at a pig roast.
Hence ?.

Needless to say, Abbey was, in a way, my literary life coach for a while, my anti-career counselor when I needed it most. Thanks to Abbey and the places his books sent me - philosophical as well as geographic - I never got back on that long and winding downhill road I'd begun to run in the city back East. Because, without getting into a long, annotated, quote-supported summary of his bibliography, that was the message the words and stories imbedded in Abbey's books instilled in me: The yin-yang dance of geography and living well: Where you are is who you are. The latter depends on the former, he said - a reality encoded in our human genome. Also, though, he pointed out that in the world we live in today, the defense and survival of the former depends upon the integrity and courage of the latter.
Hence, I walked away, even if I didn't wander so far away. I've still ended up with a home, a family, work, community, sure. Yes. Absolutely. Those things are the most ancient, most human, most universal of desires and needs, are they not? But now, whilst en route to those things, I also walk out into the countryside around me that until I came West had remained only a scenic backdrop in my life, like the blur passing by my career-careening car's windshield.
Hence ?.
Sarah and I continued to ski bum and river guide and travel for years after that first meeting. Then we got married. Then we settled in a little town on the edge of the Colorado Plateau - Abbey Country, as he himself claimed it. Then we had two kids who we now raise in this place, running rivers, skiing, hiking, biking, exploring. And we share all this with a band of companions and campe�eros who have made the same choices of how, and where, to travel their lives. And who salute all that by starting each summer with a float down the San Juan River.
And so I bow to Ed Abbey for offering me that view of the topography off the map.

Our third day on the river, we are camped at Ross Rapid. Here the river is embedded in a narrow, steep, stair-stepping corridor of grey and golden bedrock. And here, where the river sweeps to the left, a slotted side-canyon spews in debris from river-right. The result is a big bench for camping; a wide, shallow, gently swirling eddy for playing; and a constricting of the river itself so it bunches into a swift series of standing waves as it passes by our beached boats. A much-favored and traditional campsite on the annual San Juan trip.
Much happens here: For hours, we all paddle and surf the duckies in the wave train, and the kids make dozens of life-jacketed plummets through the rapid - scrambling upstream, jumping in again, bobbing the waves, then stroking hard to catch the eddy below. Good practice for river-rats-in-training. Later, the gloves come out and some of us whip a baseball around the knee-deep eddy's infield. Others wander up onto the limestone benches above camp to garner views over our impromptu village and to pay homage to Kenny Ross, a Bluff, Utah-based river runner for whom this surreal, soulful spot is dedicated.
Still later, as darkness fills the canyon, the cocktail flag will be raised - a red monkey wrench on a black field. A filling river-dinner will be concocted and shared. Then chairs will then be encircled, toasts made, jokes and stories told, guitars brandished and songs sung until the first-quarter moon follows the sun behind the ragged canyon rim. Then, our little band of nomads will fall asleep under the stars.
And I will again pass another in a twenty-year run of nights doing just what I most want where I most need to be. Because it's who I am.
Yes, after this river trip, after the adventures of another summer, there will be still that ennui and tedium and fatigue of the routine tasks and distractions of daily life, even here in Abbey Country. Yes, there will still be the "hence" of the concerns and challenges of finances and jobs. Yes, I still will be likely to die with my boots on - or river sandals, if I'm lucky. Such is life in modern times. Such is the price of living the life we want and need - a creative life in a beautiful place doing meaningful, challenging things in a symbiotic, synergistic community - in a world that doesn't reward such values.
But that's okay, because I know where the medicine is: Right here, right where we live. Right how Sarah and I have chosen to raise our family. Right with these others on this magical, mystical, ancient river who have also chosen to make a stand and write their own story with us in this place.
Right where Abbey said it was.

Ken Wright lives in Durango, hence struggles to pay the bills while wandering around out there as much as he can. He is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home and Why I'm Against It All (Raven's Eye Press).