Canyon country. Southwestern United States. Lights out in Moab at midnight. A transformer has blown. Illuminated by dawn, it remains as ochre and aflame as Ed Abbey depicted in The Monkey-Wrench Gang.
His monkey-wrencher, problem solver, and chief polygamist, Seldom Seen Smith, can still be roused in these parts. As slippery and feisty as ever. If cornered, he’d go something akin to this.
Seldom Seen Smith:
Goddammit. People everywhere. Imbeciles really. Overflowing. In my park. My church. Trampling my pews. They cackle and shout and chitter incessantly. Dammit, be silent for once in your life. Or go check out Dingleberry Arch and let me be. Mongrels. All of them. Waging war on my landscape with internal combustion. It’s the National Park Industrial Complex, and business is busting its pants. My friend Ed is certainly dead and gone here.
Somebody monkey-wrenched the town just before I pulled in. A transformer was down, and the power was out clear from Moab to New Mexico. Who am I kidding? It was Hayduke himself. Message received, George!
With the town dark, the REI rubes won’t have their IPAs chilled or their hot tubs bubbling. They’ll drink tepid tap water and dip in and out of a cold shower. Good. They need an early start, for tomorrow is a day of plundering the views from each overlook, staring slack-jawed at a phone screen which shows the arch directly in front of them.
No matter, fifty feet from the road, and it’s still mostly empty. The trail can be yours if you’ll just get out aways. Yours and the mountain bluebird’s. But isn’t Delicate Arch tired of us? Give it a break, goddammit. Just for a day. Let the sandstone exhale and take in the La Sals, let it peer at the blue sky and chat away the afternoon with a raven.
All these arches are female, no question. Certainly, Delicate Arch. Endless patience for us dawdlers, giving and giving and giving. Curves so perfect, we’re unsure why we’re so attracted, but that’s it. Isn’t that always it, curves and mounds. Her gentle void cradles an untold number of revellers and their camera-phones, then she turns them back loose to the world a little more contented than before. Behind her, the white mountains rise in reverence, for she was there as they wriggled through the geologic birth canal.
Yet the flabby sightseers go berserking through the entrance gate in their rental wagons, gawk at an arch, then back to those phones and onto their snacks and soda pop bottles that will linger in the Moab Municipal Landfill for the next 450 years. Here, as voyeurs, as peeping toms, they look up the skirt of an arch and sneak a photo of her unmentionables.
One such morning, a boy of twelve was manoeuvring his remote-controlled car beneath Double Arch. I hoped it would flip and smash, and the kid would wail, but no such luck. Then a man, a grown man, pulled down his pants under the delicate one for a laugh from the aimless crowd. He slapped his bare ass and got a high five. I paused to snicker, but then shook my head. Dumbassery. This be Arches, in the year of our Amazon and Apple and PepsiCo lord, 2025.
I suppose it’s good for the Moab vendors selling their Hummer tours and Jeep tours, and ATV tours, and an endless amount of useless outdoor wares. I’m not so different, selling my float trips and my know-how of the river. Though I’d never paddle any bastards, any acolytes of consumerism and mercantilism. I’ll sit back and watch them squirm with an oar, gulp down my five allotted PBRs, and watch the sun turn their white asses cherry red.
In town (they call it a gateway town now), the Moab bookstore houses the last remnant of old Ed, the only place he exists in our canyon country anymore. The damn bookstore is even named after my outfitting company, Back of Beyond. And last time I was there, another author was peddling his damn guidebook at Ed’s desk. More literature on where and how to bruise my land. And yes, that’s Ed’s desk there in the back of the shop. A couple of framed photos of my friend are displayed on it, as well as his bestsellers, of course, ready to be turned for meagre profit to the few who haven’t read them yet.
His pine desk used to shine glossy with tung oil, now worn down to a matte. I think Ed pieced it together from an amalgamation of scraps. The top looks like it could’ve been a chunk of a door. My desk, however, is a patch of plywood on an overturned five-gallon bucket, where I find myself scribbling this letter, or diatribe, or whatever it is.Â
They use his desk to sell his books. Though an indie bookstore in this day of Amazonian shoppers, Ed would be okay with it, I suppose. Besides, his Kelty pack always housed a bent paperback or two, but what’s more, an untold number of piss cheap beers. He murdered countless pull-tab cans of the sweetest desert nectar, PBR and Schlitz. They all met their maker at the lips of old Ed during his arid wanderings. Rumour of Ed and Hayduke measuring distance by the number of six-packs consumed is the honest truth, not some fraternity folklore.
I suppose at this point, I just like my quiet freedom too much. But these wide-eyed visitors seem to enjoy the orange and red Entrada Sandstone, the piñon pines and common ravens, at least through the lenses of their phones. They certainly like it when a raven stops to take a sip from a desert pothole and gives them a smart-aleck pose. And I suppose this land is their land, and progress is unstoppable. Just get out of your cars for fifteen goddamn minutes and smell that Ute air.
The arches and canyons are ever beautiful in these barrens. Beautiful seems too simplistic, but plainly humble enough to describe them. And yes, the people are here, in droves, some of them curious, most just doing their confused best at present. And ok, sure, that toddler on the trail, the one who’s doing battle with sleep at nap o’clock so she can see just one more arch, I’ll admit, charms me slightly. Am I not a completely heartless bastard?
And the nation’s parks, the Arches and Canyonlands, endure despite our best efforts to trample them to a fine dust. They’ll be here another million years, and their rivers will keep carving deep into the earth’s maw. Who knows where we’ll all be then on this steaming, belching marble.
So, in accordance with our gang initiation, pour out some of your PBR onto these bastard asphalt roads for Hayduke and certainly for Abbey. Okay, a little for Doc and Bonnie, too. Every SUV has its A/C on blast and its navigation telling the driver how not to get lost on a one-way road. And give the sandstone just a tiny bit of repose and bona fide respect without wielding your phone in its direction.
You just might catch a glimpse of the most seldom seen of the monkey wrenchers, this Jack Mormon of a river guide with three wives and a penchant for praying for earthquakes near dams. So as long as there’s fence to be cut and heavy equipment to be busted, I’ll be out there.
Seldom Seen Smith
Lee’s Ferry, Arizona
