Abbey's Road

Abbey's Road is a collection of vignettes from Ed Abbey's travels, including Australia, Italy, Mexico, and his beloved Southwest. In it, he continues to be a curmudgeon, a caustic observer of nature and people, less than polite and more than poetic. He irritates, entertains, and educates, all at the same time. While Abbey was in Australia, "Penny introduced them [three Aboriginal women] to me as she squinted through her viewfinder: 'This is Jean, the blind one; this is Sheila, missing a nose; this is Lily Billy.' Sprawled in the dust and ashes, the witch-ladies gaped at me, including the one without eyes, and jabbered away. They were the most physically hideous human creatures I had ever seen - shrunken, mutilated, gray with filth, pot-bellied, spindle-limbed, crawling with flies to which they appeared supremely indifferent - all of them obviously syphilitic and mad as kookaburras... I watched their lively hands, their active searching faces, and saw something like gaiety in those irrepressible gestures. Why quit, they were saying. Why quit?" (p. 28-29). Expect more of the same. Of famous Ayers Rock, "The rock rises 1,200 feet above the desert. It is a mile long, half a mile wide. One single monolithic bulge of ancient, arcane, arkose, and rugose Cambrian sandstone, 500 million years old..., it resembles a pink - or in different light - a rust red worm or grub, hairless and wrinkled, that has succumbed, through petrifaction, to the prevailing inertia of Being" (p. 53). Ayers Rock (Uluru) is a hairless grub? That's an Abbeyesque description, for sure! And here's another of his caustic and "insensitive" observations: "I always get scared when I enter Mexico. Something about those short, heavy mestizo police with their primitive stonefish eyes - the way they look at you - and the bandits loafing along the highways with stolen assault rifles, picking their teeth with lizard bones. I don't know which I fear most, the cops or the bandits. In fact except for the uniform, I can't tell one from the other" (p. 70). He continues his condemnation of exploiting nature for economic gain: "Turismo is always and everywhere a dubious, fraudulent, distasteful, and in the long run, degrading business, enriching a few, doing the rest more harm than good" (p. 86), or for recreation: "There is no lower form of life known to zoological science than the motorboat fisherman, the speedboat sightseer" (p. 118). Abbey has a unique way of describing the world. Here are a few samples: "The taste of fear on my tongue - a green and sour flavor. The blue green corrosion of an old battery terminal" (p. 80). "I am fascinated by his feet. The old man owns the most beaten-up, stone-battered, cactus-cured, fire-hardened pair of feet I have ever seen on a human-being - so cracked, played, and toughened they almost suggest hooves" (p. 84). "... [O]ne word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word" (p. 113). "What the conscience of our race - enviro

He's flip, he's serious, at times at the top of his entertainment (always second to the polemics) game. When Abbey's "on", as he is in parts of this book of essays, he's untouchable. His Snideness is at his most philosophical, his most opinionated, his most, uh . . . truculent, in this stimulating book. Along with Desert Solitaire (see my review), this book will not be leaving my bookshelf anytime soon. There are 3 sections: Travel (the most entertaining), Polemics & Sermons (actually more like Rants & Raves), and Personal History. The one disturbing/detracting aspect to the book is this: With all the leg-pulling, hyperbole, and outrageous pronouncements dished out, Abbey's glaring racist side can't be disguised. His calloused remarks about the Mexicans and Hispanics are passed off as snide humor, but the insensitivity is pretty unsettling. It reveals a deeper prejudice, something that a guy like Cactus Ed should have been well aware of but I suppose it was his perogative to sound like a redneck anyway. So, there you have it, a pretty decent offering from a real iconoclast. If you haven't read Abbey before, I would read Desert Solitaire first and try this one on after. Parataxis The Cloud Reckoner Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

All of the material in this cassette is available elsewhere, but nowhere else can you hear the intonation, humor, and on occasions rants of Cactus Ed in his own voice. I have played this for friends who have never heard of Abbey and universally comment that they have never heard anything quite like it. Whether he's drinking with pigs in the desert, musing on planting a tree under the nuclear umbrella, or playing cat and hiker with a puma, there is wisdom and absurdity in every spoken sentence. If they ever get another copy and you beat me to it - mine has worn out - you have won a real prize.

This collection of previously published magazine articles is vintage Abbey, alternatively moving and funny, sacred and profane, flip and dead serious (well almost) and at all times entertaining. Divided into three categories - Travel, Polemics and Sermons, and Personal History - the subjects range from the Great Barrier Reef to technology to women to Winnebagos to hallucinogenic drugs - with many stops in between. The introduction, wherein Abbey comments on nature writing - and various nature writers - is itself worth the price of admission.

This wistful collection of essays captures the spirit, the essence of the great deserts of Australia and Mexico. There is a yearning for all that is wild in the great Australian outback which captures the reader's inner core. Abbey makes clear that though Australia is his kind of place he is obliged to return to his mother country. He captures the spirit of place by describing the weird smells emanating from gedgi trees, the bitter taste of Aussie Black Swan lager, the distant and near views of Ayers Rock, his longing for an Aussie barmaid who almost accepts his invitation to travel with him in a rented 2-wheel drive vehicle across the impenetrable western desert. He captures the Australian or Strine vernacular and the desperation of the modern aborigine. This yearning of Abbey carries over onto a desert isle off the coast of Mexico where there's not much but isolation, scarce water, no women, and beans for dinner. That's pure Abbey