Status Updates From The Best of Edward Abbey

Roy is a leather-hided old man with gray hair, red nose & yellow teeth; he is kind, gentle, well-meaning, but worries too much, takes things too seriously. He’s afraid of having a heart attack, falling off the horse, dying there on the sand, under the sun, among the flies, weeds & indifferent cattle. Seems to me like a decent, clean way of taking off, better than the slow rot in a hospital with bedsores & bedpans.

McMurtry called him “the Thoreau of the American West.” I’ve read some of his work but really I’ve only scratched the surface. I live and breathe the wilds so I should have dug into more of his works a lot sooner.

Typically I eschew “best of” collections however he put this together himself and declared it damn tight or something like that ☺️ so I grab my pack and bottle and Bowie and head out.