Status Updates From The Best of Edward Abbey

Early in the morning I hear coyotes singing again, calling up the sun.

☀️☀️☀️

A bear does not pick berries with a little tin pail; 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.

Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. What I saw was the moon - the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We are. And each such moment holds all that we could possibly need.

Mesquite burns with a slow hot flame.

Fire is magic, a purifying and sanctifying magic, and most especially a mesquite fire on a sand dune at evening under desert skies, on the shore of a pool that gleams like polished agate, like garnet, like a tiger’s eye.

The sun goes down. A few stray clouds catch fire, burn gold, vermillion, and driftwood blue in the unfathomed sea of space.

Looking out on this panorama of light, space, rock and silence I am inclined to congratulate the dead man. I envy him the manner of his going: to die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird. To die in the open, under the sky, before this desert vastness opening like a window onto eternity—that surely was an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck.

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.