He Had His Moments

I drove into Arches last night, grumbling. It’s obligatory of course for someone writing a book about Ed Abbey to make the pilgrimage to this particular park, since this is the place he wrote his great book, Desert Solitaire. But it’s also a place that has fulfilled Abbey’s worst nightmares, and seems to celebrate not just wild red rock shapes, but the rise of the automobile. For all its grandeur, it’s a hard place to view without irony. You try and find a spot to create some quiet, some personal relationship with this unearthly landscape, to drink a beer and maybe smoke an honorary cigar, and revel in the desert quiet, but then the line of cars come ripping up the paved road, or, as happened to me, a camper full of loud kids lands right where you’ve tried to have your little ceremony.

“The spoiler has come.” This line from Robinson Jeffers comes into my mind. Abbey wrote in his journal that the search for transcendence was the most important thing. But he did his share of grumbling while he was here, and what doesn’t get much play in his book is the fact that he was going through a divorce and spending a lot of time in Hoboken. During his supposedly solitary stint his wife and kid lived with him for a while in the trailer. I am writing a book about both Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey and compared to Stegner, who stayed married to the same woman his whole life, there are times that Abbey, with five kids with five wives, doesn’t look so great. The journals tell a story of a man fighting depression, a brave man true but an inconsistent one. Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Things I Noticed When I was Five, and This Morning, Too

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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smoothed brick, barred owl egg, medicine bottle

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ON THE ROAD: Highlights of the Western Trip So Far

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I’m in the West now and boy does it feel good. I’m here to track the ghosts of Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey, and to reflect on the current state of the Western environment. Here are some of the highlights of the journey so far:

*During a June scouting trip to Tucson, I poured over the Abbey journals and letters in the University of Arizona Library. I was there to study and I tried to be a good boy and stay in my seat– to be studious and calm–but I got tired of only reading about Western adventures. Finally I gave in to the urge to explore, and drove up to the Grand Canyon. My plan was to hike in to the Havasu Falls, about twelve miles down from the canyon rim. The falls were the site of one of my favorite chapters in Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Abbey spends a month living alone down near the waterfall, dragging an old miner’s cot to sleep on behind the curtain of water. He wanders around naked, talks to himself, hallucinates a little. The chapter ends when he strands himself on a cliff ledge and sleeps in a small cave in the rock wall. He writes: “I stretched out in the coyote den, pillowed my head on my arm and suffered through the long night, wet, cold, aching, hungry, wretched, dreaming claustrophobic nightmares. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.” While I didn’t sleep in a coyote den, I did have my share of misadventures, springing in part from the fact that as I launched my hike into the canyon I seemed to think I was still 35 and in great shape,as I had been the last time I lived in the West. The reality was that I was a pastey 51 year old Easterner who had no right hiking twelve miles with a backpack in 104 degree heat. I would later pay the price with an inflamed red leg, grotesquely swollen with cellulitis. But I made it out two days later. And the pain was balanced by the joy of seeing the blue-green, almost-tropical falls after four hours of hiking though dry, dusty orange rock…… Continue reading →

Table for Two: An Interview with Monica Wood

categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews

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Hot off the presses!

Monica Woods’s new book, When We Were the Kennedys, is being published this week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s a superb book, warm and funny and wise and heartbreaking, too, the story of a terrible year in a wonderful life, the year Monica’s father died when she was just nine. And wait—it’s not an entirely terrible year, full of the life of a busy mill town in Maine, the life of a big female family, the life of a country about to lose its president, and the life of a very observant protagonist. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Write a Fan Letter. Preferably to Me.

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Actual Photo

Let us start with Robert Browning’s fan letter to Elizabeth Barrett, January, 1845:

“I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart — and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing — really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning ‘Would you like to see Miss Barrett?’ then he went to announce me, — then he returned . . . you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?” Continue reading →

Support Your Local Prankster

categories: Cocktail Hour

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NOT Bill and Dave, but Ed and Wavy Gravy…..

As I mentioned in the window above, I just visited Wendell Berry in Kentucky. It’s an experience I’ll never forget (and will write about soon), but Wendell wasn’t the only literary luminary I talked to in KY. I also had the great pleasure of meeting the writer Ed McClanahan. We talked about many things, including, of course, his friendship with Ken Kesey and his role in the Merry Pranksters.

But we also talked about Kickstarter. Turns out I’m not the only one trying to raise money. Ed’s is a great project and he is closing in on both his target and his deadline.

So check this out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcclanamania/mcclanamania-ed-mcclanahan-reads-for-you

You can help a Prankster in need! Continue reading →

Origami Weekend: Confessions of a Non-Folder, Continued

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Origami by the incredible folder and scientist Robert Lang

[We invite Katherine Heiny back to follow up on her Origami post from May 22!]

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“Folder or non-folder?” the woman at the front desk asked me.

“Is that like ‘Human or subhuman?’” I asked.

She stared at me expressionlessly.

I sighed. “Non-folder.”

We were in New York for the National Origami Convention. My husband had taken Angus to the first day of the convention and when they returned to the hotel room, Angus had been in a sort of joyful daze and my husband had drunk scotch straight from the bottle. We had all been too tired to go to the origami dinner or participate in the nocturnal folding. Today it was my turn to accompany Angus. Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Summer Swimming

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Ahh. Drew and Sarah’s dock at Staples Pond, with sky–photo by Elysia.

Ah. Last summer I couldn’t swim because of the neck operation. It just hurt too much to pull water with my hands, to roll my shoulders, to turn my neck from side-to-side. I could wade in and float, but. So. It’s a special pleasure this summer to drive the three miles to Drury or Staples and visit with the McNairs or Slartons and swim out to the center of whichever little pond and tread water with the loons. You might also be with dogs, you might also be with friends, but when the water is in your ears and you are stroking forward you are very much alone in your thoughts, Continue reading →