Abbey Rode ....

Hello Folks,

Yesterday was the warmest day yet in Moab as spring is rapidly approaching. Walked up the hill behind the condo ... and it is quite a hill ... to the beginning of Steel Bender Trail. The road that goes to the top of the canyon wall, which is all paved until you reach the trail head, goes by an outcrop of sandstone that is cordoned off with fencing. In this area is rock art, which of course, has been embellished with the names and initials and bullet scars of the low IQ set.

As you walk up you see the discarded sacrament containers of these negative IQ’rs  – beer bottles, beer cans, cigarette butts, beef jerky wrappers, McDonald’s cardboard, paper and styrofoam. 

So ... what is the mindset or logic that allows you to determine that your garbage can is wherever you toss something from the cab or box of your four-wheeler ... or shooting at rock art, road signs, telephone pole cable insulators ....

Which leads me to Edward Abbey ....

Abbey had a Master’s Degree in philosophy and worked as a Park Ranger in Arches National Park in the late 1950s ... it was the notes that he was constantly writing at this time that would form the basis of his book, ‘Desert Solitaire’ – which is regarded as one of the finest narratives about the natural environment in American literature.

Abbey was referred to as the ‘desert anarchist’, advocating ecotage (sabotage on behalf of ecology), he was against the development of National Parks, referring to it as ‘industrial tourism’, but he reserved his harshest criticism for energy developers and land developers who he claimed were ruining the landscape of the American West. In some of his essays the narrator throws beer cans out of his car because ‘the highway had already littered the landscape’.

Here’s an Abbey quote ...

"The fat pink slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over-sized over-priced over-advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country: Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet-riddled petro glyphs, spray-painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled-up waterholes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles .... “

So ... the beer can tossers are either eco-terrorists or ‘fat pink slobs’ ... I’ve made up my mind ... I’ll let you make up yours ...

To quote from verses 407 and 513 of the Krome Koan,

‘Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.’

‘One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.’

The winged menace was unusually silent today ... probably busy at a team building meeting ... buffalo can be extremely hard to work with ... they say you learn best when you are having fun ...extraordinary things happen when everyone is smiling and having fun ... team building is about learning to enjoy your work AND to enjoy it with the people you work with ... yeah, right ... so obviously only one will survive the meeting ... which one will it be ... stay tuned ... or maybe I should say ‘ tooned’ .... as in Looney ....

More later,

Phil