Down the River by Edward Abbey

Abstract

362 Western American Literature Finally, to call attention to the Indians’ plight, he suggests that they attack Yreka, but when he scouts the city, the unsuspecting settlers are so hospitable he returns to tell the Indians he hasn’t the heart to lead them; instead, he flees to Central America. Realizing he has changed sides so often that neither Indian nor white can trust him, he sums up the whole book in the words: “I had attempted to sit on two seats at once, and had slid between the two.” The modern reader can understand that here certainly is no hero; however, it is the narrator’s inability to learn from his mistakes that makes the story tiresome. It is perhaps to the history buff, wanting to relive the gold rush, and to the conservationist, interested in how mining ruined the land, that this book will be most useful. NORMA J. ENGBERG University of Nevada at Las Vegas Down the River. By Edward Abbey. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. 242 pages, $6.95.) If it matters, this collection of essays is better-unified than Abbey’s last two — The Journey Home and Abbey’s Road. The frame is the river trip, perfectly suited to the author’s gifts and point of view. On the river, shut out from the noise of modem life by clean, towering rock walls, one moves at nature’s pace and accepts nature’s day and night. Thinking slows down, goes deep. The body stretches and the appetites are keen. It is the right world for Edward Abbey: good companions, good adventure, wild surroundings. This is where he has put his foot down, as Thoreau recommended, and said, “This is, and no mistake.” Thoreau also said scornfully of the reformers of his time, “They speak of moving society, but have no resting place without it.” The resting place for Abbey’s lever, with which he would quite joyfully overturn what most of the rest of us have mournfully accepted as reality, is a rock somewhere in the wild part of the Southwest; any rock. For Abbey is a genuine revolu­ tionary of the black-flag variety, a positive anarchist who really does believe that the greater part of what his neighbors have fallen to calling good is actually bad, and who stands on his hind feet and says so. There is no pussy­ footing, “objective” journalism here, although Abbey does get his facts right. He is against dams, nukes, bureaucrats, and the other unnecessaries of our Faustian collective, and he damns them with somber, cataloguing thoroughness. Probably a number of writers could get that far; what makes Abbey special, and I think major, is that he rips and slashes the enemy with such Reviews 363 obvious relish for life, an undercurrent of glee. There is a free, unfenceable spirit here. Probably no western writer since Mark Twain has been funny in quite this way. Abbey loves good country, good food, friends, unbossed time — the old, normal, human range. This is behind everything he says, and we recognize it instinctively, genetically. Down the River makes one of the clearest statements of the wilderness corollary to the Turner thesis I have seen. If open land made Americans what they are, then what becomes of them when it’s gone? “Europe was saved,” Abbey writes, “from becoming a permanent prisonhouse by the open­ ing up of America. (And the forcible displacement of America’s original inhabitants.) But suppose we in America surrender our last remnants of wilderness to the demands of industrialism?” For Abbey, a most disturbing rhetorical question. His answer goes far beyond the meliorist accommoda­ tions of such conservationists as René Dubos (the essay containing these thoughts on wilderness is called “Thus I Reply to René Dubos”), into a radical, Abbeyan association of wild country, political freedom, and a full emotional and intellectual life — an ideal state which Abbey says could be called civilization. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Death and the Good Life. By Richard Hugo. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. 215 pages, $10.95.) For a first novel by an acclaimed poet, this is a lot of fun. The initial crime is...