I first saw you as Old grey beard desert mountain man Smoking a cigar You called yourself an anarchist A democrat with a small d I dig that You talked of the importance of the wild The nature that’s out there somewhere on the edge of the madness we are all stuck with in the day to day drudgery we call “modern living” You were well spoken and funny, and while I didn’t agree with everything you said, I felt I could go along with most of it
So then I, as fellow lover of nature and person without much else to do, dug deeper You talked about fire watch towers, Arizona redneck bars, Nietzsche, Einstein, and watching the birds You talked about sabotaging bulldozers and wanting to reach out and touch the mountain lion You talked a lot about freedom too How each person should be their own leader And no one should be a boss And about how whatever great expanse of wilderness, or wildness, we have left is the last refuges of our freedom
The freedom to be that very thing we crave more death, to be wild To feel alive We only crave death now because we never feel truly alive Grinded down in alienated ******* “jobs” Promise of nothing more than light pollution noise pollution and the regular plain old pollutions of modernity We search for some kind of meaning And the struggle to survive with our own two hands has always been the most meaningful action of the human spirit
So we need this wilderness to ******* and get lost in To breath in deep and trip and fall and get a little ***** We need that wilderness for us to go postal in, however you take that to mean And finally we need this wilderness because we are this wilderness It’s in our bones and in our blood Oh Ed, you and I aren’t alone in this call to the wild Ask Fredy Perlman about the freedom of the insect and the bird Ask Kevin Tucker what he thinks of predicide Whether it’s shooting wolves from helicopters or poisoning carcasses with stric9 so coyotes die when they eat it We defend coyotes here And as a good Christian boy I believe that anyone who kills a wolf, except in self defense, should go to Hell
And maybe one day I’ll go off into your Arizona deserts Or Chris McCandless’s Alaskan expanse And maybe I’ll live and maybe I’ll die But I will be home I will be free And I will be thinking of you, Edward Abbey
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”