was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on this date in 1927. The Writer’s Almanac has this:
In 1956 he began working as a park ranger and a fire lookout for the National Park Service. He worked there for fifteen years, and this led him to write about the wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. He said, “For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!” His book Desert Solitaire (1968) is about his time working as a ranger in Arches National Park, Utah. In it he argues for, among other things, a ban on cars in wilderness preserves. In a memorial piece about Abbey, Edward Hoagland says of him, “Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life.”
NewMexiKen gathered these Abbey quotations:
If you’re never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You’ve only missed out on one half of life.
The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.
Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Edward Abbey died in 1989.
And he hated cows.