Description
“The natural world, as we call it, has already become remote, out of reach, mysterious, in the minds of urban and suburban Americans. They see the wilderness disappearing, slipping away, receding into an inaccessible past. But they are mistaken. That world can still be rescued that is my main excuse for this book.”-Edward Abbey You are about to visit some of the most exciting places on earth. Not the sort of excitement that makes morning headlines or the nightly news. Instead it is the excitement that comes from experiencing the natural world as it always has been and should be, and seeing human beings living in tune with its subtlest rhythms. In Australian cattle country and in the primitive outback. On a desert island off Mexico and in the Sierra Madres. On the Rio Grande and in the great Southwest. On Lake Powell in Utah and in the living American desert. It is adventure. It is enlightenment. It is vintage Abbey. “I have been along a few of Mr. Abbey’s roads. He sees much more than I did. Indeed, reading him is often being there was.”-John Leonard, author of Reading for My Life Edward Abbey, a self-proclaimed “agrarian anarchist,” was hailed as the “Thoreau of the American West.” Known nationally as a champion of the individual and one of this country’s foremost defenders of the natural environment, he was the author of twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and The Journey Home. In 1989, at the age of sixty-two, Edward Abbey died in Oracle, Arizona. Introduction: Confessions of a Literary Hobo Travel 1. The Reef 2. Anna Creek 3. The Outback 4. Back of Beyond 5. A Desert Isle 6. Sierra Madre 7. On the River Again 8. A Walk in the Park 9. Down there in the Rocks Polemics and Sermons 10. Science with a Human Face 11. The Right to Arms 12. The Conscience of the Conqueror 13. Merry Christmas, Pigs! 14. The Winnebago Tribe Personal History 15. My Life as a P.I.G., or the True Adventures of Smokey the Cop 16. In Defense of the Redneck 17. Death Valley Junk 18. Fire Lookout 19. The Sorrows of Travel Coda: Cape Solitude
