{"id":10103,"date":"2025-02-21T14:46:53","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T18:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/immortal-wisdom-from-the-park-ranger-who-inspired-generations-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-21T14:46:53","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T18:46:53","slug":"immortal-wisdom-from-the-park-ranger-who-inspired-generations-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/immortal-wisdom-from-the-park-ranger-who-inspired-generations-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Edward<\/p>\n

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey<\/strong> (January 29, 1927\u2013March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged \u201cby reason of demobilization of men.\u201d When he received the discharge papers, he wrote \u201cRETURN TO SENDER\u201d on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed \u201ccommunist initiated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland, thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire<\/em><\/a>, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Edward Abbey as an off-duty park ranger. (Photograph: Phillip Harrington.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries<\/a>, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life: <\/p>\n

\n

HOW TO DIE \u2014 but first, how not to:<\/p>\n

Not<\/em> in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.<\/p>\n

Not<\/em> in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.<\/p>\n

Not<\/em> in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others\u2019 blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor<\/em> in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.<\/p>\n

Not<\/em> the legal murder either \u2014 too grim and ugly such a martyrdom \u2014 down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial \u2014 not to be murdered so, no never. <\/p>\n

But how to<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Alone<\/em>, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below \u2014 before the crash, before\u2026 <\/p>\n

With none to say no, none.<\/p>\n

Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When he did die a lifetime later, alone in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: \u201cNo Comment.\u201d<\/em> He requested that his useless body be used \u201cto help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.\u201d Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry\u2019s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, \u201clots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,\u201d and no formal speeches \u2014 \u201cthough the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.\u201d When the wake was held at Arches National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Edward Abbey in his late fifties.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:<\/p>\n

\n

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it\u2019s still here.<\/p>\n

So\u2026 ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.<\/p>\n

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman\u2019s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die<\/a>, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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