Edward Abbey had the best send-off any writer could - short of a Viking funeral - in a three-hour celebration of his life Saturday in the desert overlooking his beloved Arches National Park.
Abbey, an author and activist who wrote about the Utah desert wilderness and spent much of his time near Moab, died March 14 in Arizona. In his 62 years, he attracted a dedicated and growing following of conservationists.They were out in force Saturday, 500 of Abbey's people in the bright sunlight, lounging or squatting on slickrock. Behind the speaker's podium was a breathtaking view of Arches. In the opposite direction, the cliff wall that parallels the highway near Moab, and in the distance, the Book Cliffs and LaSal Mountains.
Far from being a gloomy memorial, the session was a lively commemoration, filled with Abbey stories, Mozart compositions played by the University of Utah Honors Trio, group singing, elegies, readings, drums, flutes - a celebration of his fierce dedication to the desert.
The controversial Abbey was belligerently in favor of environmental protection and against road building, ranching and dam construction. His advocacy of strong action against development was picked up by many in the environmental movement. It spawned the radical Earth First! group, whose symbol is the monkey wrench used to wreck heavy equipment.
Speakers addressed Abbey so frequently that at times he seemed present.
Wendell Berry, a poet from Kentucky, read a letter sent by the author and former Utahn Wallace Stegner.
Abbey made the desert his own country, as Robert Frost took New England, Stegner wrote.
"He had the zeal of a true believer and a stinger like a scorpion . . . He was a red-hot moment in the life of the country, and I suspect that the half-life of his intransigence will be like that of uranium."
Berry commented, "I never laid down a book by Edward Abbey when I did not feel more encouraged than when I picked it up."
Salt Lake nature writer Terry Tempest Williams recalled a desert hike with Abbey on which they came across a discarded six-pack container. Abbey set it on fire and kept walking.
Saturday's gathering was "to acknowledge family, tribe and clan, and it has everything to do with love - loving each other, loving the land."
Peacock, one of those who buried Abbey in the Arizona desert shortly after he died, acknowledged that now he is "kind of on the lam" because of that.
"Though most of Hayduke is buried under a pile of black rock someplace, his spirit lives on," he said. Hayduke is a character in his book, "The Monkey Wrench Gang."
Nature writer Ann Zwinger said all present will remember "how and when we heard" of Abbey's death.
"Desert is where I want to be when there are no more questions to ask," she said. "Thanks, Ed."
Doug Peacock, the model for Hayduke in "The Monkey Wrench Gang" was saying that Abbey was "on point" in the movement to fight for the land. Suddenly, the flag beside the podium started to fall over.
Peacock grabbed the flag and waved it vigorously back and forth. "There's going to be more work for all of us, and I'm simply here to recommit myself to that purpose," he said.
The flag staff was anchored again in its little cairn of rocks. Later, toward the end of the ceremony, conservation writer Barry Lopez said it was pretty spooky that the flag happened to fall right then.
Suddenly, without anyone near it and without a breeze, it dipped again. "Now you tell me that he's not here!" Lopez exclaimed.
Lopez said Abbey "called things by their names. He did not mince words. He did not equivocate . . . He recognized the dimension of social responsibility in literature."
Without that, he said, a country's literature would be bankrupt or merely decorative.
Ken Sleight, the Moab bookstore owner who was the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith in "The Monkey Wrench Gang," read a letter he wrote to Abbey after he learned of his death. In it, he recalled meeting Abbey 21 years ago when the budding author was a ranger at Arches and Sleight was a river runner.
They immediately began discussing Glen Canyon Dam, whose destruction is dreamed of in "The Monkey Wrench Gang."
The poet Chip Rawlins, Logan, read an elegy he had written that spoke of the news that Abbey had died: "I'd like to say that coyotes passed the word . . . the Colorado told the Green . . ."
Dave Foreman, a founder of the radical Earth First! environmental group said the Zunis have the "mudhead kachinas," the trickster spirits who pull tricks during the serious ceremonials.
"Ed Abbey was the mudhead kachina of the environmental movement," he said.
He praised him as a great man and a great patriot, in terms of loving the land, not necessarily the government. "He represented what the country could have been if it hadn't turned its back on its ideals 200 years ago," Foreman said.
"Every book of Ed Abbey's, every essay, every story has launched a thousand deeds."