Earthblog

Interviewed by Todd Simmons
First printed in Matter Journal 13: Edward Abbey

Photo courtesy of Jack Loeffler

Everyone kept pointing to Jack Loeffler when I mentioned that we were doing a special issue of Matter about Edward Abbey. From things that I had read, I knew Jack and Ed had been close friends for decades, he’d helped bury Abbey in the desert, and had gone on to write a memoir of his late friend, (Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey). I sought out the still-busy aural historian, writer, radio producer and sound collage artist, and he readily agreed to an interview.

Jack Loeffler has a radio voice—smooth, consistent, and engaging. His memories of Abbey came pouring out during our phone conversation. His breadth of knowledge concerning our human plight impressed me more than anything else, and it’s easy to see why he and Abbey got along so well. Listening to Jack, it’s fairly straightforward which path leads us away from our short-sighted, destructive relationship to the earth. His vision stems from his curiosity about indigenous and traditional cultures, and his work to record and preserve their music and lore. He has conducted field research among the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Tewa, Keresan, Zuni, Chiricahua Apache, Tohono O’odham, Nez Perce, Yaqui, Seri, Huichol, Tarahumara, Mayan, and California Indians; and Hispano, Basque, and Anglo-ranch cultures. His traditional music library contains over 3,500 songs that he recorded on location.

Todd Simmons: When did you first meet Edward Abbey, and did you know his work before you met him?

Jack Loeffler: I knew the man before the myth, but we first met—although we didn’t start hanging out then—back in ’62 in a place called Claude’s Bar in Santa Fe. Somewhere along the line I got a job as a fire lookout for several seasons, beginning in 1965. Every now and then I’d go into Durango for supplies. My fire lookout was up in the Jicarilla Ranger District to the Carson National Forest. It’s in the San Juan River watershed. And I picked up a book called Desert Solitaire, hard back, $4.95 or something. I looked at the picture in the book and recognized Ed. I read the book, and thought, boy, that’s a really good book.

We have a mutual friend, John De Puy, an artist who lives in northern New Mexico, whom we’d both known for a long time. I think Ed and John met back in the ‘50s, when they were both somehow associated with UNM. I was doing a job with a museum in New Mexico and realized that the skies were getting pretty funky.  The Four Corners power plant really bugged me.

Author David V. Herlihy talks about cyclist Frank Lenz's failed trip around the world
Written by David Boerner
Photographs by Frank Lenz
Thursday, 22 July 2010

In May of 1892, Frank Lenz set out from his home of Pittsburgh, PA on a new Victor “safety” bicycle to literally ride around the world. He never made it.

The Lost Cyclist by David V. Herlihy documents Lenz’s journey, his disappearance somewhere near Eastern Turkey, and his subsequent fading from American consciousness.

Entwined in Lenz’s story is the story of William Sachtelben and Thomas Allen, who successfully circumnavigated the globe by bicycle just as Lenz was starting his journey. Sachtelben and Lenz never met, but they were kindred spirits, united by their supreme self-confidence that bordered on pomposity, and by their ambition and interprise. Restless after returning from his two-year world tour to a successful but boring American life, Sachtelben took an opportunity to travel to Turkey and investigate the case of Lenz’s disappearance. He had little success in closing the case, and his trip spiraled out of control when he found himself at the center of the 1984-1986 Armenian Massacres by the Ottoman Empire.

Lost Cyclist author Herlihy is an expert on bicycle history and also the author of Bicycle: The History (Yale 2004).

He will be appearing Saturday, August 7^th, 7pm, at the Bean Cycle/Matter Bookstore for a reading and discussion with a slideshow about The Lost Cyclist.

Matter Daily talked to Herlihy recently about his recent book, about the “globe girdlers,” and about how much plaudits these men actually deserve.

Matter Daily: How did you happen upon the story of Frank Lenz?

David V. Herlihy: I’ve been reading late 19th century cycling literature for about twenty years now. I would frequently come across the name of Frank Lenz. I was also aware of an article on Lenz by Irving A. Leonard in the Wheelman Magazine and entitled “Valiant Voyager.”

About twelve years ago, John Kelly of the Washington Post approached me for information on Lenz, knowing that I was a student of cycling history. He was on leave and had undertaken a project to write a book on Lenz. At the time I did not have much information to share. A few years later, after I had lost touch with John, I came across an interesting interview with Lenz in the Pall Mall Budget, conducted by a British journalist who had run across Lenz in the middle of China.

There once was

so much talent in our little museum-

walls of madness and sorrow

where the colors weren't afraid to bleed.

Until I fashioned a freeway

through her garden,

barnacles on her stern,

polyps on her glands,

automobiles through the roses

planted the lifetime before yesterday.

CSU writer remembers Abbey as his professor
Written by Steven Schwartz
Tuesday, 14 June, 2010
Look for this essay in Matter 13: Edward Abbey.

Edward Abbey sat squeezed behind a small student desk.  It wasn’t an elementary school desk, but it looked like one with him sitting behind it.  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked that first day of class in 1981.  He’d been invited to join the creative writing faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and we were to be the first class he’d ever taught—a graduate seminar in writing nonfiction.  He wore a red bandana tucked under a plaid shirt and a jean jacket.  Making little eye contact, he smoked a pipe and spoke mostly in one- or two-word pronouncements.

He wanted us to call him Mr. Abbey, although he didn’t state this explicitly.  Just that he called us Mr. Kessler, Miss Temple, Mr. Hepworth, Miss Young, and Mr. Schwartz.  He told us to write every day.  We wrote this down in our notebooks.  Did he write every day?  No, he said, and didn’t elaborate, except to admit that he revised very little.  “I never spend more than twenty-four hours on a piece,” he said.  He always regretted this a year later when he read over the work, he added.  We wrote this down too.  There didn’t seem to be any contradiction between what he said and did.  Sometimes one’s persona can embrace contradictions that in others would be screamingly hypocritical.

At break, he wandered away and got lost.  University of Arizona is not that big a campus, but he failed to return for forty-five minutes.

“I got lost,” was all he said.  I was outside smoking a cigarette when he came back.  We were all wondering where he had gotten to—back to Ajo, his home in the mountains?  Had we alienated him the first day of class?  Didn’t he like us?  Was academia that bad?  I rarely smoked and didn’t look natural when I did.  The cigarette had burned down to the filter and either I imagined or it really happened that he stared in disapproval at my hand—which threw the butt (suddenly the word was so ugly) on the ground.  I picked it up and walked a block to the trashcan where I deposited it, contrite.