|
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.
In the meantime, a Park Service friend of mine, Bill Brown, had become aware of the debacle that was about to take place out on Black Mesa in Navajo and Hopi country, land that’s sacred to both tribes. So in 1970 we started the Black Mesa Defense Fund. I hooked up with Ed again and we both hated what was going on up there. We spent a lot of time up there thinking dire thoughts; that was some of the field research that happened for the book The Monkey Wrench Gang. We discovered that we were simpatico, and we started camping together. We’d go camping a lot over the years. We camped several times a year, a week or two at a crack. At Christmastime, we’d take our respective families to some place like Cabeza Prieta or Mexico and camp. Basically it was this endless conversation that went on between the two of us for, really, about twenty years. Sometimes he’d call me or I’d call him on the phone and we’d carry on. We were truly buddies, right down the line, and camped as much as we could because that’s when we had a chance to talk. And that’s what we enjoyed.
TS: What prompted you to write a memoir (Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey) of your late friend?
JL: On two different occasions Ed asked me to be his chronicler. That’s the word he used, but after he died that didn’t even enter my mind. Then a publisher back in New York asked me if I’d do a book and I said no. It was too…too soon. They tried again and I finally said yes. Then I wrote the book, and that publisher was bought by another company from Germany, I guess, and all the environmental writers who were there—including Dave Foreman—got bounced. Eventually the book was published by UNM Press. But what happened was, I was able to get a copy of Ed’s journals from the University of Arizona’s archive, and I also had my own notebooks and all the books Ed had ever written except Jonathan Troy, which I later got a copy of. Ed had never wanted me to read that book; he thought it was a terrible book. He gave it a D+ or something.
When I decided to do it, I started by rereading all of his books and reading all of his journals—the ones that remained, I think one through four or maybe one through three were lost. At one point I went back to Home, Pennsylvania, and talked to his dad, Paul Revere Abbey. He gave me some stuff that was stashed in their basement, which I still have, that’s never been published. It was just some letters and things. I think I put some of that in my book. I had recorded Ed a couple of times. I have always taken good notes and I have a good memory, so when I got into that book it started writing itself. Every morning I’d write a minimum of 1500 words. They weren’t all good words, but I wrote everyday until that book was done, until the first draft was done. Then I’d go play with it and mess with it until it finally turned into what it is. UNM press published it, and now it’s in its third or fourth printing, I guess. It’s all in paperback anymore; the hardbacks are all gone.
TS: Was it hard for you to write about your good friend? What was it like?
JL: To write the original draft was really far out, because I was reliving experiences with Ed and actually going out and rehiking a lot of our old trails all over the American Southwest and even down into Mexico. It was like Ed and I were walking together, and the conversation continued (chuckle). So I told the ghost of Ed what I was writing about and I made it as honest as I could, because he had two mottos. One was resolve—with his finger pointed toward the sky (chuckle)—and his other was follow the truth no matter where it leads. And that’s what I tried to do with this book. I remember when the New York Times review guy T.C. Boyle got it and reviewed it, he couldn’t understand how I could remember all those conversations. I wrote him a letter back and told him how I could remember all those conversations, because we had them, and I always took notes and know that Ed did too, because our conversations ended up in his books, in his novels. That was always kind of weird (laughter)—to be reading one of his books and suddenly there was this familiar conversation going down. So, anyway, it probably took a good year to write that first draft adequately. Then I played with it for several years, off and on.
TS: What about Edward Abbey surprised you, or would surprise his readers?
JL: One of the things that would probably be surprising to people who didn’t know Ed very well was just how deeply spiritual a person he was. But it was within the context of the flow of nature. At one point he considered himself either a naturist or an earthiest, bearing in mind that he had a masters degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico. He was deeply into the flow of nature on some sort of an almost—I hate to call it a mystical level because that connotes something that he really wasn’t—but it certainly got past any kind of organized religious point of view, and it was deeply spiritual. A lot of our discussion revolved around that kind of thing.
A few things almost surprised me that I found revealed in his papers. One was from a lecture that he delivered at UNM, when he was still an undergraduate. He called himself, “A barefoot eco-freak anarchist.” And he was consistent with that same point of view with regard to himself, or at least that was his guiding light throughout the whole span of his lifetime. That didn’t change a bit. I have all of these journals and papers of his written in his own hand—and his penmanship stayed just about the same through his entire adult life.
Also, at one point, Ed considered a double career, one as a composer and the other as a writer. I have a few scribbles of some of his compositions. My wife and I had given him a copy of the 1911 Britannica for his birthday one year, and my wife had rebound the whole thing. She’s a book binder. As a gift he sent her a cassette of one of his own compositions played by himself on the piano. And I said (chuckle), “You know, Ed, I’m glad you gave up being a composer (laughter), and opted to be just a writer.” It’s really something, though, to listen to his head musically. He had a hugely wonderful ear. One of our favorite games was a guessing game, as to what the piece of music would be. If we couldn’t get that, we would try to guess the name of the composer. I remember one time sitting in his living room and he said, “I want you to listen to this and tell me who it is.” It was incredibly difficult and incredibly out there. But I recognized the piece and said, “That’s Charles Ives.” He said, “Good for you!” and told me the name of the symphony—I think it was either the second or the fourth—and he later dedicated The Fool’s Progress to the memory of Charles Ives, who was an anarchist, composer and insurance salesman in Hartford, Connecticut.
TS: Increasingly it seems the environmental movement is too heavily dependent on science, in the sense that if we just present the facts, then of course people will listen and act accordingly. Ed certainly questioned science in his writing—what are your thoughts?
JL: We won’t be able to pull ourselves out of this dilemma without a high ratio of applied—well-applied—science. The word “well-applied” is key. I have a lot of questions about what is regarded as the proper application of science, but I think for environmentalists to turn the tide it will take a much bigger point of view—a total shift in cultural paradigm. Our cultural paradigm right now is an economically dominated paradigm, which is fundamentally turning habitat into money, and that needs to be shifted.
One of the things that I really love—and am working on diligently and have for many years—is trying to understand myriad Native American points of view with regard to living successfully within the context of homeland. The traditional indigenous peoples I’ve worked with, throughout the American West and Mexico, have without fail regarded the planet as sacred. Truly sacred. Our culture has utterly secularized landscape. We need a huge sense of that sacred which Ed certainly felt, and a deep abiding understanding that we are spawned by the earth itself. Subsequently, we have to perceive that almost within a kind of mythic context. The mythic process has to be revitalized in a way that does not crystallize into some form of a religion—to really understand ourselves on some deeper level than just in terms of cold, hard science. I think those two elements—the mythic and the sacred—have to be factored into the way we look at all of this. Plus, I think we’re going to have to redefine a whole philosophical system that does away with our current sense of economics. That has to be understood. Wendell Berry certainly understands that economics is indeed the great enemy. But it also occurs concurrently with human overpopulation, so we have to reduce our numbers. One of the things Ed talked about and Garrett Harden talked about and lots of us have talked about is, we have to really concentrate on reducing human population. If we make it to nine billion or ten billion by 2050, it’s all over as far as I’m concerned. It may be all over anyway. That’s the hard part. But we have to so completely reinvent our sense of scope as we pursue this problem—and indeed it must involve a huge amount of science—but it involves a lot more than just science.
I recently worked on a project where I interviewed a bunch of Los Alamos scientists—I live about forty miles from Los Alamos—and I heard some extremely interesting cases for the use of nuclear energy from them. One guy said there was no way that wind and solar and all the rest of it can even touch the energy needs that we’re going to have by the year 2050. I asked him if he could imagine using less energy by 2050. That was not a part of his paradigm. My favorite of Ed’s apothems is, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” because that is what drives our economically dominated paradigm. In a sense it is like a state of metastasis; it’s not just our species, it’s what our species brings with it that is metastasizing.
TS: Why is Edward Abbey still important?
JL: I think it’s because he was recognized as a hero activist. He did his fair share of night work. And he had the courage to say precisely what he thought and he behaved absolutely fearlessly. I don’t think anybody has touched him with that kind of power subsequently. There is a lot of really good writing going on and a lot of really good thinking going on, but I think Ed was one of the very first true environmental activists. You know, cutting down billboards or whatever. There’s this whole array of deeds that he did that–he’s beyond the statute of limitations—that caused him to be regarded as he is. But what’s so interesting to me, knowing him as well as I did, was that he was a very shy fellow (chuckle). He could deliver a mighty speech, but when there was a social occasion, he was really very shy.
I remember one time, for The Fool’s Progress, he’d wanted to include a cabrito roast. I told him we could do one at my house, because I’d done a bunch of them in the past. So we did a cabrito roast, which is roasting a goat in a pit underground. It’s something you invite a lot people to because there’s a lot of meat (chuckle)—boy it was good, too, we put a pork roast inside the chest cavity of the goat and marinated the whole thing in beer, red chili, garlic, and oregano for twenty-four hours, and it was so good, it was just outrageous (chuckle). But anyway, there were a few other writers there, and Ed admired Godfrey Reggio enormously—the guy who did the Quatsi trilogy. Ed regarded Godfrey as probably the best filmmaker of his time. And Godfrey was there, and Ed was too shy to actually engage Godfrey in conversation. It was interesting to watch all of that go down. But one on one, after Ed got to know you, or at least after he and I got to know each other really well, the conversation just went on and on and on about everything.
His brother “Hoots” told me that at one point back in Home, Pennsylvania, the two of them were walking down the street, and a car stopped at a stoplight, but the front of the car was in the crosswalk area for pedestrians, and rather than walk around the car, Ed stepped up on the fender, walked across the hood, stepped down on the other fender and hopped off the car. He walked over the car rather than around it. That was the way he was. He was absolutely fearless.
Another time, this is when he was not well and knew he could hemorrhage to death at any minute, he and I were taking a hike down a sandy arroyo out in the Sonoran Desert and a guy came cruising up on a four-wheeler. Ed grabbed the handlebars and dragged him right out of the arroyo and told him to get out of there immediately. It was just interesting to see how Ed did this. He had great courage, and he had the courage of his convictions. And in a time when few people display that would lead me to think that’s why Ed is still highly regarded. Not only that, his writing is extremely compelling. He said it the way he saw it, and he saw it as correctly as anybody has.
TS: The comedic aspects of Abbey—his playfulness with language, the puns, the goosing of nearly every sacred cow—sets Abbey apart from his contemporaries. Even today few writers approach similar subjects with as much humor and wit. Any thoughts?
JL: He had a really good sense of humor. There were times when we cracked each other up so hard that we could barely breathe. Sometimes it was in (chuckle) weird circumstances, but his sense of humor was really evolved, and at the same time some people have thought of him as being morose. You know, he had his ups and downs. But he had a sense of humor that wouldn’t quit.
TS: Who inspired Ed, who did he read that we might not know about?
JL: Some writers that he appreciated included Thoreau, Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut. He regarded Shakespeare as a toady, a sycophant. No real heroes like Spartacus. One of the people he read was an anarchist thinker named Benjamin Tucker. It seems to me that Tucker may have been the first guy to say something to the effect that, “A true patriot must be willing to defend his country against his government.” Ed took ideas like that and made them his own, perfected them in his own way. It’s really great to read who Ed read. Ed was also interested in Peter Kropotkin, but I think that his real anarchist hero was Mikhail Bakunin.
In his masters thesis, he wrote about Bakunin who fought at the barricades and he was actually a bomb thrower; whereas Kropotkin believed in revolution, but I don’t think he ever engaged in battle. He was exiled early on and lived in Britain. But his writing—he was the most intelligent of that coterie of anarchist writers who were born in the 19th century and he wrote into the 20th century. He sort of took over the mantel of anarchist philosophic spokesman after Bakunin died. Ed’s dream early on would have been to die fighting. In the ‘50s, in one of his journals, his idea of a good way to die would have been in a gunfight with the FBI out on some remote corner of Baboquivari somewhere. I understood that very well. In fact we had matching .357 Magnums. That way if we were ever really (chuckle) put up to it, we’d at least have the same kind of ammo (laughter).
TS: How do we best avoid the shoot-out?
JL: If we cease to think within the context of current geopolitical-organizational framework, and revert back to John Wesley Powell’s notion of looking at the watersheds of the arid West—if we decentralize, that is key. We have to decentralize political power—that’s been understood for a long time—then reintegrate within the context of home watershed. We have to see the watershed as a commons so that the people at the top of the watershed are just as aware of the needs of the people at the bottom of the watershed, and vice versa. And we have to work within the context of mutual cooperation, and use the commons as a model, recognizing that the commons is the entire biotic community and not just the human species. Then we need to get out in it to learn how to restore it in order to live in a healthy fashion—that to me would also be key. I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time. We have to redefine the way we look at watersheds. And it’s not just the water; it’s the entire biotic community. It’s the geophysical cradle. It’s the atmosphere. And it’s human culture, human consciousness.
TS: What is Edward Abbey’s greatest legacy?
JL: Well, to me personally, it’s having had a best friend (chuckle). Ed rearranged a lot of the environmental point of view and spearheaded the radical environmental movement, which then split into a whole array of other ways of looking at environmental stuff. Ed, with Desert Solitaire, sort of threw gasoline on an ember. And it took off. His great legacy is having melded anarchist thought with environmentalist thought, which turned into what it’s growing into now. That to me is an enormous legacy.
TS: You were with him as he was dying those last few years. How did it start?
JL: He keeled over in our living room—in 1982. They misdiagnosed him, saying he had pancreatic cancer. It was revealed within the month that he had esophageal varices, but none of us knew what that meant. He had his first bleed right around Christmastime that year. We were supposed to be camping down in Baja for six weeks with our families. And he had his first hemorrhage. So we ended up just going into the Superstitions—just him and me—for a couple of weeks.
TS: Any last thoughts?
JL: The one thing that strikes me now is that Ed was older than I when he died, but I have now outlived him by over eleven years. My mind has had a chance to go through all sorts of wonderful permutations, and I just wonder what Ed would have been like at the age of 73, which is my age now. The last ten years has been the most productive span of time that I’ve ever had. Ed’s last ten years were really productive for him. Boy oh boy, what would have come out if he could have had another ten years? It could have been really far out. He died at the age of 62 years and 45 days. It’s a big thought: What could he have done?
|
