'Clan of Abbey' gathers to celebrate his ideals

MOAB, Utah — An empty chair threw its shadow across the meadow: a tall-backed, scuffed, swivel writing chair, looming in its emptiness. The writing chair was one that Edward Abbey used. And when you know that, you can understand how long and how broad the shadow was.

Only rarely, once every few generations or so, a figure rises to stand above others as inspirational guardian of America's defining heritage — its raw, open outdoors.

This month, 15 years after his death, friends and family gathered here in the hills south of Moab to celebrate the literature, the life, the ideals, the cockeyed spirit, the certain despair, the boundless joy and the soaring landscapes of just such a rascal, old "Cactus Ed" himself. In a loose sort of way, they called themselves the Clan of Abbey. A clan of the heart. A clan of the wild. A clan of backpackers, river runners, rabble-rousers and dauntless dreamers who believe that the high ground in America is the untrampled ground.

Abbey was a sometimes park ranger and itinerant fire lookout — a Huck Finn and Henry Thoreau wrapped into one for the era in which America's conservation movement sharpened its teeth. In 21 books, both fiction and nonfiction collections of evocative, ruminative, rollicking personal essays, his cause was wild nature. The wild West. Also, the wildness in each of us that defines our freedom and sustains our humility. His foes were industrialization, dominion, technology, sprawl and greed.

"I write," Abbey said, "to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies."

"I write," Abbey said, "to make a difference."

Organized by word of mouth, the tribute occurred at a place that Appalachian-born Abbey held to be sacred: these Utah hills. The mountains that rise in one direction. The otherworldly, treeless slick-rock maze that spills out in the other. And the Green and Colorado rivers that gouge canyon lands out of it all. This was the crazy topography that became both the chief character and the compelling setting for so much of his writing. Abbeyland.

In a grassy meadow at Pack Creek Ranch, a foothill retreat where he sometimes holed up to work, a property owned by one of his dearest friends, a ranch where one of his children was conceived, friends pondered his empty chair. A few sat in it, as if seeking some tangible connection to a man who, they all agreed, had changed their lives, not by a few degrees but by many.

"When he was alive, Ed didn't need anybody to speak for him. He doesn't now," said Ken Sanders, a Salt Lake City bookseller, publisher, anti-establishment troublemaker and close friend of Abbey's. "All you have to do is read the books!"