The Ghost of Edward Abbey

You walk the mile-long walk to your mailbox, six inches of new snow soaking through last year’s boots, purchased in the fluorescent glow of a consumerist shrine to the great outdoors. On that rare trip to town, you’d watched latte-sipping millennials drive their SUVs around the loading dock for $10,000 worth of shiny plastic camping gear. You chuckle, wincing at the memory. Abbey would laugh too, or at least shoot another few holes in his wheezing Frigidaire.

“Uncle,” Julia had gasped over the landline. “Whaddya think of all this? Are they gonna be done counting votes tonight or next week or next month?”

“I regret to inform you that my television is no longer with us. Shuffled its coils off this mortal one.”

Julia’s tone suddenly stern: “But how do you get your news then? You care, right? Don’t you wanna know?...”

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit,

and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.*

And so it is that today – landline ringing insistently, always an interruption – that Julia has called again to inform you of her gift waiting in your mailbox, a device that will plant you directly into the terra firma on this side of the digital divide.

The fact that it’s 2020 and you have never owned a cell phone has been a constant source of bemused wonder among your nieces, their devices literal extensions of their souls. Julia has explained more than once that Bailee is an “influencer” but how to wrap the mind around that remains a mystery. “It’s all on Instagram,” Julia sighs. “There’s filters. Millions of followers pay her bills.”

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes,

but for real bona fide stupidity,

there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

You laugh, imagining your own never-to-be Instagram. Chickens in sepia, fencing hanging skeletal and ragged, video clip of the moisture dribbles between the ceiling’s viga-latilla eaves. Someday, inevitably, Instagram will develop an olfactory add-on, you think, and – theoretically at least – you could beam the faintly molding smell around the roof issue into the chic apartments of Julia’s more flighty contemporaries in Paris, London, Rome.

Certainly, there have been attempts in the past, mostly by Julia but on one notable occasion by Bailee in which you’d pointed your shotgun at the Mercedes Sprinter filled with electronic game show parting gifts, dashing the team’s hopes of blogging on-slash-civilizing “The Man Time Forgot” or some equally patronizing banality.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense,

it only needs defenders.

The closest you’d come prior was the day your submission was sitting in the mailbox, unopened manilla envelope red-stamped in all-caps “RETURN TO SENDER.”

“Julia,” you’d said after walking back to the house, manuscript in hand, lifting the landline receiver, dialing, ringing. “If I mail you my articles, can you re-type them and submit them through your computer? Apparently, paper isn’t good enough for them any more…”

“Uncle…” and you’d pondered for a moment the extent of emotion intoned through that singular five-letter word: frustration, despair, condescension, disbelief, confusion…Grief. Love.

“I’m buying you a computer, that’s all there is to it.” She’d sighed a Julia sigh bursting again with descriptors. “You can write them just like with your typewriter and submit them yourself by email. Easy peasy.”

Growth for the sake of growth

is the ideology of the cancer cell.

“It isn’t, and I won’t,” you’d stated plainly, unequivocally. “My dear, I’ve survived for 78 years without a computer so what’s another few, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise?"

Yet another adjective laden Julia sigh. Since then, she has dutifully inscribed every story, every article. Electronic submission, electronic deposit to your bank account. Her doing so is probably what inspired Bailee’s Sprinter intrusion; you’ve long been aware of the stubborn old man trope and how it plays.

So why is the cell phone different? For one thing, it’s a gift without permission asked, and for another, it’s Julia, whose debt of inscriptive diligence has kept the chickens fed, bought the roof patches, filled your pantry with everything you haven’t grown yourself. But more, it’s the silence now that the television is gone. You are still safely content in solitude after all these years, but the daily reassurance of its sound and vision had also been a constant, and if there’s anything you cannot abide, it’s change.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

The package in the mailbox is surprisingly small. Not that you’re unaware of the size of cell phones but in your hands, the device that connects the outside world still shocks with its miniscule dimension.

Homeward bound, you hold the package like a newborn, all tentative diligence.

It takes the better part of an hour to set it up. You wonder a few times if you should call Julia for help, but it’s surprisingly intuitive. Add this, approve that, click click. Your fingers are too big, too clumsy for the buttons. You consider hurling it at the television’s burned out husk, screen through screen. But then it’s done and ready, the digital horizon spread out as borderless screenlit illumination.

Here Google, here Instagram, here Twitter. Palming it, resisting the urge to peer over your shoulder for some spectre materialized in the cabin and catching you in the act, watching and mocking your undoing.

It ain’t paper; that’s for certain. Tiny people on a tiny screen serve counterpoint to vastness. You squint. How do people read anything on these things? Who would want to?

Growth for the sake of growth

is the ideology of the cancer cell.

And yet, there is something else that knaws like a weasel in the chicken coop, blood smeared muzzle and blood dribbling from its jaw. You’d had a falling out with Abbey at that meeting in the desert, the divide between freedom and closure. You could dig the

hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful

—yes, beautiful!—

society

and maybe even the suppposition that

perhaps ever-continuing industrial and population growth

is not the true road to human happiness,

that simple gross quantitative increase

 of this kind creates only more

pain, dislocation, confusion and misery.

But that drawing had always conflicted irreparably with the entire existence of the desert Southwest: wide-open, infinite, wild. Free.

Dear Abbey: There is no freedom in border closures.

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

The tiny screen is now asking if you would like to connect to the cloud. You hesitate, although you are now entirely certain that if Abbey had stuck around long enough to reconcile the contradiction between freedom and closed borders, he might have remembered that he’d once proffered thus:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,

leading to the most amazing view.

May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

*****

*author's note: the italicized text passages throughout are quotes from Edward Abbey, American essayist and novelist. His grave in the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Pima County Arizona is marked with a simple stone, upon which his friends have etched:

EDWARD

PAUL

ABBEY

1927–1989

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