Category: Edward Abbey

For the past several years, my partner, Michael, and I have been drawn to Southeast Utah, one of the Four Corners of the Southwest. (Northeast Arizona, Northwest New Mexico and Southwest Colorado form the others.)

To someone who grew up on the East coast, Southeast Utah seems almost empty, but to the Navajo, naturalists and geologists, it’s anything but. Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams and Ellen Meloy have written compellingly about this land. On my most recent trip, I carried Abbey’s still fresh 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a bunch of environmentalists who hope to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam, built in the sixties across the Colorado River just over the Utah-Arizona border. The dam created Lake Powell and rendered inaccessible miles of spectacular redrock canyon where people lived for thousands of years. Sentiment for the dam’s demise is still alive, as expressed by the slogan on a cap worn by a man I met in the Comb Ridge Coffee Shop: Just drain it!

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