“Fire on the Mountain” by Edward Abbey, 2012
This is a coming-of-age story about a 12 year old boy entranced with 'the West' – the desert, the mountains, the fauna, the animals and most of all his 70-year-old stubborn grandfather. As a kid Abbey grew up idolizing Tom Mix and tough cowboys, so this is his origin story too. Abbey later became an anarchist environmentalist, most famous for penning “The Monkey Wrench Gang” about sabotage, but it's here that the foundation is laid.
The preface makes this out to be some kind of libertarian manifesto about an old and heroic cow rancher who refuses to leave his property because 'the Guvmint' wants it. In this case it is to absorb it into the huge New Mexico White Sands Proving Grounds and Missile Range. So it’s implicitly anti-military but the book doesn't slant that way. It’s the 1960s and in his opposition to losing his ranch – or being told to leave it for a time - this Grandpa never mentions dangerous nuclear tests, shelling ruining the environment, being against the cold war or disliking the military. Here it is the various forces of the U.S. state - Marshals, lawyers, Air Force military police - trying to seize his property through a form of eminent domain; property his family robbed from the Apache, as Abbey makes clear. He could be Amon or Clive Bundy, millionaire cattle ranchers in east Oregon, for all the difference. The Bundy’s graze their European cattle on federal land and reject any role for the federal government too, including paying miniscule grazing fees. Abbey got an M.A. in philosophy before becoming a park ranger and writer but the distinction between different kinds of 'sage brush rebels' seems to have escaped him, at least in this book.
Women are depicted as cooks, relatives and protective, generally marginal people alongside the men and boys. Grandpa has a Mexican housekeeper and one Mexican range hand, so he’s got employees and is clearly a small businessman. He's against modern conveniences like the telephone; but he sure as hell does have a gasoline truck along with his horses and cattle. Does the reader sympathize with the old man? Given the only objection is 'my property, my property' that he's lived on all my life, it's threadbare and iffy – especially when he threatens to shoot or kill anyone who comes close to his ranch house. No one would welcome the military seizing their home, certainly. His best friend realizes he alone can’t defeat the government forces and continually tries to talk him out of his ‘last stand’ mentality. We're all familiar with stubborn old coots who live in the past as it’s almost an emotional disease for some old people. The preface called this book a paean to Western 'individualism.' Yet the old man is at the emotional level of a 12 year old boy, as his kid nephew backs him in his ‘last stand’ too. It seems that individualism fails again, even as resistance.
The best part of the book are the depictions of the New Mexico desert and mountains around Alamogordo, New Mexico just north of El Paso – cougars, yucca cactus, dry washes, water springs, mountain vistas, horse travelling and the indomitable heat. If you are fascinated by the ‘West’ and desert areas, this book will inspire a visit. It anticipates Abbey's environmentalist take in future books about the Grand Canyon area, Arizona and southern Utah where he honed his message by joining with others and opposing corporate ruination too.
Note: The title is the same as Terry Bisson's excellent left-wing book "Fire on the Mountain" about the success of the John Brown raid, published in 1988.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Good News,” “Hayduke Lives” and “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (all 3 by Abbey); “This Land” (Ketcham); “Red State Rebels” and “Born Under a Bad Sky,” (both by J. St. Clair); “The Worst Hard Time,” “Mad Max,” “All the Pretty Horses” (C. McCarthy).
And I got it at May Day’s used section!
The Cultural Marxist / June 3, 2024
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