Read Online The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey - Free Book Online Page A

million a year.
    Doc came down in his bathrobe. “Are you playing that goddamned imitation-Negro music again?”
    “I like it.”
    “That slave music?”
    “Some people like it.”
    “Who?”
    “Everybody I know except you.”
    “Hard on the plants, you know. Kills geraniums.”
    “Oh, God. All right.” She groaned and changed the program.
    They went to bed. From below rose the genteel, discreet and melancholy sounds of Mozart.
    “You’re too old for that kind of noise,” he was saying. “Those teen tunes. That bubble-gum music. You’re a grown-up girl now.”
    “Well I like it.”
    “After I go to work in the morning, okay? You can play it all day then if you want to, okay?”
    “It’s your house, Doc.”
    “It’s yours too. But we must consider the potted plants.”
    Through the open French doors of the bedroom, beyond the second-story terrace, miles away down the sloping plain of the desert, they could see the glow of the great city. Airplanes circled softly, inaudible, above the metropolitan radiance, quiet as fireflies in the distance. Tall searchlights stalked through the velvet dark probing the clouds.
    His hands were upon her. She stirred sleepily in his arms, waiting. They “made” love, for quite some time.
    “Used to do this all night,” Doc said. “Now it takes me all night to do it.”
    “You’re a slow comer,” she said, “but you get there.”
    They rested for a while. “How about a river trip?” he said.
    “You’ve been promising that for months.”
    “This time I mean it.”
    “When?”
    “Very soon.”
    “What made you think of that?”
    “I hear the call of the river.”
    “That’s the toilet,” she said. “The valve is stuck again.”
    She was a walker too, that girl. In lug-soled boots, army shirt, short pants and bush ranger’s hat, she marched along, alone, through Albuquerque’sonly mountains, the pink Sandia range, or tramped about over the volcanoes west of town. She didn’t own a car but on her ten-speed bicycle sometimes pedaled all the fifty miles north to Santa Fe, pack on her narrow back, and from there up into the real mountains, the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains, to the end of the pavement, and hiked on to the peaks—Baldy, Truchas, Wheeler—camping alone for two or three nights at a time, while black bear snuffled about her midget tent and mountain lions screamed.
    She searched. She hunted. She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.
    Doc kept muttering about the river. About the Grand Canyon. About a place called Lee’s Ferry and a riverman named Seldom S. Smith.
    “Any time,” she said.
    Meanwhile they cut down, burned up, defaced and mutilated billboards.
    “Kid stuff,” the good doctor complained. “We are meant for finer things. Did you know, my dear, that we have the biggest strip mine in the United States, up near Shiprock? Right here in New Mexico the Land of Enchantment? Have you thought about where all that smog is coming from that blankets the whole bloody Rio Grande valley? Paul Horgan’s ‘great river,’ channelized, subsidized, salinized, trickling into cotton fields under the sulfur skies of New Mexico? Did you know that a consortium of power companies and government agencies are conspiring to open more strip mines and build even more coal-burning power plants in the same four-corners area where all that filth is coming from now? Together with more roads, power lines, railways and pipelines? All in what was once semi-virginal wilderness and still is the most spectacular landscape in the forty-eight contiguous bloody states? Did you know that?”
    “I was once a semi-virgin,” she said.
    “Did you know that other power companies and the same government agencies are planning even bigger things for the Wyoming-Montanaarea? Strip mines bigger than any that have