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which would transform my life. And one day, in the bathroom at Blue Mountain, I came across a copy of the
Earth First! Journal
, which would help transform my sense of the world.
    Earth First! was still young in those days, a radical environmental group that rose in the Southwest desert in the time of James Watt and Ronald Reagan. Less a group, really, than a style: cantankerous, uncompromising, convinced that the fire had gone out of the wilderness movement and that it was their duty to reignite it. Founded by a few friends, Earth First! drew its inspiration from the pages of the great desert writer Edward Abbey, and in particular his novel
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, an account of a small redneck band that crosses the desert blowing up coal mines and highway bridges in defense of the wild. Earth First! was launched in an illegal ceremony atop Glen Canyon Dam, the concrete plug that had flooded deep, gorgeous canyons of the Colorado into Lake Powell (Lake Foul, to Abbey). The small band gathered atop the dam and unrolled a massive plastic crack down its face, symbolizing their hope that it would soon disappear. These guys (and they were almost all guys) fascinated me—their frank and joyful denial that humans mattered most (
Earth
First!), their pugnacity at a momentwhen Reagan and the Right were rolling over every more responsible advocate of a normal, balanced America, their willingness to tip over every sacred cow, even the environmental ones (Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads). And so I set out to investigate, traveling to Utah to hike with Abbey, and to Idaho for a hard-drinking week in the glorious Challis National Forest at the group’s annual encampment. And to headquarters, such as it was, in the Tucson home of founder Dave Foreman. Outside, it was a normal Southwestern ranch-style home in a cul-de-sac kind of neighborhood. Inside, it was marvelous chaos—people bunking here and there, planning one mysterious action or another, maps of wilderness areas on every wall, phones ringing constantly in the way they used to
—ringing
, not playing the first measure of some pop hit.
    The one calm human being in the middle of all that storm was also the youngest, the most clean-cut, and by far the healthiest looking. John Davis was the editor of the
Earth First! Journal
, which was the glue that held the anarchic group more or less together. I watched him paste up a few stories—a blockade of a road into some planned clearcut on an Oregon national forest, an early tree-sit by some protesters in redwood country. Everyhalf hour or so he would rise from his desk, walk over to the doorjamb, and do twenty or thirty pull-ups. Refreshed, he’d get back to his labors. The journal he was editing reflected the group’s prevailing ethos: new editions were published not in accord with the conventional months, but with the pagan calendar (Beltane, Samhain); the lively letters column was called “Dear Shit-fer-Brains”; and the most-read column was doubtless “Dear Ned Ludd,” where readers would write in with questions about, say, what type of sugar to pour down a bulldozer’s gas tank if you wanted to disable it. It was, in other words, thoroughly irresponsible. Except that in a world where the rise of radical conservatism still seemed fresh in its craziness, this response also seemed thoroughly necessary. As if someone was actually giving as good as we were getting. And I was twenty-five at the time—it seemed deeply romantic, this idea of wilderness as the ultimate good.
    In retrospect, I realize I saw Earth First! near the end of its glory days. Two things happened. One, as with all cool scenes, it was soon inundated—since it was the only fighting game in town, activists from a dozen other causes