IN MAY 1988 Edward Abbey went into southeastern Utah for a four-day horseback trip with a small “expedition” party. Accompanying him was his friend, outfitter and guide Ken Sleight (according to Abbey lore, Sleight was the model for the character Seldom Seen Smith in The Monkey Wrench Gang); Sleight’s assistant, a young packer named Grant Johnson; and two others.
The journey was into the craggy backcountry of Grand Gulch, a winding series of slickrock canyons worn into the sandstone plateau of Cedar Mesa in Utah’s San Juan County. It is, by all accounts, an extraordinary place, its arresting red rock beauty embroidered by bursts of archaeological richness. The Grand Gulch canyons contain a remarkable collection of Ancestral Pueblo cliff ruins and rock art, some of it long since rendered inaccessible by the erosive force of the desert winds.
Despite the company of his friend Sleight, despite the appealing remoteness of the place, and despite it being the desert Southwest (a place that was for Abbey “love at first sight”), it was in many ways just another job. Abbey was there on assignment for Condé Nast Traveler, which had commissioned him to write an essay for a special issue of the magazine, “The Glory of the West.” The essay that emerged from Abbey’s Grand Gulch trip carried an alluring air of mystery in its title: “The Secret of the Green Mask.” Reading it today, a couple of things stand out.
One is the photographs: two large, black-and-white photos from the trip accompany the essay. Abbey appears in both. In the first, he’s taking an afternoon siesta, lying on the valley floor on his back with arms outstretched, his straw hat strategically placed over his face to provide some shade. He’s framed in the lower right of the photo, reclining to the right of a round cottonwood tree. Two packhorses stand at the left of the tree, one of them with its head partly in the branches, perhaps seeking shade or looking for something more interesting. The canyon walls fan upward in the background, appearing to move away from the tree at the center of the photograph and ending in a puff of white cloud and sky at the top of the photo. It’s a nicely composed image, conveying at once the power of the personality—even at rest—and the beauty and resonance of place.
The next photo is even more striking. In this one Abbey is positioned on the left side of the image, sitting on a small rock bench and taking notes, with his back nearly pressed against the curved wall. The place is Turkey Pen Ruins, a sandstone alcove that curves upward to the top of the image and appears as an amphitheater of stone, framing a view of the canyon to the right of the photograph. Abbey’s here a solitary figure looking out into the distance, into the vastness of the desert landscape.
The photos were the work of Mark Klett, another member of that Grand Gulch party in May 1988 and also on assignment for Condé Nast. The editor of Traveler had in fact paired the two men, thinking that it would be interesting to couple prominent writers and landscape photographers for the special issue on the West. (Full disclosure: Klett is a colleague of mine at Arizona State University and I’ve known him for a few years, although I only recently became aware of his Grand Gulch trip with Abbey. I asked him to sit down with me to talk a little about his recollections of the assignment, about Abbey, and about those photographs.)
Already by then an accomplished fine arts photographer known for his innovative “rephotography” of the western landscape, at the time of the trip Klett had read and admired Desert Solitaire and some of Abbey’s other essays. But he had little sense of Abbey the person other than the familiar stories (often told by Abbey himself). Klett thought that the author’s persona was a bit over the top, so when Condé Nast called and asked him if he “wanted to go on horseback trip into southern Utah with Edward Abbey,” he agreed, but with slight trepidation. Abbey himself chose the location, selecting a place that was interesting and remote, yet not so secluded that attracting the attention of Traveler readers would pose any great concern.
Abbey’s arrival at the Grand Gulch trailhead did little to dispel an over-the-top reputation. Klett described the author’s showy entrance in his red Eldorado convertible, a Cadillac cowboy riding high on the seatback, whooping loudly and wildly waving his hat. But Abbey soon set Klett at ease, and today the photographer has very fond memories of the trip.
Kiva in Grand Gulch (November 2003)
Klett shot more than one hundred photographs on the Grand Gulch assignment, although only two ended up in the published article. I asked him about that Turkey Pen Ruins image, which Klett has put on exhibition at various venues over the years. A slight smile crossed his face. “It’s my favorite photograph from the trip and from that period in my work. It really captures how I saw Abbey experiencing the place on that trip, gauging that experience, recording it.”
Abbey’s Traveler essay is a light piece, but a lively one (he may have been writing for Condé Nast but he was still Ed Abbey). For the most part he stays within the sunny conventions of the travel essay, though he can’t resist taking a few jabs at old foes. Noting that cattle were banned from the canyon decades earlier, Abbey delights in the signs of a recovering landscape: the reappearance of wild plants, the stabilization of the stream banks, the return of deer to the canyons. And he expresses the hope that someday all of the public lands of the American West will be similarly regenerated once they, too, are no longer “infested with domestic livestock.” It’s a vintage Abbey riff, though his punches were pulled more than usual (he was clearly on his best behavior for the Condé Nast crowd).
And then there is that mystery alluded to in the essay’s title. It’s one that Abbey the dramatist takes his sweet time in unveiling. But he eventually describes a haunting image encountered in the rocks, the Ancestral Pueblo “green mask” pictograph high up on the wall of Grand Gulch’s Sheik’s Canyon. Abbey’s depiction of it is one of the essay’s best passages:
Most unusual, however, is the life-size floating head at the far end of the gallery, a yellow face with red hair (or headdress) and a green mask painted across the eyes. A troubling apparition, centuries old, spooky, queer, sinister—if I were the superstitious type I’d flee this place at once. But as comfortable modern rationalists, we simply turn our backs on the Green Mask, eat our lunches, and stare with pleasure at a scrim of light rain falling beyond the shelter of our amphitheater.
At the end of the essay Abbey struggles to capture the essence of “this quiet, secret, and secretive canyon.” He quickly throws in the towel, however, and acknowledges that a four-day pack trip is nowhere near enough time to understand the place. To really understand it, Abbey writes, he’d have to come back and live in the canyons for a while, “perhaps a century or two, through all the transformations of the seasons and the years.” Until then, he’d rather not discuss something he can’t even name. If we really want to know more about the elusive essence of the canyon, then we should, Abbey suggests, “ask that head on the wall, the creature behind the Green Mask.”
It’s a circumspect and meditative Abbey, playing a game of metaphysical hide-and-seek that he started decades before in Desert Solitaire. An unsettling cipher, the green mask seems to signify to him the irreducible mystery and power of place, to be a sublime marker both of our presence and our evanescence. The true meaning of the desert landscape is in the end unknowable, beyond the measure of science, beyond the comprehension of even Abbey’s vast poetic faculties.
There is another secret in the Grand Gulch essay, however, one that also turns on a key image from the trip. It’s a small secret, but knowing it has the effect of knowing all good secrets. It makes you feel like you understand something a little more fully, maybe even that you’ve become privy to some deeper truth.
As Klett and I were talking about the Turkey Pen Ruins photo, he shared a surprising detail. “You can’t tell, but he’s not alone in that photo.” Abbey was, in fact, sitting next to someone in the scene, the fourth member of the trip, a woman named Carole who is mentioned only in passing in the piece (she was apparently a friend of Sleight’s, though that isn’t entirely clear from the record of the trip). Klett didn’t think the magazine would be interested in a duo in the photograph, and he didn’t want to move them to get a solo shot of the author, so he found the perfect vantage point in which only Abbey is visible.
I looked even closer at the high-resolution print of the photo that Klett had brought with him. I tried to see the other figure in the picture, to see some sort of visual “tell”—perhaps a slight shadow, maybe something in Abbey’s body language—suggesting that he was not really alone in the scene. Nothing. I still saw only Abbey.
Knowing this little secret about the photo, though, made me think differently about the image. And it reminded me that so much of the reception of the writer and his work has been swamped by that Abbey myth: the image of “Cactus Ed,” the solitary, self-styled desert anarchist, zealous defender of the wilderness, someone who’d “rather kill a man than a snake.” The power and beauty of Klett’s photo of Abbey in the Grand Gulch ruins can reinforce this image (although it’s far too tranquil a scene to evoke homicide): Abbey as the “lone voice crying the wilderness.” But of course, that’s only on the surface. Both the photo and Abbey’s persona (another kind of “mask”) are careful and deliberate aesthetic creations. If we forget that we risk taking both images of Abbey as the truth.
When that happens, Abbey’s voice, his work, his environmental vision—all get hollowed out and distorted. He becomes the one-trick pony: the radical wilderness preservationist with little appetite for modern society but a definite taste for writing screeds against cattle ranching and urban sprawl (“Phoenix should never have been allowed to happen”). Abbey, it must be said, brought much of this on himself, especially when he let it rip (which he did often). But those who knew him—and those who read him more carefully—know that this Abbey was mostly a fiction, a mischievous invention.
The problem is that the image of Abbey as the anti-modern, misanthropic environmentalist can eclipse his more tempered thinking and writing, rendering the latter all but forgotten. But recall the philosophical punch line of Desert Solitaire: “Balance, that’s the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.” Hardly the words of a radical primitivist. Or think of how Abbey similarly commends (in Abbey’s Road) “a wholesome and reasonable balance between industrialism and agrarianism, between cities and small towns, between private property and public property.” The desire to mix wild and civilized, natural beauty and pragmatic utility, animates some of Abbey’s best and most mature work.
In Grand Gulch, Klett got to know this more moderate, three-dimensional man behind the brash rhetoric and the Cactus Ed caricature. Klett fittingly saw the fuller picture: “Here’s a human guy, living a life, not taking himself too seriously. I liked that about him. If he’d really been a raging ideologue, an environmental extremist, well, it probably wouldn’t have been a very good trip.”
The Grand Gulch essay appeared in print in March 1989, the month and year of Abbey’s death. It remains a little known piece and hasn’t been reprinted. Track it down for the photos or to be reminded of the author’s easy hand with the immersive travel essay. Or read it for a more poignant end, as a record of one last journey—exuberant, playful, earthy, and still searching—into the heart of Abbey’s country.
