The Monkey Wrench Gang (15 page)

Hayduke knelt and wrote a message in the sand to all highway construction contractors: “Go home.”

After some thought he added: “No fucking bridge, please.”

To which, after further thought, he signed his secret name: “Rudolf the Red.”

After a moment he crossed that out and wrote: “Crazy Horse.” Best not identify oneself exactly.

Forewarned. Well, so be it. He’d be back, Hayduke would, with or without the rest of the crew, properly armed next time, i.e., with a
sabot
big enough to lever a bridge from its foundations.

He walked north along the rim toward the head of the canyon, looking for a place to cross. Might save miles of walking if he could find one.

He did. Pinyon pines and junipers on the rim, contoured terraces below, the canyon floor not so far away—150 instead of 200 feet. Hayduke took his rope out of the pack—120 feet of quarter-inch laid nylon—uncoiled it and looped it around the base of a tree. Steadying himself with the left hand, controlling the free ends of the rope with his right, he leaned backward over the edge of the rim and hung there for a moment, enjoying the sensation of gravity neutralized, then swiftly rappeled to the ledge below.

A second rappel lowered him to within scrambling distance of the canyon floor. He lined his pack to the ground with the rope, dropped the rope and climbed down through a chimney to the sandy alluvium at the base of the wall.

He refilled his four canteens at the stream, where it purled through sculptured grooves in the pink bedrock of the canyon. He took a good drink and rested for a while in the shade, dozing. The sun moved; the light and heat crept upon him. He awoke, took another drink, hoisted the pack to his back and climbed a high talus slope through a break in the west rim of the canyon. The final pitch, above the slope, was steep, tricky, twenty feet high. He took off the
pack, tied the rope to it and climbed to the rim, one end of the rope in his belt. He drew up the pack, rested again, then marched south along the canyon rim to regain the project right-of-way.

Through the afternoon he continued
his
project toward the northwest, into the sun, nullifying in one day the patient, skilled, month-long work of four men. All afternoon and into the evening he plodded along, back and forth, pulling up stakes, removing ribbons. Aircraft passed overhead, miles above, trailing vapor plumes across the sky, not concerned with Hayduke or his work. Only the birds watched him, the pinyon jays, a mountain bluebird, a hawk, the patient buzzards. Once he startled a herd of deer—six, seven, eight does, three spotted fawns—and watched them bound off into the brush. He blundered into a bunch of cattle and they rose reluctantly at his approach, half wild, half tame, hoisting hind ends and then foreparts from the shady ground, and trotted away. This wilderness at least would support pastoral man for a long time to come.

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers and the general motherfuckers come back again.

Thus George Hayduke’s fantasy. Did he believe in the cyclical theory of history? Or the linear theory? You’d find it hard to pin him down in these matters; he wavered and wobbled and waffled from one position to another, from time to time; what the fuck who gives a shit he would say if pressed, and grab the tab snap the cap from another
can of Bud, buddy, pop the top, Pappy, from another can of Schlitz. Floating his teeth, gassing his guts, bloating his bladder with beer. Hopeless case.

Sundown: a gory primal sunset lay splattered like pizza pie across the west. Hayduke stuck another wad of jerky in his teeth and dogged on until he could no longer see the flagging on the trees and darkness compelled him to call it a day. He had worked from dawn to dusk or, as his old man used to say, “from can’t see to can’t see.”

He must have walked twenty miles this day. At least the ache in his limbs, the swell of his feet, made it seem so. He ate his supper of Hayduke Granola and crawled into the sack, deep in the bush, he believed, dead to the world of care.

Hayduke slept late into the next morning, roused at last by the roar of a car or truck rushing past nearby. He staggered up to find himself within fifty yards of a road. For a minute he didn’t know where he was. He rubbed his eyes, pulled on pants and boots, skulked through the trees to within sight of a road junction. He read the signs: L
AKE
P
OWELL
62; B
LANDING
40; N
ATURAL
B
RIDGES
N
ATIONAL
M
ONUMENT
10; H
ALL’S
C
ROSSING
45.

Good. Almost home.

He pulled out the last few stakes, removed the last few ribbons, slipped across the road and took off through the scrub forest cross-country toward Natural Bridges. Within that relative sanctuary, following Armstrong Canyon and the trail from Owachomo Natural Bridge, he would find the gang waiting, he hoped, hidden in the crowds of tourist and camper, at the official, designated, national monument campground. That had been the plan, and Hayduke was twenty-four hours ahead of schedule.

He buried the final handful of stakes and ribbon under a rock, adjusted the pack and marched boldly forward into the trees. He carried no compass but relied on topo maps, his infallible sense of direction and his overweening self-confidence. Justified. By four o’clock that afternoon he was sitting on the tailgate of Smith’s truck slurping beer, gobbling an Abbzug-constructed ham sandwich and exchanging
stories with the crew—Hayduke, Sarvis, Abbzug & Smith: it could have been a brokerage firm.

“Gentlemen and lady,” Doc was saying, “this is only the beginning. Greater things wait ahead. The future lies before us, spread-eagled like a coronary upon the dunghill of Destiny.”

“Doc,” says Smith, “you said a mouthful.”

“We need dynamite,” Hayduke mumbles through his sandwich. “Thermite, carbon tet, magnesium filings….

While Abbzug, aloof and lovely in the background, smiles her sardonic smile.

“Talk, talk, talk,” she says. “That’s all I ever hear. Talk, talk, talk.”

Campground, Natural Bridges National Monument
.

“Can I borrow your bolt cutters?”

The man seemed pleasant enough, a suntanned gentleman in slacks and polo shirt and canvas shoes.

“We don’t have any bolt cutters,” Abbzug said.

He ignored her, talking to Smith. “Having a little trouble.” He nodded his head back toward another campsite, where a pickup truck and camper trailer were parked. California license tags.

“Well,” Smith said.

“We don’t have any bolt cutters,” Abbzug said again.

“I see you’re a professional outfitter,” the man said, still talking to Smith. He gestured toward Smith’s truck. “Thought you might have a set of tools with you.”

BACK OF BEYOND EXPEDITIONS HITE UTAH
all across the door panels on big red magnetic decals.

“Yeah, but no bolt cutters,” Abbzug said.

“Maybe heavy-duty wire cutters?”

“Well sir,” says Smith, “we could loan you—”

“A set of pliers,” Abbzug said.

“—a set of pliers.”

“I have pliers. Need something bigger.”

“Try the ranger’s office,” Abbzug said.

“Yes?” He finally condescended to speak directly to her, as if he hadn’t been inspecting her all the time anyway from the corners of his eyes. “I’ll do that.” He finally walked away, through the junipers and pinyon pines, to his own outfit.

“Persistent cuss,” Smith said.

“Nosy, I’d say,” she said. “You see the way he was looking at me? The swine. I ought to give him a knuckle sandwich.”

Smith was thinking about his decals. “Guess we don’t need no more advertising.” He peeled them off.

Hayduke and Dr. Sarvis returned from their walk in the woods. They had been preparing a shopping list for the next series of punitive raids, scheduled to begin ten days from today. Paranoid as always, Hayduke preferred the discussion held well away from the public campground.

Dr. Sarvis, chewing on his cigar, read over the list: rotor arms, iron oxide flakes, Du Pont Red Cross Extra, Number 50 blasting machine, fuse lighters, good things like that.

Doc slipped the paper into his shirt pocket. “I’m not sure I approve of this,” he said.

“You want to take out that bridge or just play funny games?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Make up your mind.”

“I can’t get all this stuff up here in a plane.”

“You sure as hell can.”

“Not on a commercial flight. Do you realize what you have to go through to get on a plane these days?”

“Charter a plane, Doc, charter a plane.”

“You think I’m a rich bastard, don’t you?”

“I never met a poor doctor yet, Doc. Better yet,
buy
us a fucking plane.”

“I can’t even drive a car.”

“Let Bonnie take flying lessons.”

“You’re full of ideas today.”

“It’s a beautiful day, right? A motherfucking beautiful day.”

The doctor laid his arm across Hayduke’s broad back and squeezed that musclebound shoulder. “George,” he said, “try to have a little patience. Just a little.”

“Patience, shit.”

“George, we don’t know exactly what we’re doing. If constructive vandalism turns destructive, what then? Perhaps we’ll be doing more harm than good. There are some who say if you attack the system you only make it stronger.”

“Yeah—and if you don’t attack it, it strip-mines the mountains, dams all the rivers, paves over the desert and puts you in jail anyway.”

“You and me.”

“Not me. They’ll never put me in one of their jails. I’m not the type, Doc. I’ll die first. And take about ten of them with me. Not me, Doc.”

They entered the campsite, joining the girl and Seldom Seen. Lunchtime. The sultry air of a clouded noon pressed down on them. Hayduke opened another can of beer. He was always opening another can of beer. And always pissing.

“How about some more poker?” Smith said to Dr. Sarvis. “Beat the heat.”

Doc expelled a cloud of cigar smoke. “If you like.”

“Don’t you ever learn?” Hayduke said. “That grizzled fart has cleaned us out twice now.”

“I learn but seems like I always forget,” Smith said.

“No more poker games,” Abbzug harshly butted in. “We have to go. If I don’t get this so-called surgeon back to Albuquerque tomorrow we’re going to have malpractice suits on our heads and that means no more money and higher insurance premiums and no more fun and games with you two clowns up here in the enchanted wilderness.”

She was right, as usual. They broke camp promptly and hustled down the road, the four jammed hip to hip in the cab of Smith’s truck. The bed of the truck, canopied by an aluminum shell, carried their
camping gear, their food supplies and Smith’s toolbox, icebox and other staples of his profession.

The plan was to drive Doc and Bonnie to the landing strip at Fry Canyon, where they were to meet a small private plane which would take them to Farmington, New Mexico, in time to catch the evening flight to Albuquerque. Roundabout, expensive and tiresome but still much better, from Dr. Sarvis’s point of view, than commuting that awful span of bulging desert—some four hundred miles—on the four wheels of his Continental.

Hayduke and Smith would then go on to what once was the river, now the upper arm of Lake Powell, to reconnoiter the next objective: three new bridges. On the day following, Smith had to drive on to Hanksville to rendezvous with a group of his client backpackers for a five-day tour of Utah’s Henry Mountains, last-discovered and last-named U.S. mountain range.

And Hayduke? Didn’t know. He might go with Smith, or he might go wandering off on his own for a while. The old jeep, loaded with all his valuables, had been left a week earlier in a parking lot at Wahweap Marina near Page, close to the ultimate, final, unspoken, impossible objective, Smith’s favorite fantasy, the dam. Glen Canyon Dam.
The
dam.

How Hayduke was to get his jeep back or himself back to his jeep he didn’t know at this point. He could always walk it if necessary—200 miles? 300?—up and down and in and out of God’s finest canyon wilderness. He could borrow one of Smith’s little rubber boats, inflate it and paddle down the 150 miles of stagnant Lake Powell. Or he could wait for Smith to drive him down there.

The beauty of his situation was, for Hayduke, that he felt he could be let off anytime, anywhere, in the middle of nowhere, with his backpack, a gallon of water, a few relevant topo maps, three days’ food supply, and he’d make it, survive and thrive, on his own, man. (All that fresh beef wandering around on the range; all that venison on the hoof down in the box canyons; all those sweet-water springs under the lucent cottonwoods a convenient day’s march one from the next.)

So he thought. So he felt. The sensation of freedom was exhilarating, though tinged with a shade of loneliness, a touch of sorrow. The old dream of total independence, beholden to no man and no woman, floated above his days like smoke from a pipe dream, like a silver cloud with a dark lining. For even Hayduke sensed, when he faced the thing directly, that the total loner would go insane. Was insane. Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wildness and freedom, lay the trap of madness. Even the vulture, that red-necked black-winged anarchist, most indolent and arrogant of all the desert’s creatures, even the vulture at evening likes to gather with his kin and swap a few stories, the flock of them roosting on the highest branches of the deadest tree in the neighborhood, all hunched down and wrapped up in their black-wing robes, cackling together like a convocation of scheming priests. Even the vulture—fantastic thought—goes through the nesting fit, mates for a time, broods on a clutch of vulture eggs, produces young.