“There’s a Fellow Here to See You”

The receptionist rang me in my office — “There’s a fellow here to see you.  No appointment.”  

Me:  “Christ.  What’s he want, and what’s his name?”  

Her:  “He says he reads your stuff on population. His name is Edward Abbey.”  

Me — long pause. 

“Older guy with a beard…. face like an eroded canyon?”   

“Yes.”

I was out the door like my ass was on fire.  

Edward Fucking Abbey!  

He had been a huge influence on me, but I was so flummoxed in his presence that the best I could squeeze out was “I had to read you in college.”

He frowned, and I recovered.

“No, no, not like that,” I said, struggling to get it right.  

I quoted him back to him, very nearly word-for-word, about going light-weight and being *IN* the experience rather than observing it through a camera viewfinder.  

I even had a name for the idea; I called it “The Law of Inverse Appreciation” — the less there was between you and nature, the more you appreciated it.  

Well, that turned things around — he liked that!

Abbey was a tough old coot. He thought what he thought, and said what he said, and he was never a pearl clutcher or one to suffer fools for too long.  

Some time later — maybe a year or two — Abbey put into words the most radical immigration solution I’ve ever heard — one that I still admire for its focused simplicity and framing.  

The problem, as Abbey saw it, was Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) which was corrupt from top to bottom, and which had ruled Mexico, under several names, without interuption, for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000.

Abbey wrote that the US Border Patrol should meet everyone crossing into the US, give them an old WWII rifle and a box of ammunition, and then turn them around, with the words: “You know what to do with that, right?"

Perfect.

And Ed Abbey wasn’t wrong.  

When all the displeased people leave, rather than fight, continued despotism is guaranteed.  

Fidel Castro understood that, which is why, in 1980, he was only too happy to send the malcontents he called “escoria” off to Miami.

Over 35 years later, I heard Ed Abbey’s idea voiced by someone entirely different — Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

As Russian tank columns rolled ever closer to Kiev, Zelenskyy refused westen advice to jump on a plane and fly off to exile.

"I need ammunition, not a ride,” he explained.

Ukrainians would not flee; they would fight. 

And by God how have they fought!

Slavaa Ukraini!  ¡Viva la Revolución!

Edward Abbey saw it all, and he got it exactly right.