"Wrenched - A Feature Documentary" Ms. Kristi Frazier, Producer - 2013

 

"Wrenched - A Feature Documentary"

Ms. Kristi Frazier, Producer

On May 14, 2013, I drove from Kingman, Arizona to Winslow, via Interstate I-40 and a few back roads. Along the way, I stopped in Flagstaff to visit with Ms. Kristi Frazier, the Producer of ML Lincoln Films’ “Wrenched – The Movie”, subtitled “How Edward Abbey lit the flame of environmental activism and gave the movement its soul”.

In late 2012, when Kristi Frazier first contacted me about my writing and the movie, I became interested in the project. Having written about Edward Abbey in various articles over the years, I wondered how ML Lincoln planned to treat Abbey’s legacy. Even twenty-four years after his passing, a documentary about Edward Abbey and the environmental activist movement he helped to found invited controversy.

When the original trailer for the movie hinted at the need for Monkey Wrench Gang-style physical intervention against “the machine”, I was concerned. Blowing up a coal train or pouring Karo Syrup in the fuel tank of a bulldozer made for good fiction, but not for responsible environmentalism or good politics in the 2010’s.

In my own way, I set about subverting the movie’s apparent promotion of environmental insurrection. To me, there was already too much violence and meaningless destruction of property in this world. No responsible person or film should advocate for more of the same. My way of attempting to turn that tide, if only in the film, was to write. My subject was Edward Abbey, as I saw him in life and channeled him in his current non-physical state.

Almost before I knew it, I had published four new articles about Edward Abbey. In life, he was famous for his passions, including an unbridled desire to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, thus releasing its water into the Colorado River. Years ago, I had walked with the Spirit of Edward Abbey at Navajo National Monument, Arizona. At the end of our walk, I realized that death had released the Spirit of Edward Abbey from his famous crankiness.

Who knows if my new articles had any influence on the filmmakers or the film? During my meeting with Kristi Frazier, she indicated that all of the environmental fervor was still in the film, but that it would not be a call to arms against developers or mineral extraction. I was pleased to hear that a new trailer for “Wrenched – The Movie” was coming in late May 2013.

I just finished watching that new trailer and afterward, breathed a sigh of relief. None other than Robert Redford makes a brief appearance in the trailer, saying, “It was the very beginning of an environmental movement, but it belonged to a certain caste of people that the other people saw as threatening”. Activism always threatens some people, but it is often necessary in order to enhance public awareness. I do not know if Robert Redford’s appearance in the movie trailer indicates that there will be a place for “Wrenched – The Movie” at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, but I hope so.

Over the years, in this blog I have singled out only three people for a “World Citizen Award”. In 2008, I praised Tom Moody and his wife, the late Joan Moody, who together protected Namenalala Island in Fiji from fishing and over-development. In 2011, I praised Kathy Hemenway for being first to identify the environmental risks of potash mining in the Holbrook Basin, Arizona.

In conjunction with ML Lincoln of ML Lincoln Films, Kristi Frazier has spent over three years of her professional life shepherding “Wrenched – The Movie” toward its expected release in early 2014. When we think of a movie producer, we often think of some bigwig mogul smoking a cigar at a Hollywood studio. Instead, Kristi Frazier, a married mother of three balances work and family in Flagstaff, Arizona. Without her tireless dedication to a complex task, I doubt that ML Lincoln’s vision of the Spirit of Edward Abbey would ever make it to the screen.

In anticipation that “Wrenched – The Movie” will soon receive widespread theatrical release and critical acclaim, Plush Kokopelli and I recognize Ms. Kristi Frazier as recipient of only the third ever “World Citizen Award”. Congratulations to Kristi Frazier.

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By James McGillis at 11:51 AM | Environment | Comments (1) | Link

In 1981, Edward Abbey and "Earth First!" Monkey Wrenched Glen Canyon Dam - 2012

 

In 1981, Edward Abbey and "Earth First!" Monkey Wrenched Glen Canyon Dam

In 1965, my father and I visited the Four Corners States. Three years later, Edward Abbey enjoyed the publishing of his first non-fiction book, titled Desert Solitaire. Abbey’s words help give geographical and historical context to many places I visited in 1965. Quoting from Abbey’s book, I wrote about my visits to Moab, Utah, Lake Powell and Rainbow Bridge National Monument.

In 1975, at the age of 48, Edward Abbey experienced widespread notoriety when his novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang received mixed reviews. Although many readers and reviewers enjoyed his queasily exciting adventures in incipient eco-activism (some say eco-terrorism), others abhorred the sabotage Abbey’s motley band of characters perpetrated in San Juan County, Utah.

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote with eloquence about his personal history and the natural history of his favorite places in Southeastern Utah and Northern Arizona. By the time he wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, the same places served mainly as a backdrop for the nefarious activities of his fictional characters. Following are Abbey’s words of fiction and my photos of reality at several places mentioned in The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Monument Valley–

Page 235, “Hayduke rushed back, breathing hard, scowling with ill-suppressed delight. He jumped in, jumped the clutch and burned away, turned left at the highway and drove north toward Kayenta, Monument Valley, Mexican Hat, the trackless canyons of Utah – escape.”

Page 243, “She sat on the iron flange of an overturned mining car and gazed far out toward the south, through the veils of the evening, for a hundred miles as thought can sail, over Muley Point and the Gooseneck meanders of the San Juan River, past Monument Valley, over the Monument Upwarp and beyond the rim of the visible world to Kayenta, the Holiday Inn and the battered blue jeep still waiting there.

San Juan River –

Page 88, “Instead of destroying the survey crew’s signs, she suggested, why not relocate them all in such a manner as to lead the right-of-way in a grand loop back to the starting point? Or lead it to the brink of, say, Muley Point, where the contractors would confront a twelve-hundred-foot vertical drop-off down to the Goosenecks of the San Juan River.

Glen Canyon Dam –

Page 11, “Four hundred feet long, it spans a gorge seven hundred feet deep: Glen Canyon. Flowing through the bottom of the gorge is the tame and domesticated Colorado River, released from the bowels of the adjacent Glen Canyon Dam. Formerly a golden-red, as the name implies, the river now runs cold, clear and green, the color of glacier water.”

Page 16, “Not the dam.”
“Yes sir, we have reason to think so.”
“Not Glen Canyon Dam.”
“I know it sounds crazy. But that’s what they’re after.”
Meanwhile, up in the sky, the lone visible vulture spirals…

Page 31, “He hadn’t remembered so many power lines. They stride across the horizon in multicolumn grandeur, looped together by the swoop and gleam of high-voltage cables charged with energy from Glen Canyon Dam, from the Navajo Power Plant, from the Four Corners and Shiprock plants, bound south and westward to the burgeoning Southwest and California. The blazing cities feed on the defenseless interior.

Page 37, “Now they came, amidst an increasing flow of automobile and truck traffic, to the bridge and Glen Canyon Dam. Smith parked his truck in front of the Senator Carl Hayden Memorial Building. He and his friend got out and walked along the rail to the center of the bridge.

Page 66, “Hayduke had been complaining about the new power lines he’d seen the day before on the desert. Smith had been moaning about the dam again, that dam which had plugged up Glen Canyon, the heart of his river, the river of his heart.

Page 103, “The old jeep, loaded with all of his valuables, had been left a week earlier in a parking lot at Wahweap Marina near Page, close to the ultimate, final, unspoken goal, impossible objective, Smith’s favorite fantasy, the dam. Glen Canyon Dam. The dam.

Page 108, “When Glen Canyon Dam plugged the Colorado, the waters backed up over Hite, over the ferry and into thirty miles of…”

Page 117, “Smith took a long and studious look at the east-northeast, above the humpback rock, straight toward that lovely bridge which rose, like an arc of silver, like a rainbow of steel, above Narrow Canyon and the temporarily plugged Colorado River.”

Page 330, “Or down in Arizona for the glorious finale to the campaign, the rupturing removal and obliteration of, of course, that Glen Canyon National Sewage Lagoon Dam. We never did get all together on that one. Smith wakes slowly, taking his time.”

In an introduction to the 1982 film, “The Cracking of Glen Canyon Damn”, Edward Abbey stood cliff-side, with the dam behind him. Gesturing toward the object of his derision he said, “I think we are morally justified to resort to whatever means are necessary to defend our land from destruction… invasion. I see this as an invasion. I feel no kinship with that fantastic structure over there. No sympathy with it whatsoever.”

The brief film chronicled the March 21, 1981 event that some called the birth of the radical environmental movement in America. In the film, members of the environmental group Earth First! unfurled a 300-foot tapered black sheet of plastic down the face of the dam, making it appear as if a gigantic crack had appeared in the structure.

To a small group of people who stood nearby, Edward Abbey made a speech from the back of a flatbed truck. “Surely no manmade structure in history has been hated so much by so many, for so long with such good reason as Glen Canyon Dam. Earth First! The domination of nature leads to the domination of human beings. And if opposition is not enough, we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert. The empire is striking back, so we must continue to strike back at the empire by whatever means available to us.

Win or lose, it is a matter of honor. Oppose, resist, subvert, delay until the empire itself begins to fall apart. And until that happens, enjoy… enjoy the great American West, what is left of it. Climb those mountains, run those rivers, hike those canyons, explore those forests, and share in the beauty of wilderness, friendship, love and common effort to save what we love. Do this and we will be strong and bold and happy. We will outlive our enemies, and as my good old grandmother used to say, we will live to piss on their graves. (Applause) Thank you.”

During Abbey’s speech, which he timed to coincide with the unfurling of the banner, National Park Rangers arrived at the scene. Despite their investigation, authorities were unable to identify the individuals responsible for the draping of Glen Canyon Dam. Looking somewhat puzzled at the gathering, rangers cited neither Edward Abbey nor anyone else in the crowd.

To read the first article in this series, click HERE.

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By James McGillis at 05:18 PM | Environment | Comments (0) | Link

Edward Abbey - The Bard of Moab, Utah - 2009

 

Edward Abbey - The Bard of Moab, Utah

As I first read author Edward Abbey's book, "Desert Solitaire - A Season in the Wilderness”, I loved both his writing style and his subject matter. In that book, his style was simple, direct and observational; yet personal, all at once. His subject was the old Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah.

 

With rye humor, he wrote about the animals, plants, hoodoos and summer tourists that populated the area around Devils Garden campground. It was there, as a mid 1950’s park ranger that Abbey lived for part of two seasons. His second season ended with a train trip home to the east coast that started at “Thompson” (Springs). Can one think of a more ignominious way to leave Canyonlands than at a railroad whistle-stop on a cold, rainy night?

 

That night, one Jeep with 4-wheels spinning, drove north of Moab on Valley City Road. With the heavy rain, mud flying from the wheels and the engine floored-out, the wipers swept across the windshield just fast enough to smear the red mud away. They were late to the station and flagging down a cross-country passenger train at Thompson was rare and dangerous. With no time to take the paved road, they continued northeast, their wheels barely touching the muddy ground.

 

The driver, squinting through the muddy glass, was sad to see his friend go. The other was heading east to a promised job and money. That need drove the man back home. At Arches, he had experienced the secrets of God’s creation. Later, he was to live in Oracle, Arizona. Between his birth and death, he liked to say that his life took him from Home to Oracle. Now he paid the stationmaster to stop the Zephyr and get him onboard.

 

Thompson Springs had no Fred Harvey restaurant or luxury hotel. It had one diner, one motel and one eternal wellspring of water, which accounts for half its name. Few passengers ever boarded a Union Pacific passenger train at Thompson Springs. The small stop was used mostly to ship cattle or Fruit to market. Situated half way between Green River, Utah and Grand Junction, Colorado, Thompson Springs could just as well have been half way to nowhere.

 

While the bearded man pressed five dollars into the stationmaster’s hand, the eastbound California Zephyr had already passed both sets of green lights. At that moment, no one on the train expected to stop at Thompson Springs.

 

With throttles wide open, the eastbound Zephyr pulled the grade on approach to the old station. The thrum of the engine and the glare of the headlight shot through the night sky. With a touch of W.C. Fields ringing in his voice, the stationmaster declared, “Sir, there is no time to waste. You are leaving here on that train”. As a powerful wavering light filled the depot, the stationmaster realized that the train was about to pass them by. With one hand he shoved the five dollars deep into his pocket, and with the other he threw a lever, activating the red lights on the station platform.

 

Seeing red, the engineer of the Zephyr had no choice but to shut down the throttles and actuate the air-brakes in full emergency mode. As massive brake shoes applied friction to each steel wheel, the engine of the aluminum-clad streamliner shot past the passenger platform. Grinding, creaking, and then shuddering, the engine came to a halt in a cottonwood grove beyond the station. “Peace at last, peace at last”, was all that the U.P. engineer managed to say. Luckily, the train was comprised of ten cars, so Abbey could board the last car, which by then stood creaking at the far end of the platform. 

 

As a town, Thompson Springs survives to this day for only one reason, which is water. As strange as it may seem, at Thompson Springs there is free flowing water in the desert. Even now, residents can pull up to the town's water dispensing station and fill truck-mounted water tanks as needed. "Be sure to shut off the valve when you are done", reads a nearby sign. First used to support cattle and sheep ranching, the springs later made a reliable water-stop for steam locomotives. As Abbey so eloquently decried in Desert Solitaire, the West was changing. When his train departed Thompson Springs that rainy, autumn night, its gleaming silver locomotive no longer required water-stops. The diesel-electric motors powering its drive-wheels made Thompson Springs obsolete.

 

In Edward Abbey’s early writings, a prescient reader may spot evidence of both his inconsistencies and his growing discontent. A serial monogamist, Abbey married often and spent money freely on such icons of consumption as a red 1975 Eldorado Cadillac convertible. Like the pamphleteers of our early union, Abbey used his wit and his pen to wage metaphorical war against despoilers of the desert he loved.

 

First published in 1968, Desert Solitaire elevated Edward Abbey to celebrity status, especially in Moab and the Spanish Valley. In 1974, drawing on his proceeds, Abbey bought a home at 2260 Spanish Valley Drive. There, he reputedly wrote his breakthrough novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. I use the word “reputedly”, but not to impugn or malign the memories of Abbey’s family, friends and neighbors. Publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang occurred in 1975. Is it reasonable to assume that Edward Abbey could write, then have edited and published his opus in one year’s time?

 

Thirty years after his death, if we were to poll current Moab residents regarding Edward Abbey’s legacy, half would love him and half would revile him. If Abbey were to return today, his spirit might align more closely with those who hate him than with those who love him. Abbey was never one to take himself too seriously. His style of self-deprecating humor compares well to Will Rogers or Mark Twain.

 

The Abbey House, as locals call it, is currently on the market for under $300,000. Although the house and grounds need some repair, the current owner has done what she can to maintain a mid-century home with style and grace. The day I visited Abbey's Shrine, there were candles lit upon the mantle. The grounds and outbuildings may look like a Tennessee Williams stage set transported to the desert, but then again, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure.

 

Whether new owners repair the house or tear it down, we hope that all future custodians of the property will conserve and retain its large stone fireplace. Local stone, chosen for its pattern, texture and color dominates the outdoor wall of the front entry. Inside, the opposite face of the same structure makes up the fireplace and living room wall. Hearkening back to a time when firewood heated most local homes, stone vents above the hearth circulate warm air into the room.

 

That hearth, as its heart, architecturally defines the Abbey House. If tomorrow, a tornado carried away every stick of the Abbey House, that stone fireplace would stand. Saving the heart of his former home would be monument enough to Edward Abbey, the iconoclastic author and onetime Bard of Moab.

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By James McGillis at 12:02 AM | | Comments (0) | Link

Navajo National Monument - Harmony With the Natural World - 2008

The Magic Gate - Part 5

Living in Harmony With the Natural World

 

Navajo National Monument

 

In Northeastern Arizona, fifty miles south of Kayenta, we stopped at the lightly visited Navajo National Monument.  Even today, with the lure of free camping, it rarely draws a crowd.  Leaving Highway 160 during our 1965 visit, we encountered a newly paved road covering the thirteen miles to the monument.  Like most National Park Service (NPS) roads of the era, the engineers designed it for minimum impact on its environment and for speeds of less than forty-five miles per hour.  Upon arrival at the monument, we found a new visitors’ center and a campground with about thirty spaces.  The older, more rustic campground remained unimproved.

 

Navajo National Monument is a misnomer, honoring the fact that early Anglo-American visitors associated its ruins with the Navajo Nation, within which its boundaries lie.  Craig Childs, in his 2007 book, House of Rain, identifies the area’s early occupants as the “Kayenta Anasazi”.  By 1300 CE, after only fifty years of occupation, the Kayenta Anasazi abandoned these, among the last of their alcove dwelling sites.  Thus, the monument’s Betatakin and Keet Seel ruins rank with Mesa Verde and Hovenweep as the last redoubts of a vanished culture.  The spring-fed, relict forests in the monument’s canyons attest to the relatively recent drying of a once abundant environment.

 

In 2008, I again visited Navajo National Monument.  While camped there, I reflected on Edward Abbey’s words about the place, as written in, Desert Solitaire.  At the time, Abbey decried what he identified as the destruction of primitive areas throughout the Southwest.  This he blamed on the U.S. Department of the Interior, which had opened many new areas to automotive visitation.  Here are his words:

 

“Navajo National Monument.  A small, fragile, hidden place containing two of the most beautiful cliff dwellings in the Southwest – Keet Seel and Betatakin.  This park will be difficult to protect under heavy visitation, and for years it was understood that it would be preserved in a primitive way so as to screen out those tourists unwilling to drive their cars over some twenty miles of dirt road.  No longer so: the road has been paved, the campground enlarged and modernized and the old magic destroyed.”

 

Times change, people change, but after his death in 1989 at age 62, Abbey's consciousness on earth evolved no further.  Abbey was both a naturalist and a sometimes naturist.  His gift was an ability to describe for his readers the natural wonders of America’s deserts and the Colorado River.  As a self-proclaimed anarchist, he waxed poetic in his fight with the federal government, which he saw as either disinterested or incapable of conserving those unique and unspoiled natural resources. 

 

Although his only documented anarchistic act was to pull up some road survey stakes at Arches, Edward Abbey often receives credit for inspiring such troglodytic and destructive groups as the Earth Liberation Front.  The counterculture energies of the 1960s coalesced around protest, as exemplified by the movement against the Vietnam War and “tree-spikers” in the Northern California Redwoods.  It was an age of “pushing against”, whose legacy is with us still.  Our “wars” on poverty, terror, drugs and teenage pregnancy are but a few examples of our vain attempts to fight against that which is intangible.

 

That morning, I sat quietly in the campground that Abbey decried as a modern abomination.  There, I opened a channel to Abbey’s non-physical consciousness.  Feeling that angst and anger at the time of his death may have trapped him in the near-earth realms, I asked his spirit to accompany me on a tour of the area.  Although there was no verbal or visual communication between us, I like to think that I allowed his spirit to see Navajo National Monument as I knew and loved it.

 

Bypassing the visitors’ center, we walked along the pathway towards the Betatakin (ledge house) Ruin, about a mile away.  In an attempt to protect these fragile alcove dwellings, the NPS placed its only Betatakin viewpoint on the rim of the canyon opposite the ruins.  If you visit, remember to take your field glasses.  Since Betatakin’s natural amphitheater amplifies sound energy, signs admonish visitors not to make loud noises.  As with the Walls of Jericho, a single loud noise could weaken or destroy this well-preserved pre-Puebloan settlement.

 

Returning on foot to Abbey’s despised campground, we found its thirty spaces artfully sited near the western edge of Sunset Mesa.  From its 7500-foot elevation, the terrain falls away gently for fifty miles, all the way to Lake Powell, Arizona.  The aptly named Sunset Campground provides among the longest views in the Four Corners.

 

Even today, the campsites accommodate rigs no longer than thirty feet, so the larger RVs must go elsewhere.  Tap water is available, but there is no store, public shower or RV sanitary dump.  During his two summers at the old Arches National Monument, Abbey lived in a thirty-foot house trailer.  I smiled in disbelief that his spirit might wish to deny others a brief but similar physical experience in this beautiful place.

 

Later, as I drove away from Navajo National Monument, I reflected on the term “arrested decay”, coined to describe preservation activities at Bodie, a ghost town in California.  By limiting direct access to these sites, the NPS has done what it can to arrest the decay of ruins at Navajo National Monument.  From its visitors’ center to the roads, trails and campground, the NPS seems to have listened to Edward Abbey’s spirit.  After its 1960s improvements, the monument has changed very little over the past forty-five years.

 

As I departed Navajo National Monument, I found myself in agreement with Abbey on one thing.  Despite its supposed ruination in his time, I hoped that this serene and beautiful place would enjoy its current state of arrested decay long into the future.  Thank you, Edward Abbey for the true spirit of your work

 

The Magic Gate

 

In 1965, after two weeks in the Four Corners, my father and I again crossed through the magic gate, represented by the Santa Fe Railroad grade crossing at Flagstaff.  From there, we retraced our route back to Los Angeles.  After returning home, I entered my senior year in high school, then on to college and work life.  For the next forty years, as did our old snapshots, memories of the Four Corners faded from my mind.

 

Each year since 2004, I have made it a point to travel and live for a time somewhere in the Four Corners.  While writing this personal history at my home, near Los Angeles, I could feel the Four Corners calling to me.  Three months from now, I shall pack my belongings and enter again through the magic gate to what some call Indian Country and others call the Four Corners.

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By James McGillis at 01:05 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link