The Toxic Cactus

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. RosettaBooks, 2011, $13.99 paper.

Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness by Doug Peacock. Holt Paperbacks, 1996, $12.43 paper

I START WITH the death, when he was most vulnerable.

One day in 1989, outside Tucson, Edward Abbey sat up in his hospital bed, where he’d lain for four days vomiting blood, and pulled the tubes and needles out of his arms while saying it was time to go back to the desert. Three friends and his fifth wife snuck him out and into a truck, which left pavement and rolled over bajadas plains studded with ocotillo, creosote, and saguaro. The four living and one dying spent the night around a robust fire, Abbey in a camp chair, then in a sleeping bag. The sun rose, the sand and boulders firing as if in a kiln. Abbey’s death wish spread before him. But his body rebounded, so his loved ones carted him to his house, where he finally expired. Without phoning any authorities or obtaining a death certificate or autopsy, the friends wheeled him back to the desert. They drove off-road through washes, heading west with the sun low. One friend called the funeral a planting. Abbey wrote, “I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus.” Abbey lay in his sleeping bag, hugged by the ground, desert sky above, vultures (Abbey’s favorite bird) swarming overhead. Mountains rose in the