Billboard Series

The Monkey Wrench Gangby Edward Abbey, 1975, Excerpts

The Highway Patrol arrived promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an inexplicable billboard fire to a causally scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride to the pyre. Futile if gallant efforts. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating.

Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid – where a bright and silver caduceus glisters in the firelight – and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver.

“Next?” she [Abbzug] says.

Doc’s Friend – Hayduke

George Washington Hayduke, Vietnam, Special Forces, had a grudge. After two years in the jungle delivering Montagnard babies and dodging helicopters [for those boys up there fired their tumbling dumdums at thirty rounds per second at anything that moved: chickens, water buffalo, rice farmers, newspaper reporters, lost Americans, Green Beret medics – whatever breathed] and another year as a prisoner of the Vietcong, he returned to the American Southwest he had been remembering only to find it no longer what he remembered, no longer the clear and classical desert, the pellucid sky he roamed in dreams. Someone or something was changing things. A smudge of poisoned air overhung his homeland.

Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.

Introduction to 2000 Edition by Douglas Brinkley

The Monkey Wrench Gang is far more than just a controversial book – it is revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous. Although Abbey claimed it was just a work of fiction written to “entertain and amuse,” the novel was swiftly embraced by eco-activists frustrated with the timid approaches of mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society.

Earth First! Rankled the public and even other environmentalists from the start. The group announced itself in 1981 by unfurling a hundred-yard-long black plastic streamer to look like a deep crack down the face of Glen Canyon Dam – a scene taken straight from the opening pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang.