Free The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

spectacles may have made him look older than he really was. His nose, irregular, very large, cheerily refulgent, shone like a polished tomato under the bright white light of the desert sun. A stogie in his teeth. Well dressed, he looked like a professor. Blinking, he put on a straw hat, which helped, and came tramping up to the terminal door beside the woman. He towered over the girl at his side. Nevertheless everybody present, including the women, stared at the girl.
    No doubt about it. Under a wide-brimmed straw hat, wearinghuge black opaque sunglasses, she looked like Garbo. The old Garbo. Young Garbo.
    Smith’s girl friend greeted them. The big man took her hand, which vanished within the clasp of his enormous paw. But his grasp was precise, gentle and firm. The surgeon.
    “Right,” he said. “I’m Dr. Sarvis. This is Bonnie.” His voice seemed strangely soft, low, melancholy, issuing from so grand (or gross) an organism.
    “Miss Abbzug?”
    “Miz Abbzug.”
    “Call her Bonnie.”
    Into the truck, duffel bags and sleeping bags in back. They whipped out of Page past the thirteen churches of Jesus Row, through the official government slums and the construction workers’ trailer-house slums and out of town into the traditional pastoral slums of Navajoland. Sick horses loitered along the highway looking for something to eat: newspapers, Kleenex, beer cans, anything more or less degradable. The doctor talked with Seldom’s driver; Ms. Abbzug remained aloof and mostly silent.
    “What utterly ghastly country,” she said once. “Who lives here?”
    “The Indians,” Doc said.
    “It’s too good for them.”
    Down through Dynamite Notch to Bitter Springs to Marble Canyon and under the paranoid gargoyled battlements of the Jurassic Age to Lee’s Ferry, into the hot-muck green-willow smell of the river. The hot sun roared down through a sky blue as the Virgin’s cloak, emphasizing with its extravagant light the harsh perfection of the cliffs, the triumphant river, the preparations for a great voyage.
    A second round of introductions.
    “Dr. Sarvis, Miz Abbzug, Seldom Seen Smith….”
    “Pleased to meet you, sir; you too, ma’am. This here’s George Hayduke. Behind the bush. He’s gonna be number-two nigger this trip. Say something, George.”
    The bum behind the beard growled something unintelligible. Hecrunched an empty beer can in his hand, lobbed the wreckage toward a nearby garbage can, missed. Hayduke was now wearing ragged shorts and a leather hat. His eyes were red. He smelled of sweat, salt, mud, stale beer. Dr. Sarvis, erect and dignified, his beard smartly trimmed, regarded Hayduke with reservations. It was people like Hayduke who gave beards a bad name.
    Smith, looking at them all with his happy grin, seemed pleased with his crew and passengers. Especially with Miz Abbzug, at whom he tried hard not to stare. But she was something, she was something. Smith felt, down below, belowdecks, that faint but unmistakable itching and twitching of scrotal hair which is the sure praeludium to love. Venereal as a valentine, it could have no other meaning.
    About that time the remainder of the passenger list arrived by car: two secretaries from San Diego, old friends of Smith, repeaters, who had been with him on many river trips before. The party was complete. After a lunch of tinned snacks, cheese, crackers, beer and soda pop, they got under way. Still no regular assistant boatman; Hayduke had himself a job.
    Sullen and silent, he coiled the bow line in nautical trim, gave the boat a shove from shore and rolled on board. The boat floated into the current of the river. Three ten-man rubber rafts lashed snug together side by side, a triple rig, it made a ponderous and awkward-looking craft but just right for rocks and rapids. The passengers sat in the middle; Hayduke and Smith, as oarsmen, stood or sat on each side. Smith’s truck driver waved good-bye from shore, looking wistful. They would not see her again for