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Outposts of Eden: A Curmudgeon at Large in the American West

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Let us join Dr. Stegner as he escorts a group of California college kids
on a river-trip in the Four Corners country of Utah. They arrive at the
put-in:

Magnificent, towering walls, sandy beaches, hot sun and smooth
rock, cottonwoods - the San Juan is distinctly a mellow experience.

"Except that we've got a problem," Bud says, coming out of the
campfire light where he has been overseeing the preparation of supper.
"We've got five vegetarians aboard. They're caucusing right now about
what they delicately describe as the 'nutritional inadequacy' of our
commissary. They want to go into Blanding and buy tofu."

"Tofu! Blanding is thirty miles... and they're not going to find
tofu in Blanding. Tofu?"

Prof. Stegner urges cool heads and common sense, but an angry
spokeswoman steps forward:

She is one of the smokers on the trip - she and a frail asthmatic
kid everyone calls "F*ckin'-A Fred". Chanterelle looks a lot like the
mushroom she is named after: flat-headed and short-necked, shoulders
like a nose tackle, no waist, no hips, no glutes. All stem from the
armpits down. "What kind of beans are they?", she says, letting me
know by her inflection that I am about to learn something.

Chanterelle produces the empty #10 can and holds it up for
inspection. "Have you read the label? Ranch beans! " she intones.
"Cooked in pork by-products!"

Great God. Skewered. I can only shrug, walk away, hope
everyone recognises a Mexican standoff. Badges? We don't need no
stinking badges. Anyway, this is Professor Pshaw's problem, not mine.
"Where is Pshaw?" I ask Bud. "In our hour of travail."

"At the Recapture Lodge in Bluff."

"Doing what?"

"Lodging. He said he's slept on the ground before."

* * *

Next are three tales from Prof. Stegner's carefree hippie youth, tales that
are

...my tribute to those earlier days when it was still possible to
entertain the illusion of rugged independence... None of the names
have been changed to protect the guileless, chuckle-headed innocents
who participated in the search for a free lunch in Eden (down, Fang),
and none of the details have been embellished - much...

We had a little meeting, drank a little whiskey, and formed the As
Is Cattleman's Association of Santa Cruz County. Two middle-aged
writers, a professor of American Literature, and a mick mathematician...

We met at the ranch for what our jester, Forrest Robinson, keeps
referring to as "the roundup". "Man, I'm telling you," Robinson says,
"If five men and two boys can't catch one lousy calf before it's time
for the champagne brunch, then we ought to hang up our spurs."

Yes, patient reader, we have heard that line before. I am going to
spare you the details of the chase, the forty man-hour/sixteen boy-hour
chase, up and down the mountainsides of coastal California, over fences,
thru tangled brush and swollen creek, thru the gumbo mud of hillside
winter pasture...

The rest of the book's pretty good too. Ed Abbey liked it, and so will you:

At a time when most of our so-called nature writers have become
a bleating flock of timid temporizing equivocating castrated fence-
straddling high-minded low-bellied wide-assed gutless spineless vapid
tepid insipid poetical rhapsodical cosmical moral banana slugs, it is a
shocking pleasure to encounter a real book written by a real writer.

Review copyright ©1996 Peter D. Tillman