Walking it Off, by Doug Peacock
By Allen M. Jones, New West Unfiltered 8-15-05
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It can’t be easy being Doug Peacock. A Vietnam vet diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (he served in the Green Berets as a medic), model for one of the more renowned characters in American fiction (Hayduke, from Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang), an iconic environmentalist to an entire generation of green activists, the psychic weight this guy has to shoulder every morning, it’s a wonder he can straighten up out of bed. He’s a thoughtful man, however, and a formidable writer, and his well-considered approaches to these often painful life-convolutions have given rise to two of the West’s most distinctive and poignant memoirs.
His first book, Grizzly Years, is an extraordinary account of the time spent in the wilderness after the war, of how he used his fascination with grizzlies as a way to move toward some measure of peace and reconciliation. It’s a moving, artful narrative, and has a continuing fan base loyal enough to fill college auditoriums. His newest book, Walking it Off, is a continuation of this same motif: His search for peace through his exploration of the wild places of the world. Ostensibly a series of linked travelogues (his bushwhackings take him from the mountains of Nepal to the “Grizzly Hilton� in Glacier Park to the petroglyphs of the Cabeza Prieta desert), the emotional heart and narrative center of the book is his friendship with Abbey. In a nutshell, Walking it Off is about how Peacock dealt with Abbey’s death, and by extension, the influence Abbey had on Peacock’s life.
Safe to say, few personalities have loomed so large in the modern West as Ed Abbey. Cantankerous and strong-willed, a man of enormous opinion and small patience, since his death, aspects of his life have been inflated to near-mythology. He could drink how much? Married how many times? There are cadres of the modern environmental movement (Earth First! chief among them), that have taken their charters directly from his writing and ideas. (While I’ve never personally cared for Abbey’s fiction, his memoir Desert Solitaire has to be listed as one of the essential environmental memoirs of this, or any other, age.) After his death, and per his request, he was illegally buried in a hidden desert location. Peacock chose the spot, and helped dig the grave. Peacock writes, “It was love of the wilderness – and the need to protect it – that had brought the two of us together twenty years before. We had become friends, shared jobs, camped out, and traveled together. Ed, who was fifteen years older, became a guide in my own life, though experience cut both ways. The wild was what we had in common.�
Despite the preoccupation with Abbey, the core of the memoir is Peacock’s own internal journey, an arc of self-awareness that nicely mirrors his exterior wanderings. But given Abbey’s significance in the environmental movement, it seems likely that most people will come to Walking it Off for insights into their friendship (of which, by the way, there are many). Indeed, its hard not to linger over Peacock’s description of the actual burial. A thoroughly private moment, and a brave gesture for Peacock to set it down on paper. “The lines between life and death had been blurred for me. I wasn’t sure the dead would stay dead...When no one was looking, I gently felt Ed’s nose through the body bag (just to make sure he was still there). That aquiline Abbey beak was there all right. He hadn’t gone anywhere.� But while Abbey’s death provides a narrative framework, the real subject of the book, and I think its final value, lies in the shaping of Peacock’s own sensibilities, his very unique and redeeming approach to the world at large. Upon seeing a mountain lion’s print in the desert, he writes, “The landscape suddenly grew wilder. It was no longer the recreational place behind the rocks just south of Moab, Utah; the land became what it always had been. It bristled with vitality, with the potency to heal. This was the sign I’d been stalking.�
Among Peacock’s many preoccupations (his treasured children, his shattered relationship with his wife, his rapport with a certain “black grizzly� in Glacier), what comes to stand foremost in Walking it Off are his twinned concerns for acts of human violence committed upon other humans (Vietnam), and acts of human violence committed upon the landscape, upon wilderness. By bouncing back and forth so consistently between these two themes, it’s impossible not to read parallels, unavoidable not to see a comment. In Vietnam, napalm and mortar shells were used to commit atrocity. In Peacock’s beloved wilderness, bulldozers and drilling rigs are the weapons of choice. “The rig was gone and the hole was capped, but part of the frame remained along with sections of pipe and used bits...Ed found a spanner and fit the big wrench around the cap and removed it. We dropped in a rock, then pieces of pipe and chain...I located a pile of used-up diamond drill bits. All this went down the hole. ‘Should take them a while to drill through all that junk,’ said Abbey. Then he grinned.�
Given the rough landscapes of Peacock’s personal history, it would be understandable to see him turn embittered, cynical. But the general tone of his writing is redemptive, perhaps even optimistic. “Back in Aravaipa, I had said to Abbey that I had no wisdom but I nevertheless believed it was our cruelty – the individual inhuman act – that keeps the freight of murder, genocide, and torture hurtling through the night. The converse is that the individual act of restraint, grace, and compassion, with its attendant affirmation of the value of an individual life, can begin a revolution.�
Walking it Off, with its gentle wisdom and furious urgency, is Peacock’s individual act, his moment of restraint, grace, and compassion. A beautiful and important book.
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