Abbey Edward - The red caddy: into the unknown with Edward Abbey

ALSO BY CHARLES BOWDEN

Killing the Hidden Waters (1977)

Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions of Big-City Life, with Lewis Kreinberg and Richard Younker (1981)

Blue Desert (1986)

Frog Mountain Blues, with Jack W. Dykinga (1987)

Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions, with Michael Binstein (1988)

Mezcal (1988)

Red Line (1989)

Desierto: Memories of the Future (1991)

The Sonoran Desert, with Jack W. Dykinga (1992)

The Secret Forest, with Jack W. Dykinga and Paul S. Martin (1993)

Seasons of the Coyote: The Legend and Lore of an American Icon, with Philip L. Harrison (1994)

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America (1995)

Chihuahua: Pictures From the Edge, with Virgil Hancock (1996)

Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, with Jack W. Dykinga (1996)

Jurez: The Laboratory of our Future, with Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano (1998)

Eugene Richards, with Eugene Richards (2001)

Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (2002)

Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground (2002)

A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (2005)

Inferno, with Michael P. Berman (2006)

Exodus/xodo, with Julin Cardona (2008)

Some of the Dead are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (2009)

Trinity, with Michael P. Berman (2009)

Murder City: Ciudad Jurez and the Global Economys New Killing Fields (2010)

Dreamland: The Way Out of Jurez, with Alice Leora Briggs (2010)

The Charles Bowden Reader (2010)

El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, Molly Molloy, co-editor (2011)

CHARLES BOWDEN

THE RED CADDY

Into the Unknown with

EDWARD ABBEY

Foreword by

LUIS ALBERTO URREA

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright 2018 by the Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust
Mary Martha Miles, Trustee

Foreword copyright 2018 by Luis Alberto Urrea

All rights reserved

First edition, 2018

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bowden, Charles, 19452014, author. | Urrea, Luis Alberto, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: The red caddy : into the unknown with Edward Abbey / Charles Bowden ; foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039368

ISBN 978-1-4773-1579-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1580-4 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1581-1 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Abbey, Edward, 19271989. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. | EnvironmentalistsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC PS3551.B2 Z595 2018 | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039368

doi:10.7560/315798

For the Lone Ranger who is still out there toiling away on the graveyard shift, and for all my fellow Tontos

The simple telescope, for instance, has given us visions of a world far greater, lovelier, more awesome and full of wonder than that contained in an entire shipload of magic mushrooms, LSD capsules, and yoga textbooks. But... that science in our time is the whore of industry and the slut of war, and that scientific technology has become the instrument of potential planetary slavery, the most powerful weapon ever placed in the hands of despots.

Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey

But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but desert. Nothing but the silent world. Thats why.

And no man sees. No woman hears. No one is there. Everything is there.

Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

... The desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same timeanother paradoxboth agonized and deeply still. Like death? Perhaps.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Right, he will yell, you got it. Hell pull her small body firmly to his side, steer back onto the pavement, press the pedal to the floor.

The big brute motor will grumble like a lion, old, tired, hesitating, then catch fire and roar, eight-hearted in its block of iron, driving onward, westward always, into the sun...

Edward Abbey, The Fools Progress: An Honest Novel

Foreword

The License Plate Said Hayduke: Chuck Bowden and the Red Cadillac

A Memory by Luis Alberto Urrea

I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.

Charles Bowden, Desierto

I

Love might not be the first thing that comes to mind when one considers the often angry, hard-bitten books Charles Bowden wrote. But love was what burned inside him, it seemed to me.

Those who knew him far better than I have told me this more than once. Even the ones who are still mad at him. Even Jim Harrison, after Bowden had left this earth.

I dont think he was claiming to be a moral person, in this quote. But I do believe he was trying his damnedest to live by a code. It just had to be a code of his own devising. I risked calling him my friend.

This is how the thing began.

Early in February of 1993, between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning, my phone rang. I was hiding out in San Diego after a doomed marriage had fallen apart behind me. And my first book had been on the shelves for less than a month. It was a nonfiction account of my previous life working with the disadvantaged people of my birthplace, Tijuana.

I scrambled for the receiver before the answering machine kicked in. The Voice, the voice his many friends and enemies and paramours would never forget, spoke.

Urrea? it said.

My first impression: the guy got the pronunciation right. My second impression: he was some crusty tough guy who sounded hungover. Some character out of a B. Traven novel.

Its Bowden.

Wait. What? As in Charles Bowden?

Yeah. Its Chuck.

I was immediately pacing the floor.

Where are you? he said.

I was trying to wake up enough to understand that Charles Bowden had tracked me down for some reason.

I started to tell him he was one of my prose heroes. Then I remembered to answer his question. San Diego, I said.

What the hell are you doing there?

I went into the marriage falling apart explanation.

He cut me off.

I know about those, he said. Where were you living before San Diego?

He said San Diego as if it hurt his soul.

Boulder, Colorado.

There was a long pause. I imagined him taking a drink, or taking a drag on a cigarette.

Jesus, he said, talk about a place that makes you want to commit suicide.

Bowden followed this comment with marching orders.

Where you need to live is in Tucson.

He said something about Boulder being an amusement park for rich people and that it had trucks gluing up picturesque claptrap all over town to make those people feel special.