Abbey's ghost explains why we're in Arizona - in summer

It's hot, really hot, and we are whining, really whining, about the heat. We need the great Edward Abbey to set us straight.

So I interviewed him, paying no heed to the small fact that Abbey is dead.

We need him. I called on him. He answered.

Like all great writers, Abbey lives on in his work, in classics like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, and in his many other books and essays. I found the answers to all of my questions in passages from his many titles on my bookshelf.

ME: On sweltering weeks like this people ask themselves why they live in Arizona?

ABBEY: What draws us to the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

ME: And that's enough to keep us in a place with blistering summer heat, a place that eventually won't have enough water?

ABBEY: There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals. ... There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

ME: Like, for instance, Phoenix?

ABBEY: An oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

ME: So, you're not fond of Phoenix, or maybe cities in general. In that case, what would you say to outsiders in order to keep them from relocating here?

ABBEY: In Arizona, the trees have thorns and the bushes spines and the swimming pools are infested with loan sharks, automobile dealers and Mafiosi. The water table is falling, and during a heavy wind, you can see sand dunes form on Central Avenue in Phoenix. We have the most gorgeous sunsets in the Western world -- when the copper smelters are shut down. I am describing the place I love. Arizona is my natural native home. Nobody in his right mind would want to live here.

ME: And yet people keep coming and our politicians promote more and more growth.

ABBEY: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

ME: And what about our crazy politics? What can be done about that?

ABBEY: Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

ME: On hot summer days what's wrong with ignoring the beautiful desert and hiding like refugees in our air-conditioned buildings and cars?

ABBEY: We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

ME: Still, a place like this couldn't exist without buildings and freeways and dams, the kinds of things that the anarchists in The Monkey Wrench Gang wanted to destroy.

ABBEY: Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?

ME: But doesn't a sprawling city filled with new industry stand for progress?

ABBEY: If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

ME: I get that. But it's summer. How does a person appreciate the desert in the summer?

ABBEY: The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom. ... The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable...