Suspicious Minds (Plunk!)

Tom Russell: Ballad of Edward Abbey

The road clung to
the spine of the ridge,
sidewinding in sinuous loops
toward the blue smokes
of Smoky Mountain
where deposits of coal,
ignited by lightning
some long-gone summer afternoon
a thousand—ten thousand?
--years before, smoldered
beneath the surface
of the mountain’s shoulders.
There seemed to be no pursuit.
But why should there be?
They hadn’t done
anything wrong.
So far they had done
everything right.

Down on the alkali flats
where only saltbush,
cholla and snakeweed grew,
they met a small herd
of baldface cows ambling
up to the higher country.
Beef on the hoof,
looking for trouble.
What Smith liked to call “slow elk,”
regarding them with satisfaction
as a reliable outdoor
meat supply in hard times.
How did they survive,
these wasteland cattle?
It was these cattle
which had created the wasteland.
Hayduke and Smith dallied
several times to get out
the old pliers and cut fence.

You can’t never go wrong
cuttin’ fence, Smith would say.
Especially sheep fence. (Clunk!)
But cow fence too. Any fence.
Who invented barbed wire anyhow? Hayduke asked.
(Plunk!) It was a man
named J. F. Glidden done it;
took out his patent
back in 1874.
An immediate success,
that barbwire.
Now the antelope die
by the thousands,
the bighorn sheep
perish by the hundreds
every winter
from Alberta
down to Arizona,
because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought.
And coyotes too, and golden eagles, and peasant soldiers
on the coils of concertina wire, victims of the same fat evil
the wide world over, hang dead on the barbed and tetanous steel.
You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence, repeated Smith, warming to his task.
(Pling!) Always cut fence. That’s the law west of the hundredth meridian.
East of that don’t matter none.
Back there it’s all lost anyhow. But west, cut fence. (Plang!)

--Edward Abbey
The Monkey Wrench Gang

ROCK-A-HULA-BABY ROCK, UTAH FLATS ROUTE
ELVIS SIGHTING BELOW CAPE SOLITUDE
JUST LIKE ELVIS REVISITED
ANOTHER TRAILSIDE ATTRACTION
THE FAKE CRACK IN GLEN CANYON DAMN
WATCH YOUR STEP