The Monkey Wrench Gang Read Online Free PDF

chanted, Hayduke’s morning mantra. Through the lonesome pines he saw an orb of plasmic hydrogen, too bright to face, come up suddenly over the wrinkled ridges of the Painted Desert. A cool flute music floated out of nowhere: the hermit thrush.
    Hit the road, George. Northward. He gassed up at his favorite gas station, the Sacred Mountain Trading Post, signed the petitions (Save Black Mesa; Stop the Strip Miners) and bought RED POWER THINK HOPI stickers for his bumpers, which he plastered over the former owner’s sloganeering:
    HAVE A NICE DAY SCHMUCK
    Down from the sacred mountain into the rosy dawn he rolled, into the basin of the Little Colorado River, the pastel pink and chocolate brown and umbrous buff of the Painted Desert. Land of the petrified log. Land of the glaucomous Indian. Land of handwoven vegetable-dyed rugs, sand-cast silver concho belts and overloaded welfare case loads. Land of the former dinosaur. Land of the modern dinosaur. Land of the power-line pylon marching league on league in lockstep like 120-foot outer-space monsters across the desert plains.
    Hayduke frowning as he opens the first official six-pack of the day (one and a half to Lee’s Ferry). He hadn’t remembered so many power lines. They stride across the horizon in multicolumn grandeur, looped together by the swoop and gleam of high-voltage cables charged with energy from Glen Canyon Dam, from the Navajo Power Plant, from the Four Corners and Shiprock plants, bound south and westward to the burgeoning Southwest and California. The blazing cities feed on the defenseless interior.
    Tossing his empty beer can out the window, Hayduke races north, through the Indian country. A blighted land, crisscrossed with new power lines, sky smudged with smoke from power plants, the mountains strip-mined, the range grazed to death, eroding away. Slum villages of cinder-block huts and tarpaper shacks line the highway—the tribe is spreading, fruitful as a culture bouillon: from 9500 in 1890 to 125,000 today. Fecundity! Prosperity! Sweet wine and suicide, of thee we sing.
    The real trouble with the goddamned Indians, reflected Hayduke, is that they are no better than the rest of us. The real trouble is that the Indians are just as stupid and greedy and cowardly and dull as us white folks.
    Thinking this, he opens his second beer. Gray Mountain Trading Post comes into view, tired Indians resting against the sunny side of the wall. A squaw in traditional velveteen blouse squats by the men, lifting her long and voluminous skirts to piss upon the dust. She is grinning, the men laughing.
    Approaching Grand Canyon Junction.
    Traffic obstructs his impatient advance. In front of him a little lady with blue hair peers through her steering wheel at the highway, her head barely showing above the dashboard. What’s she doing here? Little old man beside her. Indiana plates on their Oldsmobile. Mom and Pop out seeing the country. Driving at a safe and prudent 45 mph. Hayduke snarls. Move it, lady, or get it the fuck off the road. My God, makes you wonder how they ever got the thing backed out of the garage and pointed west.
    Junction Trading Post two miles ahead. Stopping there once for a beer, he’d overheard the manager confide to a clerk, as he showed him a handwoven Navajo blanket, “Paid forty dollars for this. Squaw was going to a Sing and wanted some money right away; we’ll sell it for two hundred and fifty.”
    The road still sank before him, descending into the valley of the Little Colorado River and the Painted Desert. From seven thousand feet at the summit of the pass to three thousand at the river. He glanced at the altimeter mounted on his dash. The instrument agreed. Here’s the turnoff to South Rim, Grand Canyon. Even now, in May, the tourist traffic seemed heavy: a steady stream of steel, glass, plastic and aluminum issued from the junction, most of it turning south toward Flagstaff but some turning the other way, north to Utah and Colorado.
    My way,