The Monkey Wrench Gang Read Online Free PDF Page B

he thought, they’re going my way; they can’t do that. Gotta remove that bridge. Soon. Them bridges. Soon. All of them. Soon. They’re driving their tin cars into the holy land. They can’t do that; it ain’t legal. There’s a law against it. A higher law.
    Well you’re doing it too, he reminded himself. Yeah, but I’m on important business. Besides, I’m an elitist. Anyway, the road’s here now, might as well use it. I paid my taxes too; I’d be a fool to get out and walk and let all them other tourists blow their foul exhaust gases in my face, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t
I?
Yes I would. But if I wanted to walk—and I will when the time comes—why, I’d walk all the way from here to Hudson Bay and back. And will.
    Hayduke forged straight ahead at maximum cruising speed, inhigh range, hubs free, bearing steadily north-northwest past The Gap and Cedar Ridge (gaining altitude again) toward the Echo Cliffs, Shinumo Altar, Marble Canyon, the Vermilion Cliffs and the river. The Colorado.
The
river. Until, topping a long and final grade, he gained a view—at last—of the country he was headed for, the heartland of his heart, spread out before and beyond him exactly as he’d dreamed it all, for three years, lost in the jungle war.
    He proceeded almost cautiously (for him) down the long and winding grade toward the river, twenty miles by road and four thousand feet of descent. Had to live at least one more hour. Marble Canyon gaped below, a black crevasse like an earthquake’s yawn zigzagging across the dun-colored desert. The Echo Cliffs ranged northeastward toward a dark notch in the sandstone monolith where the Colorado rolled out from the depths of the plateau. North and west of the notch rose the Paria Plateau, little known, where nobody lives, and the thirty-mile-long Vermilion Cliffs.
    Hayduke, rejoicing, scarfing up more beer, concluding his Flagstaff six-pack, wheels down to the river on the narrow road at a safe and sane 70 per, bellowing some incoherent song into the face of the wind. He was indeed a menace to other drivers but justified himself in this way: If you don’t drink, don’t drive. If you drink, drive like hell. Why? Because freedom, not safety, is the highest good. Because the public roads should be wide open to all—children on tricycles, little old ladies in Eisenhower Plymouths, homicidal lesbians driving forty-ton Mack tractor-trailers. Let us have
no
favorites, no licenses, no goddamn rules for the road. Let every freeway be a free-for-all.
    Happy as a pig in shit, that’s Hayduke coming home. Hairpin curves at the bridge approach: SLOW: 15 MPH . Tires squealing like cats in rut, he hangs a four-wheel drift around the first curve. Another. Scream of rubber, stink of hot brake drums. The bridge appears. He brakes hard, gearing down, doing the heel-and-toe dance on brake, clutch, gas pedal.
    NO STOPPING ON BRIDGE , the sign says. He stops in the middle of the bridge. Shuts off engine. Listens for a moment to the silence, to the sigh from four hundred feet below of the rolling river.
    Hayduke climbs out of the jeep, walks to the rail of the bridge and peers down. The Colorado, third longest river in America, murmurs past its sandy shores, swirls around fallen rocks, streams seaward under the limestone walls of Marble Canyon. Upstream, beyond the bend, lies the site of Lee’s Ferry, rendered obsolete by the bridge on which Hayduke stands. Downstream, fifty miles away by water, is the river entrance to the Grand Canyon. On his left, north and west, the Vermilion Cliffs shine pink as watermelon in the light of the setting sun, headland after headland of perpendicular sandstone; each rock profile wears a mysterious, solemn, inhuman nobility.
    The bladder aches. The highway is silent and deserted. Maybe the world has already ended. Time to tap a kidney, release that beverage. Hayduke unzips and sends a four-hundred-foot arc of filtered Schlitz pouring down through space to the master stream