[at-l] Coyotes: Edward Abbey passage

[janl2@mindspring.com (Jan Leitschuh)]

	Until the "Quote a Day" fires back up, I will leap into the breach with
this chunk from Ed Abbey's "Down the River."

	It addresses some issues I've had to resolve in the last year or so, hmmmm,
since that Jean Deeds book I read in January of 2001....
The pen is mighty indeed...

	Carpe Diem, you coyotes you. 
	You "yip, yap, yelp howl and holler"-ed, and this lap dog finally listened
with the heart - and heard, finally, really heard that "old-time call".


	"Down near Tucson, where I sometimes live... the suburban parts of the city
are infested with pet dogs. Every home owner these precincts believes that
he needs whatever burglar protection he can get; and he is correct. Most
evenings at twilight the wild coyotes come stealing in from the desert to
penetrate the suburbs, raid garbage cans, catch and eat a few cats, dogs and
other domesticated beasts.

	When this occurs, the dogs raise a grim clamor, roaring like maniacs, and
launch themselves in hot but tentative pursuit of the coyotes. The coyotes
retreat into the brush and cactus, where they stop, facing the town, to wait
and sit and laugh at the dogs.

	They yip, yap, yelp howl and holler, teasing the dogs, taunting them,
enticing them with old-time calls of the wild.

	And the dogs stand and tremble, shaking with indecision, furious, hating
themselves, tempted to join the coyotes, run off with them into the hills,
but - afraid. Afraid to give up the comfort, security and safety of their
housebound existence. Afraid of the unknown and thus, the dangerous.

	Thoreau was our suburban coyote. Town dwellers have always found him
exasperating.

He says:
	"I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops and
offices and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance
in a thousand remarkable ways... By a seeming fate, commonly called
necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures
which rust and moths will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.

	It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if
not before... I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous...
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity..."

Abbey, (arguing back):
	Oh come on now Henry, stop yapping at US. Go make love to a pine tree (all
of Nature being your bride). Lay off. Leave us alone.

	But he will not stop.

	"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation... a stereotyped but
unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and
amusements of mankind. There is no play in them."

	...Quiet desperation. The bite of the phrase comes from the unexpected,
incongruous juxtaposition of ordinarily antithetical words. The power of it
comes from our sense of illumination force - "a light which makes the
darkness visible." Henry's shocking pronouncement continues  to resonate in
our minds, with deeper reverberations, 130 years after he made it. 

	He allows for exceptions, indicating "the mass of men,"  not all men, but
as for the truth of his observation gallup poll can tell us; each must look
into his own heart and mind and then deny it if he can."

Edward Abbey
"Down the River"
1982 
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    	Jan Leitschuh Sporthorses Ltd.

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