Whoa, almost a year, really??

I looked at the date on my last blog entry and realized that it's been almost a year since I last posted.  Admittedly, I've done relatively little on the Mesa Canals lately, though I rode in the Ride the Vortex Arizona MS Society 150 ride last weekend.  It was a good ride for me, with a metric century, then a 30-mile distance over the two days.  The event was marred by a fatality on Saturday, however.  I did not find out until Saturday evening, because I did not ride that part of the course, though I have ridden that road in previous years.  The Society did not put out specific information, so I won't either, though this has been reported in news outlets.

I've also been catching up on my reading during the last two weeks out of school.  I decided on a whim to re-read Ed Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang (MG); the introduction to the edition talked about it as one of the great social issue novels of the U.S., comparing it to Uncle Tom's Cabin (UTC) and The Jungle.  Having read UTC, I can now categorically state that MG is the better-written novel by far; many of the Southwestern wilderness descriptions are positively lyrical, and as I re-read it, I also notice the classic satiric construction--there are no heroes without serious flaws in this book, and it's the case that nothing changes for the better on this issue in the book, either.  Hmmm, too much like real life?

So, why did I resonate so much more with the book this time?  (This isn't to say that I didn't resonate with the book before, given my love of the wilderness.)  But this time I personally knew the landscape Abbey was describing, having backpacked, hiked, and explored the Arizona desert for 22 years now.  When I read it first, I was living in Michigan, and the environmental degradation issues were of a different order.  It's also hard to find Western-scale wilderness anywhere east of, say Kansas and Nebraska.

Plus, now, I'm old, tired, and jaded (a regular Doc Sarvis), so the satiric structure seemed more appropriate.