by Glynn Wilson

If readers are a writer's true companions, as Edward Abbey said of Henry David Thoreau, then perhaps I owe you, dear reader, another bit of writing today.

The explicit fact of the matter is, I don't owe you a damn thing. But I'm going to do it anyway. Because I can.

This thing called a blog started out as a form of online diary. I have a different view of how to use this new technology, although it is hard to escape the temptation to go personal at times, if not postal. People seem to like reading people's diaries. Maybe it is the hope that one might learn a secret.

Here's a secret. I hate to lecture, which is one of the reasons I do not teach anymore, almost as much as I hate being lectured to, especially via e-mail.

But sometimes there is no other way to get a point across in this traumatized world where the name of the game is explicitness. Irony doesn't work anymore, or at least it doesn't seem to.

Be comforted that at least for now, it is still possible in this world to pick up a book and go read it by a river.

I almost made it to the river today, but visited friends instead. One of them loaned me a book. Not a new book, but one I should have read before. Today is as good a time as any, and may be just the right time.

In Down The River, a series of essays by Abbey, a Western author, environmental journalist and self-described "agrarian anarchist," the ghost and writings of Thoreau are taken along on a trip down the Green River in Utah.

It seems like a trip well worth taking. I wish I were there now.

When I read a good book, it is hard to do it without a pencil in hand to mark the quotable parts. Otherwise, how would you go back and find them again when you write the review?

Here's a jewel from the preliminary notes.

"None of the essays in this book requires elucidation," Abbey says. It is a lie, but let him continue . . . "other than to say, as in everything I write, they are meant to serve as antidotes to despair. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry, and other bad habits."

I don't know if he stole that line or not, but it is one of those lines just about any writer would wish he or she had written.

Poetry indeed.

I will one day get around to writing more about the river, the Locust Fork that is, the river that will haunt me for the rest of my days like the Mississippi haunted Twain.

That is hard to explain in a sound byte. But for those of you who are new here, perhaps you have heard of a sprightly fellow from these parts by the name of Spider Martin? His photographs of the civil rights days are a testament to another time. I won't write his obituary here today.

But a few summers back, he and I spent a number of days running just about every run you can make on the Locust Fork in a 17-foot Kevlar canoe. We did it with two coolers in the boat, one full of food, the other full of beer.

If you ever got to know anything about him, you would have known that Spider didn't do anything the easy way.

So imagine being in the front of a canoe approaching white water and the river runs naturally to the left, but the guy steering the boat in the back takes you to the right. Looming ahead of you are several large, slippery rocks, and there appears to be only a sliver of an opening for a boat in the foaming water ahead, growing louder with every approaching foot.

It is one of those fear-gripped moments in nature when you suspect the earth is about to teach you a lesson in humility. I used to spend more time searching out these phenomena in nature than I do lately, although I need to get out there and do it more.

Have you ever experienced anything like this? Have you ever gone body surfing in the Gulf of Mexico and ridden a wave all the way into shore and been slammed like a little piece of flotsam on the beach? It is humbling. To do it right, you have to make sure the wave catches you exactly in your center of gravity at the waist. BLAM!

Or, have you ever gone water skiing and been ripped away from the rope and your skis by a wave, turned a flip in the air and landed on your face in the lake? Now that is humbling. It hurts good.

Photo by Kenny Walters

LocustFork.Net Editor and publisher Glynn Wilson atop Ruffner Mountain overlooking Birmingham, Ala.

Some of the original new journalists used to like to humble themselves on peyote. I've tried that too, and it works for a week or two. Then that old human ego just comes right back and makes you think the world is your oyster. It is not, but you can think that all you want to until you truly fuck up and cripple yourself for life.

The last time I ran the Locust Fork with Spider Martin and shared a salmon steak and a 12-pack with him on the mountain in Blount County, he chastised me to write a story about the river.

"You could write one hell of a story just about today," he said.

Of course he was right, but it wasn't what I was assigned to do, for a paycheck, at that time. I was doing research for a story about the nerve gas incinerator in Anniston, and as every journalist knows, it is hard to write a story for nothing when you spend your days writing stories for money.

Abbey is the master at the kind of story a writer might write for free in a diary. Only he managed to get paid for it. If he were alive today, he might be publising a blog. And chances are, his blog would have bashed Bush on a regular basis for his administration's routine rape of the environment.

What do I mean by the statement that Abbey is a master at telling that kind of a story?

Well, it's like this. While you are reading Down The River, Abbey makes it seem as if he were writing the story at the same time he is floating down the river. Even though you know he must have taken some notes on the trip and written the story up later on a typewriter, the story has a first person, present tense feel to it. He brings you along for the ride, so to speak.

I've written a few stories like that myself - when the editors have paid for them. But they've never given me the freedom to write something like this. Maybe there is a good reason for it besides the profit. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what that good reason could be.

The blogs are proving that people like to read stories like this. It's just that the corporate publishers have not yet figured out how to make enough money from them in a way that protects them from criticism, political retribution and libel suits.

They will. Give them time. They will steal the idea one day soon and ruin the entire enterprise, like we suspect the oil companies will do to "alternative energy" sources.

One more reason to like Abbey. He didn't like the energy companies either, and he didn't like being lectured to. He had this to say about science, which just about sums up my own views of the social sciences.

"The face of science as currently construed is a face that only a mathematician could love. The root meaning of 'science' is 'knowledge;' to see and to see truly, a qualitative, not merely a quantitative, understanding. . . . That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding."

Thoreau was aware of this tendency even in his time. It is an epidemic today, an epidemic that can only be cured by finding a writer whose talents include the ability to synthesize information and put it into a readable fashion. Sometimes we call that connecting the dots . . .