Walking It Off, Doug Peacock

This is a personal journey by the man who had a father-son relationship with the recalcitrant grump named Ed Abbey, one of the most important environmental authors of the late 20^th century.  Doug was flawed by his service as a green beret medic in Vietnam and the travesty of death and destruction that our men were forced to participate in.  He was torn apart by the killing and the death that were daily rituals in nam and the frustration of not having a real reason or purpose for being there.

Doug returned with post war stress syndrome before they officially declared it a syndrome.  In Ed Abbey he found someone who he could listen to and argue with.  Their relationship was rocky and feisty, as befits these two wilderness warriors.  Ed came from the East and became a western person, but not a westerner.  He never resented the protected areas of the West, he understood that these were never taken from the westerner, rather the western pioneers and their descendants took what they had from others and from wildness.

Ed and Doug walked the wildness and Doug found the solace that comes to many who wander in the wilds.  He redefined death through the death of Abbey, the wild grizzly’s that he observed, and the risk he took in places remote and dangerous.  It gave meaning to death in a way that was opposite of the senseless killing in nam.

Doug buried Ed, his father figure, in a remote and illegal grave in the wilds of the SW.  It was a pilgrimage and his last gift to this crusty old ecowarrior who so deeply felt the wounds that we inflict on the planet.  This book chronicles the burial, the war memories, the near death experience in Nepal, time with the grizzly’s and hikes through the desert (even through active military bombing areas) and it allows us to see how Doug pieced together his own soul while suffering divorce, loss of friends, and loss of land. 

It is not great literature, but it is compelling reading.