Seems like everybody that knew Edward Abbey has put pen to paper at least once to etch their memories into stone. My crazy road trip with Ed Abbey, my wild night with Ed Abbey, drinking, smoking, never thinking about tomorrow, with Ed Abbey. Having known Ed personally confers a kind of legitimacy that the author might or might not otherwise possess, a kind of western moral high ground.

I'd love to earn some of that cachet myself. It would justify my unleashing any number of pessimistic Luddite diatribes about how the west is going to hell in a handbasket. I'd also like to tell you that I had a homosexual affair with Ed Abbey, but alas, I never knew Ed Abbey.

I did, however, know Eustace Clemens. We called him "Sam", in honor of his Twain-like storytelling frenzies around the campfire. Sam knew Ed Abbey.

"Of course I knew old Cactus Juice," he drawled, flickering firelight reflecting in a mad gleam from his beer red eyes. "My God, Abbey was an ornery son-of-a-bitch. But we had good times, him and me, mostly out in the desert middle-of-nowhere scratchin' our scrawny asses on the nearest cactus. You know, of course, that he had written some books……"

I nodded as Sam continued, "though I never read any of them. They even made a movie out of one of those books, some courageous cowboy thing. My name for ol' Cactus Juice was Professor Sagebrush Gonzo. He always struck me as a desert version of that Fear & Loathing Hell's Angels guy. Ed's wild and crazy nights were fueled by beer and seegars, though, not drugs and that there LSD stuff. That's when he'd wink and tell me, 'Sam, beer's a drug, too, and I think I'll have another one!'"

Eustace raised his bomber of Tooth Sheaf's Stout, examined the label for a curious moment and then tipped his chin, chug-a-lugging the foamy brown liquid down to the dregs. He tossed the empty bottle aside and extracted another from the cooler. He let out the long satisfied sigh of a tired, dusty cowpoke watered by cool clear beer. "I ever tell you about the time Abbey and I high-tailed it to Vegas?"

"Never heard that one, Sam," I said, popping the top on one of Eustace's cold Silver Bullets.

"Well, I'll tell you," said he, "Ed came up from Coyote Breath, Arizona, driving one of them beat to hell pickup trucks he loved so much. At the time, I was squatting in an ol' miner's shack within spittin' distance of Charlie Steen's great discovery. I could hear that damn Ford wheezing and groaning miles away. After a few lukewarm beers leaning on the steaming hood of that truck, we decided to have ourselves a good ol' time down in Moab and go curse the paved road into Arches.

We drank quite a few, as you can imagine," he continued, eyebrow twitching, eyes all a-twinkle downing another slug of stout, "and by closin' time we was three sheets to the wind. 'Allright,' declares Ed, 'let's get on up the road and put the curse to that blasted pavement.' We turned at the Arches road, set the park gate aside and hauled it up the incline. We pulled off the side of the road right by that giant rock that looks like Paul Bunyan's penis and aired our own, relieving ourselves quite innocently by the roadside while the truck sputtered on idle.

Well, what do you think happens next? It's the wee hours of the mornin' and outta nowhere, up from the Devils Garden and over the hill from Balanced Rock, comes a park ranger police car with lights a-spinnin' and flashin' and siren wailing. He pulls up right next to us and announces from his car-seat with full-on squealing bullhorn feedback, 'Hold it right there, you two, you're not goin' anywhere.'

Ed and I took one look at each other, zipped up our collective pants and dove into the truck. We took off like a shot. Ed muttered something about the long arm of John Law wasn't about to catch him pissin' in the wind after midnight and he drove that shimmying, shaking truck like a bat outta hell. But still, it was one of God's own beaters. We got lucky. With all the shimmying and shaking going on, the back gate fell open and a pile of junk fell out onto the road. Comin' down the grade to the highway, the park ranger cop-car stopped dead behind us with two flat tires. 'Whatcha been keepin' in the flatbed, Ed?" I asked.

'Oh, just a bunch of old junk. Might be some coffee cans full of rusty nails, I s'pose.' He flashed me that broad wicked coyote-breath grin of his and just kept a-drivin'. We pulled off the road at dawn and bumped and rattled our way into the pygmy forest away from the highway. The dawn was one of them Utah spectaculars, every color of the rainbow sweepin' 'cross the sky, full moon setting in the west and a light breeze whisperin' through the sweet smellin' sage. We laid down to sleep on the sand; all of Ed's camping gear lost on the Arches incline. The fresh air must have done us good, 'cause we didn't appear to have no hangovers at all when we woke up that afternoon.

'How much cash you packin', Sam?,' he asked me.

'I got a few bucks," says I.

'All-right, then, let's go to Vegas,' says Ed.

'Vegas? You're not exactly the Vegas type, Ed. What the hell you want in Vegas?' He winked and said, 'I know a few gals that might just want to get lucky, Sam!' That was all I needed to hear. We drove through the night and arrived beneath Fremont Street's glowing neon round about midnight.

Ed had me worked up into a fever by this time. You can imagine how many ladies I was seeing out at the old miner's shack near the Big Indian. Ed painted a picture of these sweet little Mormon gals from Squirrelbush, Utah, that done come up to Vegas and embraced the high life. They met him at some book readin' in Flag and they think he's some kind of famous cowboy poet. They've invited him to Vegas for a good time even though they know he hates the place and would take Del Webb swimmin' in Lake Mead with cement overshoes if he had half the chance. Danette, Daniela and Danny Sue are all waiting tables in the Golden Clodhopper Casino. 'I'm tellin' ya, Sam, they can't wait to see us", he says.

No sooner do we pull up to the Clodhopper when that jalopy truck backfires twice and clouds of thick oily smoke belch like Old Faithful from both ends. Ed chuckles, 'Well, Sam, it only cost me thirty-five bucks and I wrote a bad check for it anyway. It's yours if you want it.' He hitches up his filthy jeans and walks into the casino and that was the last time I ever saw the dad-gummed bastard."

"You mean you never saw him again? What happened?"

"I'll be dad-blamed if I know. I looked all over for him, but never found him nor those girls he was going on about. I tried to track him down some years later, but the trailer at Coyote Breath had been shot up and tipped over. Then I started hearin' 'bout how he was some sort of environmental hero and I figured he didn't want nuthin' to do with his old pal, Eustace Sam."

"But Sam," I said, handing him a fresh stout, "what the hell! That doesn't sound like Ed Abbey to me. He wouldn't turn his back on an old drinking buddy, would he? You never hooked up with Ed after that? What did you do with the truck?"

Sam pawed in the sand with his feet, turned to gaze at the starry starry night above, hawked up a huge loogie and spit it right into the campfire. "That dad-gummed truck was as ornery as old Cactus Juice himself. I took my last five dollars and had it towed to a shop where they said it needed a new engine. Well, the hell with that."Sam took another solid slug from the fresh stout and pointed a shaky grizzled digit at me. "I'll tell you straight, buddy, I did see Ed Abbey one more time after that. I went to see Mister Professor Sagebrush Gonzo readin' from one of his high-toned intellectual books at Salt Lake and he didn't even remember me. Musta had his brain re-wired by too much beer and seegars. I just gave up on him after that."

"Good Lord, Sam," I says, "that's a sad tale. You got any more beer in the cooler?"

It's been some years since I sat around the campfire trying to make sense of Eustace's stories. Some of them I figure are as true and on the level as a good home's foundation. But then, there are the others. They're all a little wiggly, recalled out of a dusty haze of beer fueled shenanigans. But I never questioned Sam's veracity. To me, he was the old West, my last connection to a world slipping away slowly and surely.

Sam was the freedom of the open road, the promise of two-lane highway hitting the horizon, the crisp tang of sagebrush mornings in the middle of absolute nowhere, the dusty quiet of sleepy hot slick-rock afternoons and the silence of a million stars shining over the Colorado plateau. Yes indeed, I knew Eustace Clemens. He was no Ed Abbey, but that didn't matter to me. Eustace was all I ever needed.