Searching for Eernie Flack - Words Arrangedaranagulchpress.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/7/8/26785631/... · 2018. 6. 4. · our next objective: the underpass. The only underpass in Abbey's

Searching for Ernie Flack

by Michael A. LewisJanuary, 2001

In 1957, Ed Abbey wrote a story titled, "Underground in Amerigo," about a shortepisode in his life in early 1950s Albuquerque. The story was later reprinted in "InsideOutside Southwest" magazine, a copy of which was sent to us by Amy from theAbbeyweb.

As Jean and I read the story, we noticed that several of the details rang true with ourgrowing knowledge of Albuquerque and the surrounding area. Is this perhaps a truestory, or at least as true as any of Abbey's "non-fiction?" Over the next few days wediscussed the possibilities of following the story on the streets of Duke City to see if wecould find some of the scenes described. The impending arrival of Tim and Tammy,fellow denizens of HaydukeLives and the Abbeyweb crystallized this nascent projectinto the Edward Abbey Scavenger Hunt, aka Searching for Ernie Flack.

To follow our quest, you'll want to read "Underground in Amerigo," published in theMarch/April 1999 edition of "Inside Outside Southwest" magazine. If you don't happento have a copy lying about, email me for a copy of the story, purely for literary andeducational discussion purposes, of course.

Tim and Tammy arrived at a sane and sensible hour on Saturday morning, that is afternine and before noon. After the requisite greetings and hugs, we all piled into the redFord F150 4X4 extended cab pickup truck that temporarily served as our overlyconsumerist transportation and headed off across town in search of the beginning of ourodyssey: Ed's "favorite junkyard" where the wind "was screaming down First Street."

First Street these days is a bit more complicated than it was fifty years ago. Decades ofnew construction downtown have chopped the street into fragments and the constructionof I-25 pinched much of it off into 2nd Street many years ago. Undaunted, we woundour way through canyons of steel and glass surrounding rivers of asphalt, finallyintersecting First Street where it progressed, arrowlike, northward in a reasonablefacsimile of its mid-century self.

Searching for Eernie Flack file:///Users/Hayduke2000/Web Pages/Amerigo/amerigof/amerigo.html

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Although we didn't locate ajunkyard with a "tangled contataof rust and iron and old boilersand smashed Chevvies and wireand rails and schoolbuses andbroken derricks and ancientsteam shovels and trolly cars,"we did locate severalaccumulations of industrialdetritus, one of which seemedsufficiently symphonic in itsaerial extent, entropiccomplexity and chronologicalvariability as to have been inplace in Abbey's time. We piledout for the celebratoryphotographs, the lack ofauthentic screaming winds andblowing newspapersnotwithstanding, regained ourDetroit steed and turned towardour next objective: theunderpass.

The only underpass in Abbey's time was the elevated Santa Fe railroad crossing overCentral Avenue at Union Square, just west of downtown. Ed's description of "a diesellocomotive dragging a tube full of FBI agents" confirmed the identification at the sametime it begged the question, "tube full of FBI agents?" What could this mean?

We soldiered on, confident that this mystery would soon fall to the unerringconcentration of the four intrepid investigators. We turned left onto Central Avenue,drove past the Albuquerque Community Hospital, now a mental health institute, but inits time, the natal site of Ed Abbey's first born. We dove under the relief-giving metalstructure of the railroad underpass, noting in passing a large dent left by someunfortunate truck driver with a tall load.

Climbing back into the January sun, wecame at last to Pine Street, turning southoff the automotive cacophony of CentralAvenue, into a forest of botanicallyinspired side streets. The alleyways hereparallel Central, but we chose the pavedroad instead, the road more traveled,eschewing the literary authenticity offrantic cats and tumbled garbage cans.We arrived at the door of 213 Pine Streetwithin two blocks, pulling up in front ofa modest single story Adobe Revival


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home complete with cement stepsheading down into a basement apartmentand a large fenced parking area in back,suitable for "a Ford sedan" and "severalother cars about."

We had arrived at the scene of theinfamous party, the pretty and intelligentgirl, the wine and the sandwich, thebunch of violets and the almost deflatedtires. The building was somewhat theworse for fifty years of student wear,under destruction or reconstruction, itsbasement door that Abbey entered andexited covered with a large, weatheredand roughly hewn sheet of quarter inchplywood. A glance through the filmybasement windows confirmed that theunderstory at least was empty. A workingman came out the front upstairs door,eyed our assembled multitude with somesuspicion and tentatively confirmed thatyes, the house was being remodeled.Unimpressed by our story of a literaryquest, he set about his tasks as weassembled for more photos, more glancesat this the house that Abbey had brieflyfrequented, more thoughts of what it waslike when I was a wee lad of less than tenyears old.

As we turned back onto Central,thirst and hunger turned ourattention to more Earthly pursuits.We sailed down Route 66 inautomotive effulgence, amidst theArt Deco excess of head shops,skateboard emporiums, theconsumer consortia of a modernuniversity town, past the FrontierRestaurant and its neighboringimitation, plastic simulacra of latterday fast food establishments, intothe restored 50s, Route 66 revival ofneo-Hippy nostalgia. O'Neill's Pubseemed a likely watering hole forour Abbey Scavenger Hunt, and


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despite the disappointment oflearning that it was less than fiveyears in this auspicious location, weordered our beers, wines and amodest repast to fortify ourcontinuing exploration.

Libations and comestibles consumed, wemade our way back to the truck, past thecostume shop with a fully Hippy-decorated "All You Need Is Love"1966Volkswagen bus in the display window,complete with overstuffed replicas of theFab Four: too recent for the tenor of ourpresent quest. We drove onward towardthe semi-setting sun, westward downRoute 66, re-enacting the People'sPilgrimage, the flight of Abbey andFlack, away from the Pine Street party, insearch of Ernie Flack.

The "new four lane bridge across the river" has become a newer six-lane bridge, there toease the weary burden of the motoring commuter journeying to the burbs after a hardday's travail in the city, back home to the wife and kids, if any.

The astute reader may have anticipated our upcoming plight: the dirt roads of Abbey'sday, the more than adequate equine and automotive paths across the red sandy soil ofWest mesa and its sedimentary aprons bordering the Rio Grande, have been replacedover the years, and in fact multiplied to excess, by the far less interesting but ultimatelymore durable macadam pavement of a civil engineers' delight. There are many roads tothe north off Central Avenue; which one to take became a dilemma never adequatelysolved: we turned north at the earliest opportunity.

Our ribbonof asphalttook us tothe top ofWest Mesaabove theriver'sedge,whichremainedout of sitebehind anencirclingcrenellation


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of modernhouses. Welooped andspiraledvaguelynorthward,looking fora route thatwould takeus "aboutthree milesnorth of thecity." Themoon hungin the west,half fulland pale,rather morethan an icyfragment,as wefollowedeverdiminishingurbanstreets insearch of"one of thestony littlehills on thewest."

Inevitably, our path crossed that of Coors Boulevard, a modern, industrialized, six-lane,yellow-striped, urban thoroughfare, complete with all the conveniences and necessitiesof 21st century motorized transportation: McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, LottaBurger, WalMart, K-Mart, Cosco, Texaco, Exxon, Conoco; all the finer things of life.Eventually, the capitalist fervor petered out, as the road curved gently easterly, closer tothe sibilant suck of muddy waters heading south, constrained, confined and convolutedby the arching branches and winter-bare twigs of the cottonwood bosque.


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About where I expected, based on arough cartographic calculation estimatingthree miles north of Abbey's diminutiveDuke City, the unending expanse ofurban development... ended. Ordiminished at least in number anddensity, if not in extravagance. There,marching off to the north, stood a row of"stony little hill(s) on the west," each aremnant of geologic history, now largelyengulfed by very ungeologic humandevelopment, but standing bravelynonetheless, facing the river and theSandias beyond as they had done foruntold millennia. Unfortunately, none ofthem sported a "juniper crouching inforelorn isolation on the summit of thehill." Our task became more complicated.

Picking the likeliest, or at least, the least unlikely of the hills in the nearest vicinity, Ishifted our trusty red steed into compound supermacho, left the civilized safety of thepaved highway and ground uphill across the shifting sands of distant memory to the top,the pinnacle, the denouement of this bump of Pleistocene stratigraphy overlooking theriver plain. No juniper stump in sight, no poignant remnant of a hand carved cross, nopathetic depression in sand and gravel. Only cheat grass, opuntia, and snakeweed tohold the restless sands temporarily in place. Take a picture, climb back on board, retraceour tired furrows to the bottom, the road, the quest.

Wait a minute, not ready to give upyet, this hill looks promising, is thata stump up there? We parked acrossthe street from a broodingcondominimum, picked our waycarefully among the discardeddetritus of urban despair, made ourway to the clean sands of thehillside, to the top. No juniper stumpat the summit, but an interesting andsuggestive cloister of mesquite andbunch grass, oddly disturbed. Andthere at the bottom, a dirt road,winding provocatively between thebottom of the hill and the riverbeyond, suggesting the tantalizingpossibility of hearing "the oily surgeof the river sliding past themudbanks." Jean ran over the crest


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of the hill, down the north facingslope, scaring up a lone jackrabbit asthe sole representative of non-human participation in the day'sfestivities, and her shout brought uswithin sight, to see her holding up aweathered stump of, could it be? Yesit was... a juniper stump!

We declared this modicum of physical evidence as sufficient to mark at the least thepossibility of the completion of our quest, the "discovery" of the final resting place ofErnie Flack, if he ever was real at all, if he had ever lived and died, he might as wellhave been buried here, or some here very much like this one.

Tocelebrateoursuccess,we drovefurtherwest andnorth tothePetroglyphNationalMonument(Hours 8-5daily),paid ourextortedusury andparked atthe base ofa loomingcliff faceoffracturedandtumbledbasalt,whereuponhumans ofreddishhue had inages pastcarvedtheir


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culturallyacceptablegraffiti. Allit took wasone quickscrambleto the topand backtoconvinceus thateven in thedesert ofeasternNewMexicowinter wasa real andpresentseason.

Not to be denied our celebratory mood, we adjourned to a local eating establishmentfeaturing cold margaritas and hot chiles and congratulated each other on the success ofour weekend exploits.

But what about the tube of FBI agents?

While Timand Tammypluggedthemselvesinto theelectronicether andreconnectedto thedemands ofthecyberworld, Iwent to myshelves ofanaloginformationsources andbrowsedthroughEpitaph for a


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DesertAnarchist, byJamesBishop, Jr.Therein Ilearned thaton his returnfromScotland andthe continent,Ed Abbeydiscoveredthat he hadbeen thespecialsubject ofinvestigationby J. EdgarHoover andhis band ofmerry agents,intent onuprootingsubversives,communistsand otherdetractors ofthe patrioticstatus quo inthe halls ofacademe.

It seems that Abbey's reputation had wafted across the miles to Washington, DC, thereto gain the attention of the security arm of the mightiest nation in the history of...nationality. Not only had his undergraduate domestic activities caught their officialattention, but they had queried their Celtic counterparts as to Mr. Abbey's whereaboutsand subversive activities on the bonnie, bonnie banks across the pond.

Abbey was hounded by the constabulary at least until the end of this McCarthy-inspiredofficial silliness, and perhaps even longer. It was the grinding irritation of thisauthoritarian paranoia that prompted Ed's FBI remark and fed his lifelong rant againstcentralized authority.


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Searching for Eernie Flack - Words Arrangedaranagulchpress.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/7/8/26785631/... · 2018. 6. 4. · our next objective: the underpass. The only underpass in Abbey's