How far should one man go to preserve the land he holds sacred? John Vogelin, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s second novel Fire On the Mountain, insists on fighting to the death to hold onto his ranch where he was born, where he spent all his life, and where he planned to die. If this sounds like a commentary on freedom and macho American individualism, you are right. If this sounds like the premise for a gripping story, don’t get your hopes up too high though.
Vogelin is an 87 year old man who owns a ranch and some land in southern New Mexico. The government’s plan is to expand the White Sands Missile Range and Vogelin’s property is the only obstacle holding them back. They insist on seizing the land under the law of eminent domain, but old man Vogelin won’t budge. The ranch is all he knows and removing him from it would make the end of his long life a miserable one.
The supporting characters are his grandson, Billy, who is also the narrator. The young boy is visiting his grandfather for the summer, taking a vacation from his home in Pennsylvania. Billy prefers life on the ranch to that in his school and he plans to take over the property when Vogelin dies. The other supporting character is Lee Mackie, Vogelin’s best friend. Lee is a businessman, a native to the region, and the one who tries to be a negotiator and voice of reason for Vogelin as he fights with the government. Vogelin is the most complete character of the three; he has a simple outlook on life but we learn his motivations, his feelings, and the reasoning behind his stubbornness. From the other two, we learn not so much. Grandfather Vogelin is Billy’s hero and the boy vows to fight by his side to the end, but you might wonder at times why he is even in the story to begin with. He is a shadow to the main character and little more. Even the narration, which reads as if Billy is recalling the story from the vantage point of adulthood, does not actually need the first person subjective style that Abbey employs. It would be fine if written in any other voice. Lee Mackie serves a more definite purpose, acting as the conscience and counterpoint to Vogelin’s struggles, but we never really learn who he is as a person. We never learn how he met Vogelin or why he is so attached to the old man, even though he thinks the old man should sell his property to the government and move on. Thankfully, Edward Abbey learned from the mistakes he made in his earlier writings and went on to write better developed characters in his later works.
So what is a reader to gain from reading this short story with a generic plot and weakly-drawn characters? The best part of it all is the beginning when Vogelin, Billy, and Lee Mackie ride on horseback out into the mountains in search of a pony that wandered away from the ranch. The author does here what he always does best: describe the desert with its scenery, its stillness, its vast landscapes, big sky, and unique ecosystems. Abbey never fails to capture the essence of the New Mexico desert and this book is no exception. If you have been to places he describes you will know exactly what I mean.
This long passage also introduces two themes, one of which is important to the plot and the other is something that never gets developed to completion. The latter of the two is Billy’s confrontation with the desert. When on top of a mountain, he comes face to face with a mountain lion. Paralyzed with fear, the two stare at each other and this event transforms Billy’s life. The problem here is that we never really learn how Billy changed after that. Abbey doesn’t describe the meaning of this encounter and he never develops this theme subsequently to its occurrence, although it does get mentioned from time to time. We also learn that Lee Mackie had a similar type of experience when he was younger, but no details are given as to what the event was and how it effected him.
The other theme that gets taken up during their trek into the wilderness is the trio’s encounter with the military. In one scene, they get confronted by some belligerent soldiers from the air force who almost start a gun fight with them. In another part they find their lost horse, only to see it had been tortured, murdered, and mutilated by the same soldiers when they were drunk and had nothing better to do. Abbey’s portrayal of the US military is in no way favorable. And why should it be? This book was written in the 1960s and the anarchist author needed some antagonists for the plot’s conflict anyways.
SPOILER ALERT HERE. The rest of the story is anti-climactic. Grandpa Vogelin gets into a gunfight with government officials, though no one gets killed. The burning of his body at the end seems both significant as closure to the novel and symbolic as well of temporal man’s relationship to the eternity of nature. The fact that starting a massive fire in the desert to cremate Vogelin is a colossal act of stupidity ruined the ending a little bit. Forest fires spread rapidly and in the dry heat of New Mexico, this is not something to be messed around with. It is surprising that an environmentalist like Edward Abbey couldn’t see the ignorance of making a funeral pyre in such a poorly situated located.
Fire On the Mountain is almost a Western. It reads like an interpretation of the Western genre as seen through the lens of the Cold War and post-World War II America with a touch of 1960s counter-cultural defiance of authority thrown in. By today’s standards it would be considered a right-wing anti-government screed, but in Abbey’s day, fighting the government was purely a left-wing undertaking. Keep that in mind when reading anything by this author. It isn’t quite a Western because there isn’t enough action in it to make it much more than a desert drama with a half-assed gunfight near the end. If Edward Abbey hadn’t gone on to write great books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, this short novel would have been forgotten long ago. But if you can’t get enough of Abbey’s talent for descriptive writing, and I certainly can’t, this might be worth a quick read just once.
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