Sean Prentiss

writer, poet, and editor; Backcountry Magazine poet laureate; associate professor at Norwich University; winner of National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography, the Utah Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for biography

As I turned the pages in Desert Solitaire, which I repeatedly underlined and starred, I realized Abbey was different from my cliché image of a writer—a beret-wearing, cigarette-smoking, pretentious asshole. Abbey seemed like someone who might get drunk with me around a campfire and talk about his favorite trail. When I’d ask how to reach the trailhead, he’d point west and say, Over there. Thataway. Then he’d smirk.

Or my journey begins not with a definitive date but, as all journeys must, with the discovery of a mystery.

So this journey could have begun when I learned sometime in the late 1990s about Abbey’s mysterious burial. Abbey died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989 at age 62 from internal bleeding. After his death, four friends transported his body to a desert. There, they illegally buried him in a grave hidden to all but his friends and family and those turkey vultures banking overhead. His friends laid a hand-chiseled basalt tombstone atop the grave. The stories tell us that the tombstone reads, “Edward Abbey. 1927–1989. No Comment.”

“Beginning the Journey” the prologue to Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave by Sean Prentiss (University of New Mexico Press)