For most people, Doug Peacock is best known as the
character, or caricature, that the writer Edward Abbey created out of the raw
materials of the man’s life. Peacock grew up in Alma, Michigan, but during his
three tours as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam he dreamed of the American West,
clinging to a map of Montana like a secret and a promise. When he finally got
home, he headed out into the western backcountry to try to make something out
of the remains of his life. Shaken by all he had seen, numb but at the same
time full of unnamed rage, he turned to a new hobby, to monkey-wrenching, or
environmental sabotage, cutting down billboards, putting sugar in the tanks of
bulldozers, and using more explosive means to disarm the machines that were
despoiling the land he loved. It was a hobby that he shared with a new friend
named Ed Abbey, who would eventually transform Peacock into a fictional
character, the heroic but primitive George Washington Hayduke, the central
figure and driving force in Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang."
But Peacock’s own life would take a turn that Hayduke’s did not. He would come to spend time deep in the Wyoming and Montana wildernesses, passing months living with grizzly bears. A gun-lover, he refused to carry firearms when among the bears. At first he didn’t study the animals so much as get to know them, learning their ways. Meanwhile, his fictional alter ego was growing into a legend around the West. That legend still grows. Earlier in our trip, looking out at Monument Valley from the Muley Point overlook in Utah, I had seen, painted in big black letters on the concrete barrier, the words “Hayduke Lives!"
I was nervous about meeting Peacock. All I had to go on at that point was a curt email that read: “If you’re around come on by.” Well, I would be around, I’d make sure of it, even if it required driving 800 miles out of my way. That morning he had given me directions to his house in Emigrant, along the Yellowstone River about an hour north of the park, and we had agreed to meet at 5. I looked at the map and figured the mileage, but what I hadn’t counted on was winding our way through Yellowstone and stopping every mile or two for an elk or buffalo. There was an irony, of course, in bombing through one of America’s most beautiful parks to go and meet a wild man.
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But Peacock’s own life would take a turn that Hayduke’s did not. He would come to spend time deep in the Wyoming and Montana wildernesses, passing months living with grizzly bears. A gun-lover, he refused to carry firearms when among the bears. At first he didn’t study the animals so much as get to know them, learning their ways. Meanwhile, his fictional alter ego was growing into a legend around the West. That legend still grows. Earlier in our trip, looking out at Monument Valley from the Muley Point overlook in Utah, I had seen, painted in big black letters on the concrete barrier, the words “Hayduke Lives!"
I was nervous about meeting Peacock. All I had to go on at that point was a curt email that read: “If you’re around come on by.” Well, I would be around, I’d make sure of it, even if it required driving 800 miles out of my way. That morning he had given me directions to his house in Emigrant, along the Yellowstone River about an hour north of the park, and we had agreed to meet at 5. I looked at the map and figured the mileage, but what I hadn’t counted on was winding our way through Yellowstone and stopping every mile or two for an elk or buffalo. There was an irony, of course, in bombing through one of America’s most beautiful parks to go and meet a wild man.
CONNECT
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