which no doubt served as the model for the fictional George Hayduke and his fellow Monkey Wrench Gang of anarchopranksters in Abbey’s 1975 cult classic. After all, it wasn’t until meeting Abbey that De Puy would fulfill the second half of the vow he made at Navajo Mountain. Between them it was understood that Abbey would write the Southwest and De Puy paint it, but they were also compelled to protect the land that fused them. In Jack Loeffler’s biography of Abbey, he describes finding him eating beans and drinking beers with De Puy on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. They lament the desolation of the Four Corners plant, and Abbey shouts about defending wilderness: “It’s not just our right. It’s our duty!” It’s no surprise then that Wrenched, the 2014 film about Abbey’s legacy of environmental activism, reenacts the time he and De Puy stumbled across a D3 Caterpillar tractor in Colorado with the keys still in the ignition and sent it soaring off
a nearby cliff. More formally, they organized to persuade local ranchers and farmers to support the founding of the Canyonlands National Park in 1961. On the less formal side, they helped a coalition stop a coal plant from developing the Kaiparowits Plateau in Utah. (They’d been out there camping and pulling up miles of sensors.) The two of them were most simpatico—despite the time De Puy pawned Abbey’s favorite deer rifle to pay for a trip to Minoa, and Abbey, in return, sold off all of De Puy’s furniture while he was away—when they were out on the land. De Puy had come to see hiking as a form of continuous walking meditation, a methodology he’d developed during his Rinzai-ji Zen training at Jemez Springs that “stressed a mindfulness before subject matter,” while disengaging the mind from active thinking and allowing it to access a spiritual essence. He got up too early for Abbey and rarely slept, tended to
chant while he cooked or made tea, and was prone to pontificating about the noospheric philosophical ponderings of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Their relationship was as much a ménage à trois with nature as it was a lifelong friendship between two likeminded, independent, strong-willed men. Abbey died more than 25 years ago, but his words can be read in many of De Puy’s paintings, just as the essence of De Puy’s work can be felt in Abbey’s writings. “Walking,” writes Abbey, “stretches time and prolongs life . . . and makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.” This is what great art does, and it’s what De Puy’s paintings do most of all: stretch time, prolong life, make the world bigger and more interesting. R John De Puy’s work is now showing at Addison Rowe Gallery in Santa Fe through August 7.
John and Isabel Fereirra De Puy hiking the family’s land in Ojo Caliente with their daughter, Noelle, age 10. Opposite: Untitled (1958), oil on canvas. trendmagazineglobal.com 119