Abbey was half Sharpei and half mini-lab. She was named after a boy named Edward. Her sister, Nietzsche, was also named after a boy, this one named Friedrich. The woman I was married to had brought them home as puppies one day, the remnants of an unplanned litter produced by her friend's dogs.

A few years later, shortly after my wife decided that she didn't want to be married anymore and left, Nietzsche somehow scaled the backyard chain-link fence. I didn't go to work for a few days as I walked and called; drove up and down and all around; put up flyers all over the place; checked the Humane Society and the pound the next day, and every day after for longer than reasonable. She was just gone. I never saw Nietzsche again.

Abbey kept looking, too. When we were home between searches, she'd hear something - or maybe hope something, bolt outside and look around, then walk slowly back in a minute later and lay down, not looking at me.

After my first day back to work in the wake of this, I came home to find that Abbey had shit in her bed and apparently tried to hide it, but ended up covered in it; she'd somehow rubbed the top of her head raw, the fur gone and pink bloody flesh exposed; and she was bleeding from two of her nails. She was quivering and cowering, in deep pain and now ashamed as well, but happy to let me clean her up.

She'd never been alone. Everybody was leaving her, one by one. Why would she think that I'd be coming back? Nobody else was.

I knew that my wife was staying at the place Abbey and Nietzsche came from, and that there were other dogs there that Abbey knew and liked (including her parents). It was also clear that I wasn't going to be able to hang onto the house, and I had no idea where I was going to end up. I called the place my wife was staying and asked to speak with her, and she agreed that Abbey would be happier there. Which is also what she had thought for her own behalf, of course. And I think she was probably right on both counts. This is what I choose to assume.

She drove over from Minneapolis. Abbey was so thrilled to see her, jumping up and making little happy yippy noises, her tail thrashing in violent circles. The walking-collar and leash came out, such joy! I was miserable.

I stood on the steps outside the front door, watching as they got in the car. Abbey jumped into the passenger seat, sat down and looked at me through the window. We stared at each other as the car drove away and turned the corner.

That was the last time I saw Abbey.

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Excerpts from the book Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist by James Bishop, Jr., which I'd been putting off reading for quite a while.

His skill at playing the provocateur first became evident when he was fired as editor of the student newspaper at the University of New Mexico in 1951 because of an article titled "Some Implications of Anarchy." What enraged authorities was the quote on the cover that was mockingly attributed to Louisa May Alcott: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

As time went by, many observers gave up trying to figure Abbey out, becoming lost in what they saw as his contradictions: the backwoodsman with the gentle, resonant voice who read Schopenhauer while listening to Mozart; the reclusive philosophical anarchist who, although he detested the industrial system, drove wildly around Tucson in a shiny, old red Cadillac convertible with a plastic flower on the hood.

Abbey... was an anarchist with the gallows humor of a revolutionary, not a bomb-thrower advocating bloodthirsty acts... To make his point, Abbey often quoted Thomas Jefferson, the last American president he respected: "The tree of liberty is nourished by the blood of tyrants." It was a figure of speech, because neither Jefferson nor Abbey truly believed that killing was required to mount a revolution. On Abbey's road, anarchism was a positive moral force, as it had been in Europe before events in nineteenth-century Russia gave it such a dark and bloody connotation. In this perspective, it meant following the path of the Jeffersonian dream through which the individual can be resurrected as the foundation of civil society; nothing more or less than "democracy taken seriously," as Abbey put it once, meaning "no rulers," not "no rule."

Last month, Jessamyn had a sidebar link to an article at Utne.com called "Thanks, Ed Abbey." Worth reading.