2013 read #62: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey
273 pages
Published 1968
Read from May 9 to May 11
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

Of all the authors I somehow hadn't read until this year, Edward Abbey is perhaps the most surprising omission. I've known of (and intended to absorb) his works for many years, probably since I was a teenager. Now that I've had my first exposure to him, it makes me marvel all the more that I'd skipped his works until now. If Jack Kerouac reminds me of how my brother thought of himself, Abbey reminds me of me, or at least of my ideal conception of myself: a loner, self-sufficient, adventurous and maybe a little reckless, with a deep, essentially worshipful appreciation for ecology and the esthetics of real life out there beyond the end of the road, a profound distaste for authority and conventionality, a predilection for small acts of eco-sabotage, a misanthrope with an appreciation of true scale and perspective, none of that petty fixation on cheap drugs, cheap thrills, and superficial philosophy that so consumed Kerouac. You can keep your Beat poets; teenage Rick finally has a literary role-model and archetype, only fifteen or so years too late.

It doesn't hurt that this book explores then remote, now heartbreakingly overdeveloped corners of southeast Utah. I've been to some amazing places -- the North Cascades, the Oregon Coast, the Sierra Nevada, Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, the northern shore of Lake Superior, the west coast of Ireland -- but if I had to choose one and only one region to return to, it would be the redrock country of southeast Utah. If it weren't for the people who live there, I'd drop everything to move to a drafty one room shack in the Utah desert almost without hesitation. Even the names are geologic poetry to me, invoking memories of my own experiences as well as the vastness of deep time: Yellowcat, Poison Strip, Morrison, the Book Cliffs, the La Sals, the Henrys.

The life of the 1960s park ranger -- particularly the backcountry ranger, far away from the press of the "industrial tourist" -- has long struck me as the epitome of a romantic existence, its glamor unmatched except perhaps by 1970s thru-hikers with their giant external frame packs and breezy short-shorts and giant beards, or river rafting guides from the same period. (The only modern career that might come close would be backcountry archaeologist attached to a remote national forest, but even then there's too much actual work and supervision. If only volunteer field paleontologist could be a permanent, feasible career.) Reading Abbey's impressions of a still largely unspoiled Arches (years before Desert Solitaire helped make it such a popular destination) was at times heartbreaking, as I contrasted his dusty solitude with my own memories of glass visitor centers, blacktop highways, and crowded viewpoints. Far more devastating, however, was the chapter (the longest in the book, but still far too short) detailing his rafting trip down Glen Canyon before the completion of the eponymous dam. The thought of what's buried under all that brackish water and mucky silt and garbage tossed from speedboats... it makes me angry, it makes me hateful, and it makes me feel ill.

Even though I'm far from an idealistic teenager nowadays, I can't understand anyone who would feel any other way.