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.
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