Squatting on his heels, he draws us a map in the sand. Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through again and again. The surface of the quicksand, which may look as firm as the wet sand on an ocean beach, begins to liquefy beneath his feet. The automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000 lives a year), and it is the responsibility of the Park Service, as well as that of everyone else concerned with preserving both wilderness and civilization, to begin a campaign of resistance. The flow dwindled to a trickle over bars of quicksand. They have left me alone here in the wilderness, at the center of things, where all that is most significant takes place. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon we shove our fragile boats once more into the water, climb aboard and paddle slowly out of the Escalantes womb, back to the greater world of Glen Canyon and the steady, powerful, unhurried, insouciant Colorado. Then they came again, louder and as it seemed from all sides, out of the rock itself, surrounding me. The wicked rabbit is dead. As I type these words, several years after the little episode of the gray jeep and the thirsty engineers, all that was foretold has come to pass. And the mountains, at least since Rousseau (anticipated by Petrarch) and that great expansion of human consciousness called the Romantic Movement, which opened up for men a whole new world of truth, have been explored and celebrated, strenuously if not adequately, by swarms of poets, novelists, scientists and frost-bitten inarticulate (because its there) mountain climbers. [2], During his stay at Arches, Abbey accumulated a large volume of notes and sketches which later formed the basis of his first non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Yes, its a good job. Back in the warm pickup I enjoy a well-earned sandwich and drink my coffee before driving on another six miles, through clouds of wind-driven dust and sand, to the old Turnbow Cabin and the beginning of the trail to Delicate Arch. We eat a good, simple, sandy supper of onion soup, beef and beans, tinned fruit and coffee. What did I do? Keeping their mounts clear of the quicksand, they each tossed a loop over the cows head, drew the knot firm around her neck, taking in the slack, and dallied each rope to the horns of their respective saddles. Now, after the recent rains, which were also responsible for the amazing growth of grass and flowers we have seen, we find the trail marvelously eroded, stripped of all vestiges of soil, trenched and gullied down to bare rock, in places more like a stairway than a road. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Down the river we drift in a kind of waking dream, gliding beneath the great curving cliffs with their tapestries of water stains, the golden alcoves, the hanging gardens, the seeps, the springs where no man will ever drink, the royal arches in high relief and the amphitheatres shaped like seashells. Eating flowers. I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert-colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself through the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover. But it doesnt occur to either of us to back away from the attempt. ), The day before I leave. (I say it with a smile; they laugh. I am shut off from the natural world and sealed up, encapsulated, in a box of artificial light and tyrannical noise. Inside the trailer, surrounded by the artifacture of America, I was reminded insistently of all that I had, for a season, left behind; the plywood walls and the dusty venetian blinds and the light bulbs and the smell of butane made me think of Albuquerque. But first things first. Resting, I listen to the deep dead stillness of the canyon. Nausea rose from his bowels. His spoor will not be seen much beyond the campground. In other words the journey is the central thing, the expectation of what is to come; the ocean itself is merely a medium of travel. In the afternoons of July and August we may get thundershowers but an hour after the storms pass the surface of the desert is again bone dry. Between the rain and the mountains, among the tumbled masses of vapor, floats a segment of a rainbow sunlight divided. (There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire. I shuffled through the sand, over the rocks, around the prickly pear and the spiny hedgehog cactus. Like death? No other water within miles, the local gnat population fought me for every drop. Desert solitaire : a season in the wilderness /, Arches National Park. These prospectors, miners, etc. A rock wren sang, a few flies came out of hiding and droned around the juniper tree. In sum, the Mormons built coherent, self-sustaining communities with a vigorous common life in which all could participate, free of any great disparities in wealth, small enough to make each member important. The big cottonwood shuddered under the impact, stirred, swung loose and rose, becoming buoyant. I wait. [21], In his narrative, Abbey is both an individual, solitary and independent, and a member of a greater ecosystem, as both predator and prey. A rivulet of clear water pours into the pool; glints and flecks of light reflected from its agitated surface dance over the dark-golden walls of the glen. For about five miles I followed the course of their survey back toward headquarters, and as I went I pulled up each little wooden stake and threw it away, and cut all the bright ribbons from the bushes and hid them under a rock. Lacing my boots I see him attach a fragment of moldy salami to a fishhook and toss it with a line, of course into the deep and muddy water below the stream. You can also use ILLiad to request chapter scans and articles. Park rangers know these things, or should know them, or used to know them and can relearn; they will be needed. There is no trouble: getting up proves to be no harder than coming down, though we do find it necessary to add a little water to the radiator when we arrive on top. Instant access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts and more. The drive was starting to drag. But these are not strictly speaking rock forms. He imagines that the mans energy has been recirculated into the bodies of buzzards who eat him. There are no vacant lots in nature. Mondays are very nice. Not so much in the vast formations of sandstone which bulk largest in the landscape but at odd, irregular places where clays, shales and mudstones appear. Afterwards we sit by the fire until the fire gives out, listening, smoking, analyzing socioeconomic problems: Look here, Newcomb, I say, do you think its fitting that you and I should be here in the wilds, risking our lives amidst untold hardships, while our wives and loved ones lounge at their ease back in Albuquerque, enjoying the multifold comforts, benefits and luxuries of modern contemporary twentieth century American urban civilization?. As Spoonhead told me afterwards, grinning around broken teeth, its not every day you get a chance to wallop a Hualapai. If necessary weve got enough food for two days. Also worthy of praise is the local pinyon pine, growing hereabouts at isolated points, for its edible nuts that appear in good years, for its ragged raunchy piney good looks, for the superior qualities of its wood as fuel burns clean and slow, little soot, little ash, and smells almost as good as juniper. He thinks he is saving money by always paying Viviano one month late. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate. He lived in a house trailer provided to him by the Park Service, as well as in a ramada that he built himself. I had a tiny notebook in my hip pocket and a stub of pencil. Nothing moves but the heat waves, rising from the naked rock. But already the current is pulling us to the middle of the river and everything is farther away than it looks. On a Monday evening before my two days off I load bedroll, rucksack, climbing boots and grub box into the pickup and drive away, turning my back on the entrance station and housetrailer and ramada, the lone juniper and all the hoodoo rocks. Perhaps this is the loveliest hour of the day, though its hard to choose. In fact he was already pretty well dug in. At noon when I return he is gone. The increase is the indirect result of the white mans medical science as introduced on the Navajo reservation, which greatly reduced the infant mortality rate and thereby made possible such formidable fecundity. As the flood widened and deepened, filling the canyon floor from wall to wall, the tree began to float with it, slowly at first and then faster and faster as it was caught in the central current. Letting them go in peace, without debate, I fixed myself another drink, returned to the table in the backyard and sat down to await the rising of the moon. Perhaps this track leads to the mine; there are no diggings of any kind in the vicinity of the camp. Afterwards back to Moab. Based on Abbey's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in the late 1950s, the book is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. But such a revolution, like it or not, is precisely what is needed. So youll live longer, I explained. After the necessary soporific smoke and a weary conversation we unroll our sleeping bags and go to bed. The splash of fish breaking the surface. The northwestern part of this park, known as the Kolob area, has until recently been saved as almost virgin wilderness. Above the mesa the sun hangs behind streaks and streamers of wind-whipped clouds. Critics of my program will argue that it is too late for such a radical reformation of a peoples approach to the out-of-doors, that the pattern is too deeply set, and that the majority of Americans would not be willing to emerge from the familiar luxury of their automobiles, even briefly, to try the little-known and problematic advantages of the bicycle, the saddle horse, and the footpath. In places you will find clear-flowing streams, such as Salt Creek near Turnbow Cabin, where the water looks beautifully drinkable but tastes like brine. Hot in there, I say, though Ralph has asked no questions. I parked my beast for a minute close to a mudbank and hauled myself onto the saddle the easy way. Nobody could have cared less. First of all, quicksand is, Ordinarily it is possible for a man to walk across quicksand, if he keeps moving. I pulled off the saddle and sat down on the ground to open a can of tomatoes. Old Roy treated us each to a bag of peanuts and talked a little about tomorrows work: trucking the cattle up to his allotment on the southern slope of Tukuhnikivats. A difficult transitional period. I have entered into this one. (, Tuesday and Wednesday I rest. It signifies water, and not only water but also shade, in a country where shelter from the sun is sometimes almost as precious as water. Far above, a strip of blue sky, cloudless. And from the wear and tear on that trail its been living out here for a long time. Let us therefore steal a slogan from the Development Fever Faction in the Park Service. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break. Impartial and neutralist, taking no chances, I wish good fortune to both sides, good swill for all. I guess hell stay put after this. Which is also for that matter a little bit higher, according to the surveyors. It didnt stop. But how, I replied, being myself a member of humanity (albeit involuntarily, without prior consultation), could I be against humanity without being against myself, whom I love though not very much; how can I be against science, when I gratefully admire, as much as any man, Thales, Democritus, Aristarchus, Faustus, Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin and Einstein; and finally, how could I be against civilization when all which I most willingly defend and venerate including the love of wilderness is comprehended by the term? [19] However, he also sees the desert as "a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time another paradox both agonized and deeply still. What is quicksand anyway? A few hours later the bulk of the flood was past and gone. At times I hear voices up the road, familiar voices I look; and no one is there. Lightly attached to one another, weightless and free, the truck with its open door and Mr. Graham went off all together into space. The wind moans a dreary tune under the overhanging coves, among the holes in the rock, and through the dead pinyon pines. It is not entirely their fault if the need remains far greater than tribal resources can satisfy. (called a "wildcard") for one or more letters. My own, my children, mine by right of possession, possession by right of love, by divine right, I now surrender them all to the winds of winter and the snow and the starving deer and the pinyon jays and the emptiness and the silence unbroken by even a thought. Free access to premium services like Tuneln, Mubi and more. Through moonlight and darkness, as the moon is revealed, then concealed, by the turning of the canyon walls, I continue the march toward camp. Im going to bring a boxful of Christmas tree decorations silver-blue tinsel, red candles, peppermint canes, silver bells, golden stars and frosted baubles and Im going to pick out the loneliest, most forlorn of those little junipers and dress it in splendor, gay and glittering, and leave it there shining in the wilderness for a season or two, until the winds and the sun and the birds strip it bare again. Powerlines now bisect the scene; a 100-foot pink water tower looms against the red cliffs; tract-style houses are built to house the protectors; natural campsites along the river are closed off while all campers are now herded into an artificial steel-and-asphalt campground in the hottest, windiest spot in the area; historic buildings are razed by bulldozers to save the expense of maintaining them while at the same time hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on an unneeded paved entrance road. Ive driven the eight miles from park entrance to highway in only seventeen minutes or at an average rate of nearly thirty miles an hour. It was the longest tongue I had ever seen outside of a butchers shop. Since Ralph has a camera and wants pictures of the launching I am obliged to go first. But he never saw her. Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man's quest to experience nature in its purest form. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nations population, the parks cannot be saved. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of those urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while. The nighthawks, sparse in numbers earlier, have gone away completely. How do, He grinned through the dust. Look here, old horse, have a sniff of this. I offered him the pebble with one hand and with the other unbuttoned a button of my shirt, preparing to ease out the rope when the chance came. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. (Where are you now, J. Soderlund? 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