Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Near the end of Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey describes the desert as “desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny, thorny, stunted and twisted as they are tenacious” (241-242). But the desert, to Abbey, is also “the most beautiful place on earth” (1). In particular, he’s enchanted by the area around Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) near Moab, Utah, where he worked as a park ranger for two summers in the late 1950s and a third summer at some point after that. The book is part nature-writing, part polemic: Abbey describes the rocks and plants and animals around him and also rants about the over-development of the wilderness and the mismanagement of land and the laziness (as he sees it) of people who want to see nature without leaving their cars, or without actually really spending time in it. His politics, as presented in this book, are paranoid-leaning and/or generally distasteful to me, but the way he writes about the desert landscape he so clearly loves is really pleasing, and that was enough for me to keep reading.

I’ve never been to Arches (or to the desert at all) but I enjoyed reading Abbey’s descriptions of the park’s “natural arches, holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike” and of the “space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West,” and of desert rains where “the falling water evaporates halfway down between cloud and earth (5, 12, 113). I liked reading about canyon pools and waterfalls, and intense summer storms, and quicksand, and Abbey’s various adventures and misadventures, like when he helps move some cattle to their summer grazing land with a rancher and a ranch hand and is grumpy when he realizes no one has brought any lunch, or when (not in the Arches, but on a previous trip near the Grand Canyon) he’s hiking alone and goes looking for a shortcut back to his campsite and finds himself at a dead end above a sheer drop/isn’t at all sure he’ll be able to get back up to where he started. And I especially liked the chapter in which Abbey and a friend take a rafting trip on the Colorado River while the Glen Canyon Dam is under construction: Abbey describes the whole book as an elegy, but this chapter is especially poignant because Abbey knows for certain that once the dam is built, this part of the landscape will be changed entirely, and it’s a delight to read about Abbey and his friend as they float along, stopping to camp, fishing for catfish or taking hikes through side-canyons, seeing the ruins of Anasazi cliff-dwellings, and more.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *