Edward Abbey is
an American author and essayist, and thanks to my longtime friend Roseanne for
recommending this one. Abbey spent two summers as a park ranger in Arches
National Monument in the 1950’s, and a decade later, used his notes to write
this nonfiction book, Desert Solitaire, A
Season in the Wilderness. Arches is in the Utah desert, near the city of
Moab. This is a hard book to characterize, but essentially it’s Abbey’s story
about living in the desert under the harshest of conditions. He is an intense
critic of development and culture, and he clearly revels in his comfort with
relative isolation from other humans. While he does the usual duties of a park
ranger including cleaning out restrooms, delivering firewood, maintaining
trails, and interacting with tourists, he spends time philosophizing about life
on earth and exploring the territory around him. Apparently this book has
become an icon for environmentalists and is held in high esteem by them along
with the works of Thoreau.
During his time
in the desert, Abbey recounts lots of adventures that are worth reading. He is
also critical of the development of the national park system. He writes with
obvious hate, “Industrial Tourism is a big business. It means money. It
includes the motel and restaurant owners, the gasoline retailers, the oil corporations,
the road-building contractors, the heavy equipment manufacturers, the estate
and federal engineering agencies and the sovereign, all-powerful automotive
industries.” He described his own distress upon encountering the engineers who
were going to build an asphalt road through Arches.
In contrast to
his feelings about the encroachment of civilization his the desert, he wrote:
Wilderness.
The word itself is music.
Wilderness, wilderness…. We scarcely know what we mean by the term,
though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been
irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the
sweating scramble for profit and domination.
Abbey continued
his antidevelopment theme when he quoted a cowboy artist, Charles Marion
Russell:
I
have been called a pioneer. In my book a pioneer is a man who comes to virgin
country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the
trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up and strings ten million
miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.
Abbey was poetic
and pithy and when he tried to capture the essence of the desert which had
captivated him:
None of the works I have named
attack directly the problem to which I wish to address myself here: what is the
peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual
appeal, from other forms of landscape? In trying to isolate this peculiarity,
if it exists at all and is not simply an illusion, we must beware of a danger
well known to explorers of both the micro- and the macrocosmic – that of
confusing the thing observed with the mind of the observer, of constructing not
a picture of external reality but simply a mirror of the thinker.
Abbey wrote,
“The desert says nothing…. Since the desert does not act, it seems to be
waiting – but waiting for what?... There is something about the desert that the
human sensibility cannot assimilate, or has not so far been able to
assimilate…. There is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand
and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old,
does not have.” And in a most stinging attack he writes, “Civilization is the
vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations
which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life….
Civilization is tolerance, detachment, and humor, or passion, anger, revenge;
culture is the entrance examination, the gas chamber, the doctoral dissertation
and the electric chair.”
In looking at
this review, I’ve failed to quote Abbey's elegant descriptions of desert life, the
prose that has made me want to make a trip to Arches National Monument and to
check out some of the other desert parks that I’ve not yet seen. Although I can
sympathize with the losses that come from mankind’s encroachment on the
wilderness, I am also thrilled that I’m able to sample it, even if it’s only a
small taste of what Abbey did. I’m happy for asphalt trails or at least graded
gravel roads that allow me to drive to sights and smells that I’d never partake
in otherwise. But, these precious lands must be also protected and we need our
rabid environmentalists to help set limits on an invasion that would otherwise
destroy the beauty that Abbey has captured with his words.
