desert solitaire (edward abbey)

Abbey’s book is a paean to a lost land. Quite literally, in one instance, as he takes a canoe trip down a canyon river that is soon to be flooded by the construction of a new dam. As such his words capture something that humans might never witness again, and there is a wistfulness implicit in the writing, an awareness that the natural world he is inhabiting is facing not just a possible but an actual extinction. Abbey’s is the voice of an Aztec scribe, writing upon hearing the news of the landing of Cortez. Desert Solitaire describes a season spent in the Arches national Park in Utah, at a moment when mass tourism, driven by the automobile, was just about to take off. He rails against the impact this will have on the natural world, whilst confident that in the end the natural world will come out the victor in a battle initiated by humanity. However, this only confirms how Desert Solitaire is an early epistle from a new frontline that had never been contemplated until the dawning of the industrial age, a frontline that pits humans against their environment.

However, beyond the fatalism, there is an implicit celebration of the natural world and the gift of being a human, capable of contemplating this world. Abbey is a cowboy poet and conjures words to capture the things that he sees that feel as though they could only have emerged from his profound immersion in the natural world.

“He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape.”

“Comfort yourself with the reflection that within a few hours, if all goes as planned, your human flesh will be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. Whereupon you, too, will soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of human suffering. For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal.”

“the spadefoot toads bellow madly in the moonlight on the edge of doomed rainpools, where the arsenic-selenium spring waits for the thirst-crazed wanderer, where the thunderstorms blast the pinnacles and cliffs, where the rust-brown floods roll down the barren washes, and where the community of the quiet deer walk at evening up glens of sandstone through tamarisk and sage toward the hidden springs of sweet, cool, still, clear, unfailing water.”

“with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible.”