I recently visited a few national parks in Utah: Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef. While I there, I read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, a sort of love letter to the area through which I traveled.
In some ways, it’s not a surprise that I loved the book. I spent part of my childhood in the southwestern United States. Books about that area speak to me. I also love books that touch on solitude, such as Thoreau’s Walden, and books with a sense of place, such as Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. Abbey’s book is full of both of these things.
On the other hand, Abbey is not the sort of writer I feel I could bond with if I met him in person — an impossibility, since he is dead. There are many books that give me a sense of kinship with the writer. (I suppose this sort of thing plagues popular writers.) If I find myself often saying, “Yes, me too!” while I read, then I begin to see the author as someone with whom I could be friends.
Desert Solitaire is different. Although I love the same landscapes that Abbey loved and have other things in common with him, the Abbey I encountered in the pages of this book was a crank. To some degree, I understand why he was a crank. He loved the wilderness of the southwest. He was horrified by over-development and the failure of others to appreciate things as they were. But while I understand and even sympathize with that point of view, I still don’t find him very likable.
His dark sense of humor doesn’t help. I’m not against dark humor, but I almost believe that Abbey didn’t really like people. In his chapter about tourism and national parks, he wrote:
A venturesome minority [of tourists] will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches — that is the right and privilege of any free American. But the rest, the majority, most of them new to the out-of-doors, will need and welcome assistance, instruction and guidance. Many will not know how to saddle a horse, read a topographical map, follow a trail over slickrock, memorize landmarks, build a fire in rain, treat snakebite, rappel down a cliff, glissade down a glacier, read a compass, find water under sand, load a burro, splint a broken bone, bury a body, patch a rubber boat, portage a waterfall, survive a blizzard, avoid lightning, cook a porcupine, comfort a girl during a thunderstorm, predict the weather, dodge falling rock, climb out of a box canyon, or pour piss out of a boot. Park rangers know these things, or should know them, or used to know them and can relearn. They will be needed.
While some of the things on his list of what tourists don’t know made me smile, there’s a small part of me that wonders if he isn’t a bit serious about the more ridiculous things on the list. “Well, he’s dead. Let’s bury him here and move on.” I fear I am too earnest and value others too much to be entirely at home with Abbey’s humor.
I’m even more bothered by his hypocrisy. I’m sure we’ve all failed to live up to who we claim to be. I know I have. Still, Abbey shocked me a bit — although maybe he was lying, indulging in more of his odd sense of humor. At any rate, in one chapter he wrote:
Arches National Monument is meant to be among other things a sanctuary for wildlife — for all forms of wildlife. It is my duty as a park ranger to protect, preserve and defend all living things within the park boundaries, making no exceptions. Even if this were not the case I have personal convictions to uphold. Ideals, you might say. I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake.
I took him at his word about wildlife (and assumed he was joking about people). But in the next chapter, he wrote about killing a cottontail with a rock — an experiment to see what he was capable of if he were starving.
Abbey did warn readers in his introduction that we might be disturbed. “I quite agree that much of the book will seem coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive — even frankly antisocial in its point of view.” He thought these things would make readers dislike Desert Solitaire. In fact, I enjoyed the book immensely, which is why I’m recommending it to you.
Besides the fact that I like Abbey’s subject matter, I love the way he writes. He is an inspiring, masterful wordsmith. You can sense this in his introduction:
For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces — in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind — what else is there? What else do we need?
He and I disagree philosophically, because I do believe in something beyond the surface. But we both appreciate the beauty of those surfaces, and I love the way he described that beauty.
I also think that he had some great suggestions for reforming national parks. In the chapter I mentioned earlier on tourism and national parks, he recommended doing away with automobile traffic. You get to the park, park your car, and proceed on horseback or bicycle or foot or even, if you must, by shuttle bus.
I’d love to see his ideas implemented. I can’t claim that my family hasn’t driven into many a national park. We have. But we don’t really see the park until we get out of the car and actually interact with it, hiking along a trail, attending a ranger-led viewing of the night sky, taking things at a pace that allows us to truly observe our surroundings and not only see but smell, hear, and (when appropriate) even touch and taste things.
And what’s good for the visitors is even better for the place we visit. Significantly reducing motorized traffic into the park would reduce emissions within the park and prevent some of the damage caused by people who insist on driving where they shouldn’t.
If you read Desert Solitaire, and I hope you do, you may find that you like not only the book but Abbey himself. And perhaps, were he to be at one of those hypothetical dinners populated with people living or dead, I would find that I was wrong about him, that I actually liked him very much. But, whoever Abbey was as a person, he was an excellent writer with a deep love of wilderness and the desert and that alone means you should not neglect this book. That goes double if you are traveling to “Abbey country” anytime soon.