Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

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.