Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

First published in the United States by McGraw-Hill in 1968

Copyright © 1968 by Edward Abbey, renewed 1996 by Clarke Abbey

Introduction copyright © Robert Macfarlane 2018

The Estate of Edward Abbey on behalf of the Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover design by Ben Gardiner

Cover photograph by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Frontispiece image © Wikimedia Commons/Nikater (2002)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008283315

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008283322

Version: 2018-09-14

Dedication

for Josh and Aaron

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Frontispiece

Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Author’s Introduction

Epigraph

The First Morning

Solitaire

The Serpents of Paradise

Cliffrose and Bayonets

Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks

Rocks

Cowboys and Indians

Cowboys and Indians Part II

Water

The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud

The Moon-Eyed Horse

Down the River

Havasu

The Dead Man at Grandview Point

Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert

Episodes and Visions

Terra Incognita: Into The Maze

Bedrock and Paradox

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Midway through this magnificent, maddening, abrasive, lyrical, lackadaisical kick-ass manifesto and dream-vision of a book, Edward Abbey describes climbing a switchback trail up from the banks of the Colorado to the high rock desert through which the river has cut its vast course. The trail is steep, the day hot and Abbey becomes so thirsty that he sucks damp sand in an attempt to extract its moisture. Nevertheless, he persists in his ascent – and at last emerges on the surface of a rolling plain of cross-bedded sandstone, where he is rewarded with the view for which he has been hoping. To the north-west he can see the island-mesa of the Kaiparowits Plateau and the descending levels of Grand Staircase-Escalante; away to his east are the salmon-pink buttes and hidden canyons of Bears Ears.

Abbey revels in what is concealed as well as what is revealed: he walks out to an isolated point, realises he can see no evidence of human presence bar his own sweating body, and stands there – listening to the immense silence, watching the ‘heat waves rising from the naked rock’. It is one of the many scenes in the book where Abbey ritually performs his definition of desert wilderness for his readers: a place that is defined by an utterness of matter, a deep-time vastness of space and earth-history; a place that humbles the human presence, and that should be left – in the (gendered) phrasing of the US Wilderness Act of 1964 – as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’.

I write this essay fifty years since the first publication of Desert Solitaire, and I write it in a month when parts of the landscape that Abbey surveyed from that rimrock above the Colorado stand imperilled by the legislative actions of Donald Trump. In December 2017, Trump announced his intention to dramatically shrink the extent of two ‘National Monuments’ in the state of Utah: Grand Staircase-Escalante, which he reduced by almost half of its former extent, and Bears Ears, cut by 84 per cent. This reduction of two million acres of public land – which came into force on 2 February 2018 – is the biggest rollback of federal land protection in the history of the United States, and a centrepiece of the Trump administration’s broader assault on both conservation as idea and practice, and public land preservation specifically. One of the explicit intentions of the rollback is to open up both areas to the extractive industries (for coal and uranium in particular); as such it symbolically furthers Trump’s alignment with white working-class – especially mining and ranching – communities.

Announcing the shrinkage of Bears Ears in San Juan County in December, Trump both stoked and spoke to what Jedediah Purdy has called a ‘public-lands populism’; that is, a populism which ‘favors local, motorized and extractive uses of [western] public lands over federal policy-making, non-motorized recreation, and reservation for aesthetic or cultural purposes.’ In the view of this populism, all federal public lands – ‘National Monuments’, ‘National Parks’, ‘Wilderness Areas’ – in the western states represent ‘an illegal form of domestic colonialism’, an unjust land-grab begun by Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt over a century previously. Public-lands populists argue for the drastic reduction of federal control on grounds of historical illegitimacy, and the anomalously large extent of federal land in western states as compared to eastern and Midwestern states. This anti-regulatory, anti-federal narrative is itself tangled up in older western narratives about masculinity, liberty, self-reliance and the defence of sovereignty, all of which reach back into the earliest white incursions into these regions. Most problematically, proponents of contemporary ‘public-lands populism’, as Purdy has shown, have often sought to ‘de-legitimate the Native American presence in the West’, casting pro-preservation movements as a conspiracy of ‘green’ (environmentalist) and ‘brown’ (Native American) groups.

Since Trump declared the rollback in December, I have been considering what Abbey’s response would be to the proposals. It’s tempting just to quote Hayduke, the hell-raiser hero of Abbey’s cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975): ‘My job is to save the fucking wilderness,’ declares Hayduke unambiguously, ‘I don’t know anything else worth saving.’ Hayduke would, certainly, have poured sand in the fuel-tanks of mining machines and waged eco-guerrilla war on the infrastructure of incursion. But Hayduke is not Abbey and Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s fullest exploration of the ideas of wilderness, is a book from which it can be surprisingly hard to extract hard-and-fast positions, built as it is – in Abbey’s own phrase – on both ‘paradox and bedrock’.

Abbey pledges his allegiance above all to land, sandstone and the more-than-human world. ‘Long live diversity, long live the earth’ is the rallying cry he raises early in the book. He is unwaveringly against the development of wild land either for resource exploitation or for what he contemptuously calls ‘Industrial Tourism’. These positions form his bedrock. His paradoxes, though, are numerous. He despises motor vehicles, except when he is driving one. He celebrates personal liberty but also wishes to ‘lose’ his sense of self in the desert. He is an eco-centric misanthropist but also a localist whose sympathy lies most with blue-collar workers, including miners. He is suspicious of the federal state and a keen supporter of the Second Amendment. He contradicts himself repeatedly and with relish: ‘I’m a humanist: I’d rather kill a man than a snake.’ Doctrinally, he might be said to lie somewhere between Bakunin, Ammon Bundy and David Attenborough. But as Emerson observed, ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds’. Abbey’s mind was expanded by the desert lands in which he took his stand, and his compellingly uncategorizable book is fully hobgoblin-free.

Like many great works of place-writing, Desert Solitaire has no plot. It describes – as the subtitle has it – a ‘season in the wilderness’ of Arches National Park. Like many great works of place-writing, Desert Solitaire also plays fast and loose with time, for into that single ‘season’ Abbey in fact collapses the stories and reflections of several years spent in the wider desert landscapes of the American south-west. What is presented as an almanac, running from April to September, is in fact more of an anthology of episodes from what he modestly describes as ‘God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the red wasteland.’

Within his calendrical structure, Abbey also dives, dolphin-like, between the continuous present and the archaic deep time of canyon and mountain. He lives variously in ‘the undivided, seamless days of those marvellous summers’, and in the immensities of earth-history, which have seen the roaming dunes of ancient deserts petrified into the slickrock of the desert states, itself in turn eroded by ice and wind into mesas, arches, bridges and arroyos. The alternations between these modes of time is one of the distinctive actions of Abbey’s book – the one vibrantly immediate, the other vertiginously ancient.

Desert Solitaire – like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1977) and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949) – stands in clear relation with Henry David Thoreau’s founding work of American retreat literature, Walden (1854). Thoreau’s refuge was a log cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, Leopold’s was a shack in a meander of a Wisconsin river, Dillard’s a house in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains – and Abbey’s is a tin house-trailer that is ‘cold as a tomb’ in spring and hot as a furnace in summer. Like Thoreau, Dillard and Leopold, Abbey undertakes his retreat as a means of philosophical sequestering: he goes to nature in order not just to think about nature but also to think with nature, and even more radically to be thought by nature. ‘The personification of nature is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good,’ he says early on. The desert will rasp him free of anthropomorphism. Lying skin to skin with sandstone will give him fiercest focus on the otherness of matter.

In this respect, we should also understand Desert Solitaire as crookedly kindred with the practice of the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers, who removed themselves to remote desert places in order to maximise askesis and sharpen their faithfulness to its point. The ancient Greek word for this pure desert space was ‘paneremos’, from which arise our terms ‘eremitic’ and ‘hermit’. Abbey is a cranky kind of hermit, however – and he would have made a very poor monk. Though he flirts with the possibility of divinity a few times, he professes no belief in any kind of god (except, as he once jokes, ‘the smell of frying catfish’). His only theology is geology, really; his only spirituality is, he writes, ‘a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow still survives intact, individual, separate.’

Let us pause a little on the notion of that ‘hard and brutal mysticism’, for Abbey’s wrangles with this idea constitute one of the ongoing intellectual dramas of the book, and his accounts of it are riven with contradiction. How might the ‘naked self’ merge with matter yet remain ‘intact’? ‘Paradox and bedrock,’ Abbey would probably reply with a grin. He longs for an existence of pure noumena, and wants to use the spiky, scouring surfaces of the desert – ‘a realm beyond the human … spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless’ – to abrade away anything ‘Kantian’, leaving only ‘the bare bones of existence’, ‘devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities’. Abbey calls this world-without-us the ‘antehuman’, and acknowledges that seeking it might ‘mea[n] risking everything human in myself’. Certainly, there is a brutality to any ontology that acknowledges only materialism. But there is an exhilaration, too, in exposing oneself to what he at one point calls the ‘monstrous’ inhumanity of ‘rock and cloud and sky and space’. ‘One must have a mind of winter,’ wrote Wallace Stevens in his great poem ‘The Snow Man’, in order not to anthropomorphise winter. Abbey seeks the impossible task of giving himself a mind of desert – of self-petrifying.

Abbey is not often compared to British writers, but at moments such as these he reminds me strongly of Nan Shepherd, who writes in The Living Mountain (1977) of following the ‘white waters’ of the Cairngorms back up to their source on the plateau, and by so doing placing herself at risk. ‘[T]his journey to the sources is not to be undertaken lightly,’ writes Nan. ‘One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.’ The Cairngorms are Nan’s desert; the running mountain water that ‘does nothing, absolutely nothing but be itself’ is Nan’s sandstone. I think also of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a book published the year before Desert Solitaire, which shares a keen sense of species-shame with Abbey’s book, and a horror at the speed with which human activity is depredating the living world. Baker’s ‘season of hawk-hunting’ begins in autumn, ends in spring, and ‘winter glitters between like the arch of Orion’. Abbey’s ‘season in the wilderness’ begins in spring, ends in autumn, and between them the summer sun glitters off the sandstone arches. Both Baker and Abbey explicitly frame their books as elegies for landscapes that are ‘dying’: the pesticide-ravaged Essex countryside of Baker, and the development-menaced desert for Abbey. There is, too, in Abbey’s love of getting down on his belly to see what the world looks like to an ant or a lizard, something of the country-parson tradition of British natural-historical enquiry – though one can’t imagine Gilbert White or Francis Kilvert describing ants as ‘neurotic little pismires’.

Surely the oddest word in Desert Solitaire, though, is ‘lovely’. Abbey uses it repeatedly: ten times in the opening two chapters alone. ‘Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness,’ he writes. ‘The very names [of rocks] are lovely,’ he declares a few pages later, before incanting stone-types: ‘chalcedony, carnelian, jasper, chrysoprase and agate, onyx and sardonyx, flint [and] chert’ (if Abbey were a stone, he would surely be sardonyx). To hear the genteel term ‘lovely’ dropping from the lips of this beer-drinking, snake-shooting ‘desert rat’, nicknamed ‘Cactus Ed’ for his spikiness, is bewildering – as if he might suddenly also eat cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off and raise his little finger while sipping tea from porcelain cups.

But then voice is another aspect of this book’s inconsistencies: tonally, it can veer from barfly to baroque and back again in the course of a page. One of my favourite passages is where Abbey describes a pair of mating snakes as they ‘intertwine and separate, glide side by side in perfect congruence, turn like mirror images of each other and glide back again, wind and unwind again’. How sinuously Abbey doubles and echoes his own language in this self-entwining sentence! But another of my favourite passages is where he rages magnificently against ‘Industrial Tourism’ and the locust-like greed of the hordes who come to consume the desert through windshield and camera-lens: ‘Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! … and walk – walk – WALK upon our sweet and blessed land.’ The result of this mix of folksy fury and elaborate beauty is a book structured not unlike the ‘Spanish bayonet’ plant that Abbey admires at one point, a yucca with a ‘heavy cluster’ of gorgeous flowers, protected by an ‘untouchable dagger’s nest’ of leaves.

There are, unmistakably, aspects of Abbey’s book that make very uncomfortable reading today – and that should have made uncomfortable reading half a century ago. He is brazenly ableist and casually sexist. His desert is almost wholly a man’s desert. His adventures are undertaken exclusively with men. When women do feature, they are present as the wives of prospectors or park rangers, given passing mention at best; or they exist as problematic metaphors: the cliff-rose is ‘gay and sweet as a pretty girl’; after desert rain, a flower blooms ‘suddenly and gloriously, like a maiden’. Sentences describing the Navajo as ‘the Negroes of the Southwest – red black men’ who, ‘like their cousins in the big cities … turn for solace, quite naturally, to alcohol and drugs’, are unacceptable in ways that do not need unpacking.

It’s tempting to excuse these prejudices as subsets of an encompassing misanthropy, but that won’t do. Better to call him out on them – but also to note that Abbey himself hates haters, and that none of his prejudices is a simple case of rank bias. One of the four eco-terrorist heroes of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a formidable revolutionary feminist (though her portrayal is satirical as well as admiring), and it is obvious that, despite his intermittently objectionable language, Abbey’s respect for Native Americans is considerable. He suggests that much of western science has been anticipated by indigenous cultural knowledge, and commends the sophistication of the desert art and architecture of both the Navajo and the Anasazi, ‘the old people’. His anger flares at the way the Navajo have been cleared from desert lands and penned in reservations: ‘the Navajos are people, not personnel.’ And Abbey’s contempt for the nameless interlocutor who advances the wisdom of anti-Semitism at the book’s end is total and uncompromising.

In 2005 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on the well-being of communities in New South Wales, when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible.

Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John Clare as a solastalgic poet, witnessing the countryside of his native Northamptonshire disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has without doubt flourished recently. ‘A worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht, is ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes’. Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, then, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by forces beyond individual control (climate change, global corporations): the home becomes suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.

Desert Solitaire is, unmistakably, a work of solastalgia. Abbey’s ‘distress’ is channelled largely as anger, but what pains him is seeing the landscapes he loves transformed or destroyed by large-scale human intervention. The rafting trip he takes down Glen Canyon with Ralph Newcomb, shortly before that stretch of the Colorado was drowned by damming to form Lake Powell, is the most agonizedly solastalgic chapter in the book: ‘Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable,’ writes Abbey furiously, ‘which can never be recovered through any human agency.’ The account of his journey through this doomed place is superb for its range, its rage, its beauty and its comedy (the only map the two carry with them is a Texaco road map of the state of Utah; a detail which fascinatingly anticipates the ‘oil-company map’ carried by father and boy in Cormac McCarthy’s Anthropocene novel, The Road). I still remember reading the Glen Canyon chapter for the first time fifteen years ago: jaw-dropped at the mysterious, off-planet beauty of the region through which the men raft on their ‘dream-like voyage’, gobsmacked at the loss of this mystery to the silt-sump of Lake Powell. That chapter, more than any other, advanced powerfully to me the idea of ‘irreplaceability’ as a conservation cornerstone: the proposition that certain landscapes are unique such that their loss cannot be ‘offset’ by some form of compensatory habitat creation.

Abbey’s identity politics have not weathered well, but his thinking about conservation and wilderness was in several ways ahead of its time. In his arguments for sentience and emotion on the part of creaturely life, he foresaw what is known as the ‘more-than-human turn’ across the social sciences and the humanities. In his repeated calls for the re-introduction of apex predators into ecosystems, he – like Aldo Leopold – prepared the way for later work on trophic cascades, and successful megafauna reintroduction programmes such as that of the wolf into Yellowstone, with all its consequent transformations of that area. Abbey’s disdain for sheep as ‘hooved locusts’ finds echoes in George Monbiot’s campaign for a British re-wilding movement to prevent the ‘sheep-wrecking’ of landscapes by overgrazing.

It is though, surely, in its defence of wilderness as a biophysical reality, with biodiversity as its core characteristic, that Abbey’s book holds most contemporary power. In the course of Desert Solitaire, he advances a number of familiar pro-wilderness arguments: that it is a ‘necessity of the human spirit’; that it is civilization’s accomplice rather than its antagonist; and that we need it available to us ‘whether or not we ever set foot in it, we need a refuge even though we may never need to go there’ (this last argument might be named the ‘geography of hope’ argument, after Wallace Stegner’s ringing phrase from his famous ‘Wilderness Letter’ of 1960).

These are, though, eventually anthropocentric arguments in favour of wildland preservation: philosophically, they all value ‘wilderness’ as resource. A spiritual resource, yes, rather than an ‘ecosystem service’ or a ‘standing reserve’ – but still a resource. Abbey proposes these in part to move past them, I think, towards a more radical ‘intrinsic value’ argument: that we need wilderness not for our sake, but for its own sake. ‘I am not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness,’ declares Abbey, ‘the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man.’ Echoing Thoreau, he holds it axiomatic that humanity ‘leave[s] some life pasturing freely where we never wander’.

In his memoir Grizzly Years (1990), Abbey’s friend and fellow outdoorsman Doug Peacock – allegedly the model for Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang – recalls that the years when Abbey was writing Desert Solitaire were also the years when the idea of ‘wilderness’ came under attack. ‘After Vietnam I saw the world changing with amazing rapidity,’ remembered Peacock, ‘with a violent tempo that I had not noticed before 1968 … The entire concept of wilderness as a place beyond the constraints of culture and human society was itself up for grabs.’