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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.’

The nature of that attack was in part industrial, and in part conceptual-intellectual. The conceptual attack on wilderness went, among other names, by that of ‘constructivism’. Constructivism broadly argues that the physical world is inaccessibly withdrawn from human encounter, that all knowledge is mediated through language and other forms of discourse, and therefore that meaning is invariably ‘assigned’ to phenomena, rather than arising from them. ‘Nature’ is no longer allowed its autonomy, becoming at most a hybrid and co-produced chimera, and ‘wilderness’ is an ideological spectre – a space of exclusion summoned into being by the activities of power.

The political aims of constructivism were at heart admirable: by demonstrating the contingency of all discourse, entrenched positions and assumptions (concerning ‘gender’ or ‘race’, for instance) might be deconstructed and then rebuilt in more inclusive or progressive ways. And the constructivist critique of wilderness thought was, in several respects, necessary and valuable. The work of scholars such as William Cronon and Max Oelschlaeger was vital in laying bare the histories of exclusion that the ideas of ‘wilderness’, especially ‘pristine wilderness’, have enabled or motivated through history, from the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous populations from areas later designated as National Parks and public lands during and after the ‘Indian Wars’, through to the questionable ‘green imperialism’ of some later twentieth-century large-scale conservation projects. Yes, hegemony was constructivism’s target, and it brought about a political revolution, the reverberations of which are still being felt today.

Constructivism can exert its own hegemony, however. By arguing for meaning as invariably ‘made’ by socio-cultural systems, it leaves the more-than-human world stripped of agency and valency. Nature is elided, rendered unable to participate in its own representations. Constructivism sought to give voice to minorities who had been repressed by the structuring of discourse – but in the case of the natural world, constructivism left the ‘other’ of creature, plant and ecosystem silenced. By disallowing what Eileen Crist calls – in her landmark 2004 essay ‘Against the Social Construction of Nature and Wilderness’ – the ‘self-organizing, self-determining nonhuman habitats and habits, operational for millennia before human presence’, it endorsed and advanced a hard anthropocentrism. Because – according to constructivism – there is no longer any ‘nature’ and no ‘wild’, because we have all accepted the culturally constructed and always already artefactual status of such designations, there is nothing to stop us technologically remaking our landscapes without reference to such sentimental antiquarianisms as ‘biodiversity’, ‘ecological baselines’ or ‘uniqueness’. Onwards, therefore, into a fully automated future! Long live shifting baseline syndrome! Endless growth on a finite planet! For some time now, those who speak up for either making or saving significant space for more-than-human nature – or what in the American Wilderness Act of 1964 is called ‘the earth and its community of life’ – have found themselves quickly denounced as ‘romantic’ or ‘nostalgic’. But when I hear the word ‘nostalgic’, I reach for my Abbey.

We are at a fascinating moment in the modern history of ‘wilderness thought’. ‘Re-wilding’ movements are gathering pace in Britain and Europe, working with a freshly flexible definition of ‘wilderness’ to create new habitat for both human and the more-than-human inhabitants. Falling birth rates and population flight from the countryside across Europe are leaving opportunities for the return and freer movement of creaturely life, and for the increasing ‘wilderness’ as it is defined by the European Commission: ‘area[s] governed by natural processes … composed of native habitats and species, and large enough for the effective ecological functioning of natural processes … unmodified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.’ I think Abbey would have approved of this definition and what it encouraged: a forward-looking, dynamic understanding of ‘near-wilderness’, with biodiversity and self-determination at its core, and baselines taken into account, but with a respect for nature’s capacities for improvisation and resilience also implicit.

In America, however, the opposite momentum is underway. Trump and Ryan Zinke’s attack on public land designations is part of a broader attack on the rights and needs of the ‘community of life’ beyond the human, opening across multiple fronts. Abbey’s argument for ‘keeping the wild’ based on ‘intrinsic value’, and his declared readiness to fight for the rights of wildland and its creatures, seem more important than ever. He saw Trump coming, and foretold what he called the growing threat to ‘the majority of our national parks and national forests, despite the illusory protection of the Wilderness Preservation Act – unless a great many citizens rear up on their hind legs and make vigorous political gestures.’ Desert Solitaire was one of Abbey’s most powerful ‘political gestures’, and it still hums with relevance today, half a century on from its publication. I end this essay (written in an American wilderness area) by quoting from the final lines of Abbey’s preface (written, of course, in a bar), in which he makes clear that his book is not a dallying with the desert picturesque, a Bierstadt-Baedeker, but a rousing call to action:

This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?

Robert Macfarlane,

Dolly Sods Wilderness,

Monongahela National Forest,

West Virginia, February 2018.

Author’s Introduction

About ten years ago I took a job as a seasonal park ranger in a place called Arches National Monument near the little town of Moab in southeast Utah. Why I went there no longer matters; what I found there is the subject of this book.

My job began on the first of April and ended on the last day of September. I liked the work and the canyon country and returned the following year for a second season. I would have returned the third year too and each year thereafter but unfortunately for me the Arches, a primitive place when I first went there, was developed and improved so well that I had to leave. But after a number of years I returned anyway, traveling full circle, and stayed for a third season. In this way I was better able to appreciate the changes which had been made during my absence.

Those were all good times, especially the first two seasons when the tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood. There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing, and most of the substance of this book is drawn, sometimes direct and unchanged, from the pages of the journals I kept and filled through the undivided, seamless days of those marvelous summers. The remainder of the book consists of digressions and excursions into ideas and places that border in varied ways upon that central season in the canyonlands.

This is not primarily a book about the desert. In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.

Aside from this modest pretension the book is fairly plain and straight. Certain faults will be obvious to the general reader, of course, and for these I wish to apologize. 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. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so. To others I can only say that if the book has virtues they cannot be disentangled from the faults; that there is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.

It will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. There are many people who say they have, I know, but they’ve been luckier than I.

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?

Regrettably I have found it unavoidable to write some harsh words about my seasonal employer the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, United States Government. Even the Government itself has not entirely escaped censure. I wish to point out therefore that the Park Service has labored under severe pressure from powerful forces for many decades and that under the circumstances and so far it has done its work rather well. As governmental agencies go the Park Service is a good one, far superior to most. This I attribute not to the administrators of the Park Service – like administrators everywhere they are distinguished chiefly by their ineffable mediocrity – but to the actual working rangers and naturalists in the field, the majority of whom are capable, honest, dedicated men. Pre-eminent among those I have known personally is Mr. Bates Wilson of Moab, Utah, who might justly be considered the founder of Canyonlands National Park. He cannot be held responsible for any of the opinions expressed herein, but he is responsible for much of what understanding I have of a country we both love.

A note on names. All of the persons and places mentioned in this book are or were real. However for the sake of their privacy I have invented fictitious names for some of the people I once knew in the Moab area and in a couple of cases relocated them in space and time. Those who read this will, I hope, understand and forgive me; the others will not mind.

Finally a word of caution:

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?

E. A.

April 1967

Nelson’s Marine Bar

Hoboken

Epigraph

Give me silence, water, hope

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes

– Neruda

The First Morning

This is the most beautiful place on earth.

There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farm house two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome – there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.

For myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it – the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky – all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.

The choice became apparent to me this morning when I stepped out of a Park Service housetrailer – my caravan – to watch for the first time in my life the sun come up over the hoodoo stone of Arches National Monument.

I wasn’t able to see much of it last night. After driving all day from Albuquerque – 450 miles – I reached Moab after dark in cold, windy, clouded weather. At park headquarters north of town I met the superintendent and the chief ranger, the only permanent employees, except for one maintenance man, in this particular unit of America’s national park system. After coffee they gave me a key to the housetrailer and directions on how to reach it; I am required to live and work not at headquarters but at this one-man station some twenty miles back in the interior, on my own. The way I wanted it, naturally, or I’d never have asked for the job.

Leaving the headquarters area and the lights of Moab, I drove twelve miles farther north on the highway until I came to a dirt road on the right, where a small wooden sign pointed the way: Arches National Monument Eight Miles. I left the pavement, turned east into the howling wilderness. Wind roaring out of the northwest, black clouds across the stars – all I could see were clumps of brush and scattered junipers along the roadside. Then another modest signboard:

WARNING: QUICKSAND

DO NOT CROSS WASH

WHEN WATER IS RUNNING

The wash looked perfectly dry in my headlights. I drove down, across, up the other side and on into the night. Glimpses of weird humps of pale rock on either side, like petrified elephants, dinosaurs, stone-age hobgoblins. Now and then something alive scurried across the road: kangaroo mice, a jackrabbit, an animal that looked like a cross between a raccoon and a squirrel – the ringtail cat. Farther on a pair of mule deer started from the brush and bounded obliquely through the beams of my lights, raising puffs of dust which the wind, moving faster than my pickup truck, caught and carried ahead of me out of sight into the dark. The road, narrow and rocky, twisted sharply left and right, dipped in and out of tight ravines, climbing by degrees toward a summit which I would see only in the light of the coming day.

Snow was swirling through the air when I crossed the unfenced line and passed the boundary marker of the park. A quarter-mile beyond I found the ranger station – a wide place in the road, an informational display under a lean-to shelter, and fifty yards away the little tin government housetrailer where I would be living for the next six months.

A cold night, a cold wind, the snow falling like confetti. In the lights of the truck I unlocked the housetrailer, got out bedroll and baggage and moved in. By flashlight I found the bed, unrolled my sleeping bag, pulled off my boots and crawled in and went to sleep at once. The last I knew was the shaking of the trailer in the wind and the sound, from inside, of hungry mice scampering around with the good news that their long lean lonesome winter was over – their friend and provider had finally arrived.

This morning I awake before sunrise, stick my head out of the sack, peer through a frosty window at a scene dim and vague with flowing mists, dark fantastic shapes looming beyond. An unlikely landscape.

I get up, moving about in long underwear and socks, stooping carefully under the low ceiling and lower doorways of the housetrailer, a machine for living built so efficiently and compactly there’s hardly room for a man to breathe. An iron lung it is, with windows and Venetian blinds.

The mice are silent, watching me from their hiding places, but the wind is still blowing and outside the ground is covered with snow. Cold as a tomb, a jail, a cave; I lie down on the dusty floor, on the cold linoleum sprinkled with mouse turds, and light the pilot on the butane heater. Once this thing gets going the place warms up fast, in a dense unhealthy way, with a layer of heat under the ceiling where my head is and nothing but frigid air from the knees down. But we’ve got all the indispensable conveniences: gas cookstove, gas refrigerator, hot water heater, sink with running water (if the pipes aren’t frozen), storage cabinets and shelves, everything within arm’s reach of everything else. The gas comes from two steel bottles in a shed outside; the water comes by gravity flow from a tank buried in a hill close by. Quite luxurious for the wilds. There’s even a shower stall and a flush toilet with a dead rat in the bowl. Pretty soft. My poor mother raised five children without any of these luxuries and might be doing without them yet if it hadn’t been for Hitler, war and general prosperity.

Time to get dressed, get out and have a look at the lay of the land, fix a breakfast. I try to pull on my boots but they’re stiff as iron from the cold. I light a burner on the stove and hold the boots upside down above the flame until they are malleable enough to force my feet into. I put on a coat and step outside. Into the center of the world, God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the red wasteland.

The sun is not yet in sight but signs of the advent are plain to see. Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold. Southeast, twenty miles by line of sight, stand the peaks of the Sierra La Sal, twelve to thirteen thousand feet above sea level, all covered with snow and rosy in the morning sunlight. The air is dry and clear as well as cold; the last fogbanks left over from last night’s storm are scudding away like ghosts, fading into nothing before the wind and the sunrise.

The view is open and perfect in all directions except to the west where the ground rises and the skyline is only a few hundred yards away. Looking toward the mountains I can see the dark gorge of the Colorado River five or six miles away, carved through the sandstone mesa, though nothing of the river itself down inside the gorge. Southward, on the far side of the river, lies the Moab valley between thousand-foot walls of rock, with the town of Moab somewhere on the valley floor, too small to be seen from here. Beyond the Moab valley is more canyon and tableland stretching away to the Blue Mountains fifty miles south. On the north and northwest I see the Roan Cliffs and the Book Cliffs, the two-level face of the Uinta Plateau. Along the foot of those cliffs, maybe thirty miles off, invisible from where I stand, runs U.S. 6–50, a major east-west artery of commerce, traffic and rubbish, and the main line of the Denver-Rio Grande Railroad. To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado – a sea of desert.

Within this vast perimeter, in the middle ground and foreground of the picture, a rather personal demesne, are the 33,000 acres of Arches National Monument of which I am now sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian.

What are the Arches? From my place in front of the housetrailer I can see several of the hundred or more of them which have been discovered in the park. These are natural arches, holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension. They range in size from holes just big enough to walk through to openings large enough to contain the dome of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Some resemble jug handles or flying buttresses, others natural bridges but with this technical distinction: a natural bridge spans a watercourse – a natural arch does not. The arches were formed through hundreds of thousands of years by the weathering of the huge sandstone walls, or fins, in which they are found. Not the work of a cosmic hand, nor sculptured by sand-bearing winds, as many people prefer to believe, the arches came into being and continue to come into being through the modest wedging action of rainwater, melting snow, frost, and ice, aided by gravity. In color they shade from off-white through buff, pink, brown and red, tones which also change with the time of day and the moods of the light, the weather, the sky.

Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not – at least there’s nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.

The snow-covered ground glimmers with a dull blue light, reflecting the sky and the approaching sunrise. Leading away from me the narrow dirt road, an alluring and primitive track into nowhere, meanders down the slope and toward the heart of the labyrinth of naked stone. Near the first group of arches, looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre.

Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Well – the sun will be up in a few minutes and I haven’t even begun to make coffee. I take more baggage from my pickup, the grub box and cooking gear, go back in the trailer and start breakfast. Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite. The orange juice is frozen, the milk slushy with ice. Still chilly enough inside the trailer to turn my breath to vapor. When the first rays of the sun strike the cliffs I fill a mug with steaming coffee and sit in the doorway facing the sunrise, hungry for the warmth.

Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, on the canyon walls and through the windows in the sandstone fins. We greet each other, sun and I, across the black void of ninety-three million miles. The snow glitters between us, acres of diamonds almost painful to look at. Within an hour all the snow exposed to the sunlight will be gone and the rock will be damp and steaming. Within minutes, even as I watch, melting snow begins to drip from the branches of a juniper nearby; drops of water streak slowly down the side of the trailerhouse.

I am not alone after all. Three ravens are wheeling near the balanced rock, squawking at each other and at the dawn. I’m sure they’re as delighted by the return of the sun as I am and I wish I knew the language. I’d sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse. First things first. The ravens cry out in husky voices, blue-black wings flapping against the golden sky. Over my shoulder comes the sizzle and smell of frying bacon.

That’s the way it was this morning.

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