panguitch's Full Review: Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire: A Season in the W...
Edward Abbey might get under your skin or he might make you want to dynamite a dam. For me it's both. But more than anything he makes me want to flee my office, drive away from the city as fast as my car will go, abandon it when it can't go any farther, walk until I can't walk any farther, and take a few days to look around and see where I've ended up. Assuming that's still possible in this age, that there are still a few square miles of wilderness someplace where you won't get pelted by golf balls or run over by some overcompensating putz in a Hummer.
Abbey calls Desert Solitaire a tombstone, a memorial for a land that was paved over, dug out, and dammed up right before his eyes. Published in 1968 it describes his time ten years earlier, working for several seasons as a park ranger in Arches, near Moab, Utah. He describes his time there, often the only person in the 33,000 acre park, and his adventures in other remote areas of southeastern Utah and with the townspeople, uranium miners, cowboys and Indians who live there.
His take on these people is humorous but warm. It's for the corporation and the government he saves his bitterness. His dystopic prophecy of "industrial tourism," where the national parks become national parking lots and the wilderness a highway for people too lazy to step farther from their cars than it takes to snap a photo that's no different from the postcards sold at the convenience stations where they pay their taxes to the auto-industrial complex has come to pass just as surely as the Glen Canyon Dam has drowned 200 miles of irreplaceable canyonlands under Lake Powell.
Separating these portraits and tirades are luxurious descriptions of the land. Abbey describes this world with such care I feel I'm standing there (as indeed I have), the yellow cactus flower bright against the plant's green flesh, bright against the vibrant red rock surrounding me, bright as the hot sun's shine on the black eye of the raven who cocks his head, perched on the withered branch of a juniper that clutches to the cracks in the face of a sandstone fin.
Alone but not lonely ("I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation."), this Thoreau of the Desert waxes philosophical. He strains to resist the impulse to anthropomorphize the desert, to attach human motives to it. He denies the human need to seek understanding, awakening, or divine intention in the desert; refuses to find meaning in it.
His is a serene, noble nihilism, accepting only the objectivity of rock: "The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert."
He is, perhaps, a misanthrope, resenting the tourists who disturb his solitude, equating Los Angeles with death. But neither does he fit neatly in the current conception of the environmentalist. While he conscientiously spares an intruding rattlesnake he torments ants and kills a rabbit when the whim takes him. He drinks, he smokes, he eats red meat. He carves his initials in the trunks of quaking aspens (making me cringe). As much a redneck naturalist as a radical conservationist, Abbey presents contradictions that defy the political classifications of the 21st century.
Abbey's later novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is credited with inspiring the formation of Earth First! and providing a recipe for eco-terrorists everywhere. Such people forget that it's a satirical work of fiction.
It's too easy to see in Abbey a revolutionary. Instead I see a cantankerous man with a large sense of humor. A man who enjoyed his fellow human beings in small doses, separated by periods of time spent alone with indifferent rock and sand, reassuring himself that there is a reality, and it is independent of humans and their self-obsessions.
I'm grateful for this man who so surely stokes my own love for this same red desert, whose every quip and tantrum feels like it's taken from my own heart, even when I only half believe it. These things he says in the stillness of ecstasy, when every man speaks truth because there's no one to hear. Only the sun, sky, wind and sand; the piñon, sage, snake and owl; the river and the endless rock.
A passionately felt, deeply poetic book. It has philosophy. It has humor. It has its share of nerve-tingling adventures...set down in a lean, racing p...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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