Desert Solitaire
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Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying.
Just finished reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. I like to think of them as essays by a curmudgeon who truly celebrated the wild and being out in it. Alone but hardly lonely, here was a man who cared deeply for our wildest places and wrote about them as he lived in them: passionately. A true conservationist, we could all learn from him and his desire to keep the natural places as they are. Keep the motorized vehicles to a minimum in National Parks. Keep the paved roads out. Get out of our refrigerated boxes and breathe the fresh air and have a look around! Walk and actually see the beauty that surrounds you!
Whether he was writing about rafting down the Colorado River before it changes forever due to the addition of another dam, or his "ownership" of the arches at the end of his first summer as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, you feel every bit of his fierce desire to protect the land coming through in every word. You feel his kinship with every tree, rock and tumbleweed that he comes across, every snake he brings into his camper to take care of the mouse population.
I am grateful for his words, his many pilgrimages, his anger and his willingness to show it. It is the fierce protectors who are the guardians and stewards of this beautiful land.
He is one minute cranky environmentalist and the next touching wordsmith. "If no one is looking for you write your will in the sand and let the wind carry your words and signature east to the borders of Colorado and south to the pillars of Monument Valley - someday, never fear, your bare elegant bones will be discovered and wondered and marveled at."
This is a great collection of essays which I recommend. I look forward to reading more of his work.
Freedom vs. civilization
When Edward Abbey died in 1989 he left behind a body of work--both fiction and essays--tolling his anarchistic, environmentalist social criticism. Yet his 1968 nonfictional "Desert Solitaire" remains the book for which, appropriately, he is most remembered.
Based on his seasonal job as park ranger at Arches National Monument during the 1950s, it is an unforgettable book. It makes the reader want to follow Abbey out into the desert, with a parting raspberry for "syphilization," as he calls it.
Alone and at times lonely, Abbey lived three summers in a tin trailer 20 miles from Moab, Utah--though sleeping under the stars and avoiding his government-supplied home as much as possible. Occasionally he jawed with a smattering of tourists, at times pursued outdoor adventures with likeminded misfits and cowboys, but generally remained solitaire. Just Abbey, the desert and its array of living things--animal, vegetable, and, for him, mineral. The mountains and sand, the rocks and rivers, became for Abbey a living organism, the desert, that would outlive all others.
Taken largely from his desert journals, the book quenches like cool water from an oasis. A first glance, however, would show only scattered essays, polemics, travel adventures, philosophy, science, sarcasm, hearsay, and amateur anthropology (Abbey's ongoing study of "rattus urbanus," which summers in the desert). But dig just a bit and you find issuing forth a steady, sustaining and vivifying narrative: The story of a sensual man (admittedly driven somewhat insane by his hermitage) striving, with great verve and courage, to live fully and, with great wit, intelligence, and heart, to comprehend his world.
Our protagonist, Abbey, holds these disparate musings and adventures together by the force of his character: his iconoclasm, his thoughtfulness, his raw energy. Like Thoreau he sets out "to confront the elemental," non-human world in the desert--a typically American urge, particularly manifest out West, to seek solace in solitude. And like Thoreau what he finds there is himself.
An admitted sensualist, he relishes sleeping on hard ground and feeling the fluid motion of his own body as he climbs mountains and swims rivers; he cherishes the hardscrabble life of a cowboy (work he performs on his days off) and the smooth feel of good whiskey or a friendly woman. But most of all he loves freedom. And here in the desert he finds it and wonders how Man can keep it.
The question and quest of freedom are never far from his mind, whether waxing poetic or polemical. He muses on the spareness and simplicity of the desert--two qualities he admires in most things--where "the living organism [including Abbey] stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock."
But then, typically, he adds to his aesthetic judgment his philosophic: "Love flowers best in openness and freedom." This, like most of Abbey's judgments here, has the ring of truth and rightness and leaves the reader nodding in agreement and regret.
Despite such occasional philosophic delicacy, Abbey is anything but sweetness and light. His pen pours corrosive acid on modernity, government (namely, the Park Service, dam builders, and Bureau of Indian Affairs), and Industrial Tourism, as he calls it, which works to enrich the auto and hotel industries at nature's expense.
Yet his unbridled contempt for contemporary culture, mankind, and mechanistic life is leavened by his wit, as when he refers to himself not as an atheist but an "earthiest." And when he cautions an uncomprehending elderly tourist on the dangers of television: a vacuum tube capable of sucking out her brain.
Though Abbey rises through these pages rough-edged, misanthropic, vitriolic, or vulgar, we never forget that we are in the company of an intelligent, educated writer, Stanford-trained and invoking Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence (both of them), Balzac, and Hegel. But we enjoy his company nonetheless, for his reverence for nature and wilderness, for his risking his life (which he almost loses on a few occasions) in his worship of it, for his humanity and honesty. And for the lessons he teaches us and the poignant journeys he invites us on--like his raft trip down Glen Canyon, now lost to view thanks to the damming of the Colorado.
Along the way he finds God--or some facsimile--in the eternal resiliency of the desert: "Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas--the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course."
Such is optimism Abbey-style. Yet the reader senses our species' tenacity and combativeness in Abbey's informed fierceness, and leaves his desert reassured and reverent.
One of my favorite books of all time.
The first of many great books by Edward Abbey. This one concerns his early trips to the southwestern US to work in National Parks and Monuments. This is a series of essays about his experiences as a young man from New York adapting to the desert southwest. Highly recommended. I bought this hardcover edition for my library after I gave away my paperback to a friend who will be vacationing this summer in some of the parks mentioned in the book.
It was the rabbit that bothered me the most...
Edward Abbey has become an icon of the American environmentalist movement. He left the green rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, graduated from the University of New Mexico, and felt most at home in the American Southwest. Hum! Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, is his most famous work. It is an espousal of an anti-"developmental" creed; the setting is his one year's employment at Arches National Monument in Utah as a park ranger. He later went on to write The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.) no doubt this book is one of the main reasons you have to go through a metal detector and have your bags searched if you visit Glen Canyon Dam. The main character in the MWG is George Washington Hayduke, who is modeled on the very real life, Doug Peacock, a long-time friend and associate of Abbey, and if you want Peacock's side of the story, I highly recommend "Walking It Off."
When Abbey is "on", he is definitely on, and few could write so evocatively of the desert areas of the Southwest, with the implicit plea to: "let's just let things be." Try: "The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn." Abbey is erudite, and has read of the deserts of the world. How many others have read the works of a fellow curmudgeon, C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta? (p 239). How many others would reference the atonal work of Schoenberg?: "...although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert" (p 255).
But it is his social commentary, and yes, conscious, that is the real cornerstone of his fame. Consider: "They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human." And he goes to make the harsh prediction that these latter-day seven cities of Cibola will likewise be abandoned and buried, as were their predecessors. Succinct expressions of the fate of the American Indians are tied to the dispossessed and lumen-proletariat of the world: "...or the tarpaper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff and Shiprock, it's the same the world over--one big wretched gamily sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries."
Others have compared Abbey, or at least his vision, to Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and other environmentalist pioneers. I can't. Both Peacock and the solid biography of Abbey by James Bishop, Epitaph For A Desert Anarchist: The Life And Legacy Of Edward Abbey," describe his numerous flaws; a strong strain of misanthropy being one of them. You don't love nature more but heaping abuse on the humans who have, all too many times, abused it in turn. But I didn't have to rely on the opinions of others to reach this conclusion, it is right there in this book: picking up the stone, and killing the rabbit, not for food, but just to see what it is like. Why, oh why? And could one imagine any of the other three at the beginning of this paragraph doing same.
It is a fundamental problem for readers, and those who want to consider espousing the ideas of an individual, be that person Jean Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Robert Graves or so many others. When the person has "feet of clay," and the flaws are even evident in his/her writings, should not a person dock at least one star for the flaws, despite the fame?
Voice of Reason
The sixties are often labeled `tumultuous' which is as accurate as any label ever gets. For the first time since the Great Depression, a large number of rational and often intelligent Americans openly questioned the right of the duopoly (Democrat/Republican establishment) to govern and the real value of the military industrial complex to national security. The Civil Rights and anti-War Movements served as the catalyst for these Americans, but their questioning of established authority went beyond social injustice and a lunatic war. Unfortunately there was no unity of purpose, but many splinter movements looking for different rainbows. One of these splinter movements was driven by environmentalism and within this rubric was the drive to preserve U.S. wilderness areas in pristine condition as refuges from the gasoline civilization that the U.S. had become in the fifties.
All of which brings us to this remarkably good and ageless 1968 book about one man's experiences as a part time ranger at the Arches National Monument in South Eastern Utah. Abbey is a marvelous nature writer, who reflects the sixties view of preservation perfectly. His argument is really quite simple: there were many places in the U.S. that really ought not to be developed into suburban enclaves or massive parking lots. He takes the U.S. Park Service to particular task because under the guise of increased accessibility it was ruining wilderness areas with an excess of paved roads, commercialism, and general suburbanization. Like many thinkers of the sixties, Abbey argues against the homogenization of American Society, the mindless construction of dams (and canals), and, of course, the commercialization of everything.
Well he and his fellow `activists' from the sixties were absolutely right and, even before Global Warming became the political football it is today, they saw humans as stewards an increasingly fragile earth. It is too bad they lost all the arguments they put forward and the establishment won. Drill baby Drill!
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Price: $10.17
You Save: $4.78 (32%)
Description
When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form -- the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry.
Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.
Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying.
Customer Reviews
Made me want to head straight to the desert...Just finished reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. I like to think of them as essays by a curmudgeon who truly celebrated the wild and being out in it. Alone but hardly lonely, here was a man who cared deeply for our wildest places and wrote about them as he lived in them: passionately. A true conservationist, we could all learn from him and his desire to keep the natural places as they are. Keep the motorized vehicles to a minimum in National Parks. Keep the paved roads out. Get out of our refrigerated boxes and breathe the fresh air and have a look around! Walk and actually see the beauty that surrounds you!
Whether he was writing about rafting down the Colorado River before it changes forever due to the addition of another dam, or his "ownership" of the arches at the end of his first summer as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, you feel every bit of his fierce desire to protect the land coming through in every word. You feel his kinship with every tree, rock and tumbleweed that he comes across, every snake he brings into his camper to take care of the mouse population.
I am grateful for his words, his many pilgrimages, his anger and his willingness to show it. It is the fierce protectors who are the guardians and stewards of this beautiful land.
He is one minute cranky environmentalist and the next touching wordsmith. "If no one is looking for you write your will in the sand and let the wind carry your words and signature east to the borders of Colorado and south to the pillars of Monument Valley - someday, never fear, your bare elegant bones will be discovered and wondered and marveled at."
This is a great collection of essays which I recommend. I look forward to reading more of his work.
Freedom vs. civilization
When Edward Abbey died in 1989 he left behind a body of work--both fiction and essays--tolling his anarchistic, environmentalist social criticism. Yet his 1968 nonfictional "Desert Solitaire" remains the book for which, appropriately, he is most remembered.
Based on his seasonal job as park ranger at Arches National Monument during the 1950s, it is an unforgettable book. It makes the reader want to follow Abbey out into the desert, with a parting raspberry for "syphilization," as he calls it.
Alone and at times lonely, Abbey lived three summers in a tin trailer 20 miles from Moab, Utah--though sleeping under the stars and avoiding his government-supplied home as much as possible. Occasionally he jawed with a smattering of tourists, at times pursued outdoor adventures with likeminded misfits and cowboys, but generally remained solitaire. Just Abbey, the desert and its array of living things--animal, vegetable, and, for him, mineral. The mountains and sand, the rocks and rivers, became for Abbey a living organism, the desert, that would outlive all others.
Taken largely from his desert journals, the book quenches like cool water from an oasis. A first glance, however, would show only scattered essays, polemics, travel adventures, philosophy, science, sarcasm, hearsay, and amateur anthropology (Abbey's ongoing study of "rattus urbanus," which summers in the desert). But dig just a bit and you find issuing forth a steady, sustaining and vivifying narrative: The story of a sensual man (admittedly driven somewhat insane by his hermitage) striving, with great verve and courage, to live fully and, with great wit, intelligence, and heart, to comprehend his world.
Our protagonist, Abbey, holds these disparate musings and adventures together by the force of his character: his iconoclasm, his thoughtfulness, his raw energy. Like Thoreau he sets out "to confront the elemental," non-human world in the desert--a typically American urge, particularly manifest out West, to seek solace in solitude. And like Thoreau what he finds there is himself.
An admitted sensualist, he relishes sleeping on hard ground and feeling the fluid motion of his own body as he climbs mountains and swims rivers; he cherishes the hardscrabble life of a cowboy (work he performs on his days off) and the smooth feel of good whiskey or a friendly woman. But most of all he loves freedom. And here in the desert he finds it and wonders how Man can keep it.
The question and quest of freedom are never far from his mind, whether waxing poetic or polemical. He muses on the spareness and simplicity of the desert--two qualities he admires in most things--where "the living organism [including Abbey] stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock."
But then, typically, he adds to his aesthetic judgment his philosophic: "Love flowers best in openness and freedom." This, like most of Abbey's judgments here, has the ring of truth and rightness and leaves the reader nodding in agreement and regret.
Despite such occasional philosophic delicacy, Abbey is anything but sweetness and light. His pen pours corrosive acid on modernity, government (namely, the Park Service, dam builders, and Bureau of Indian Affairs), and Industrial Tourism, as he calls it, which works to enrich the auto and hotel industries at nature's expense.
Yet his unbridled contempt for contemporary culture, mankind, and mechanistic life is leavened by his wit, as when he refers to himself not as an atheist but an "earthiest." And when he cautions an uncomprehending elderly tourist on the dangers of television: a vacuum tube capable of sucking out her brain.
Though Abbey rises through these pages rough-edged, misanthropic, vitriolic, or vulgar, we never forget that we are in the company of an intelligent, educated writer, Stanford-trained and invoking Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence (both of them), Balzac, and Hegel. But we enjoy his company nonetheless, for his reverence for nature and wilderness, for his risking his life (which he almost loses on a few occasions) in his worship of it, for his humanity and honesty. And for the lessons he teaches us and the poignant journeys he invites us on--like his raft trip down Glen Canyon, now lost to view thanks to the damming of the Colorado.
Along the way he finds God--or some facsimile--in the eternal resiliency of the desert: "Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas--the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course."
Such is optimism Abbey-style. Yet the reader senses our species' tenacity and combativeness in Abbey's informed fierceness, and leaves his desert reassured and reverent.
One of my favorite books of all time.
The first of many great books by Edward Abbey. This one concerns his early trips to the southwestern US to work in National Parks and Monuments. This is a series of essays about his experiences as a young man from New York adapting to the desert southwest. Highly recommended. I bought this hardcover edition for my library after I gave away my paperback to a friend who will be vacationing this summer in some of the parks mentioned in the book.
It was the rabbit that bothered me the most...
Edward Abbey has become an icon of the American environmentalist movement. He left the green rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, graduated from the University of New Mexico, and felt most at home in the American Southwest. Hum! Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, is his most famous work. It is an espousal of an anti-"developmental" creed; the setting is his one year's employment at Arches National Monument in Utah as a park ranger. He later went on to write The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.) no doubt this book is one of the main reasons you have to go through a metal detector and have your bags searched if you visit Glen Canyon Dam. The main character in the MWG is George Washington Hayduke, who is modeled on the very real life, Doug Peacock, a long-time friend and associate of Abbey, and if you want Peacock's side of the story, I highly recommend "Walking It Off."
When Abbey is "on", he is definitely on, and few could write so evocatively of the desert areas of the Southwest, with the implicit plea to: "let's just let things be." Try: "The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn." Abbey is erudite, and has read of the deserts of the world. How many others have read the works of a fellow curmudgeon, C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta? (p 239). How many others would reference the atonal work of Schoenberg?: "...although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert" (p 255).
But it is his social commentary, and yes, conscious, that is the real cornerstone of his fame. Consider: "They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human." And he goes to make the harsh prediction that these latter-day seven cities of Cibola will likewise be abandoned and buried, as were their predecessors. Succinct expressions of the fate of the American Indians are tied to the dispossessed and lumen-proletariat of the world: "...or the tarpaper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff and Shiprock, it's the same the world over--one big wretched gamily sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries."
Others have compared Abbey, or at least his vision, to Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and other environmentalist pioneers. I can't. Both Peacock and the solid biography of Abbey by James Bishop, Epitaph For A Desert Anarchist: The Life And Legacy Of Edward Abbey," describe his numerous flaws; a strong strain of misanthropy being one of them. You don't love nature more but heaping abuse on the humans who have, all too many times, abused it in turn. But I didn't have to rely on the opinions of others to reach this conclusion, it is right there in this book: picking up the stone, and killing the rabbit, not for food, but just to see what it is like. Why, oh why? And could one imagine any of the other three at the beginning of this paragraph doing same.
It is a fundamental problem for readers, and those who want to consider espousing the ideas of an individual, be that person Jean Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Robert Graves or so many others. When the person has "feet of clay," and the flaws are even evident in his/her writings, should not a person dock at least one star for the flaws, despite the fame?
Voice of Reason
The sixties are often labeled `tumultuous' which is as accurate as any label ever gets. For the first time since the Great Depression, a large number of rational and often intelligent Americans openly questioned the right of the duopoly (Democrat/Republican establishment) to govern and the real value of the military industrial complex to national security. The Civil Rights and anti-War Movements served as the catalyst for these Americans, but their questioning of established authority went beyond social injustice and a lunatic war. Unfortunately there was no unity of purpose, but many splinter movements looking for different rainbows. One of these splinter movements was driven by environmentalism and within this rubric was the drive to preserve U.S. wilderness areas in pristine condition as refuges from the gasoline civilization that the U.S. had become in the fifties.
All of which brings us to this remarkably good and ageless 1968 book about one man's experiences as a part time ranger at the Arches National Monument in South Eastern Utah. Abbey is a marvelous nature writer, who reflects the sixties view of preservation perfectly. His argument is really quite simple: there were many places in the U.S. that really ought not to be developed into suburban enclaves or massive parking lots. He takes the U.S. Park Service to particular task because under the guise of increased accessibility it was ruining wilderness areas with an excess of paved roads, commercialism, and general suburbanization. Like many thinkers of the sixties, Abbey argues against the homogenization of American Society, the mindless construction of dams (and canals), and, of course, the commercialization of everything.
Well he and his fellow `activists' from the sixties were absolutely right and, even before Global Warming became the political football it is today, they saw humans as stewards an increasingly fragile earth. It is too bad they lost all the arguments they put forward and the establishment won. Drill baby Drill!
BBC News said Edward Brown, prosecuting. The attack was disclosed at the Old Bailey as four men were given life sentences for knifing Sunday Essiet. Myles Maddy, 19, of Thamesmead, Ademola Docherty, 20, of Plumstead, Adeniyi Oloyede, 19, of Abbey Wood, Teenager attacked with acid after giving evidence Orphan killers given life terms
Democracy NowDoug Peacock on “Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Naturalist, adventurer and writer Doug Peacock talks about the Vietnam War, how grizzly bears saved his life, the wilderness, his friendship with the late writer Edward Abbey and more. One of Abbey's most famous characters, Hayduke, from his book The
Chicago Sun-Times'Twilight': America's latest, greatest baseball movieBy admin on May 13, 2009 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) BY ALISON ABBEY Special to Sports Pros(e) Move over, "Field of Dreams." Take a backseat, "The Natural." Hit the bench, "Mr. Baseball." There's a new flick putting everyone's