Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

Edward Abbey was a young park ranger at what was then known as Arches National Monument when, one day, he heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the trail. Knowing this was forbidden, Abbey stepped out to confront the interloper, only to find representatives from the National Park Service, out to survey the path of a paved road. It was then, Abbey describes, that he knew it was all up for Arches. A road would bring cars, which would bring people, and soon the wilderness of Arches would be turned into another Disneyland. It's hard to say he was wrong--Arches receives up to two million visitors each year these days, so many that the Park Service had to institute a timed entry program this year. Those millions find something sublime in the wild formations of the canyonlands, but few of them find anything that could be described as wilderness.

What Abbey calls "industrial tourism" is one of the targets of Desert Solitaire, a book of essays cobbled together from Abbey's experience as a park ranger at Arches over two summers in the 1950s. When not sandwiched into an entry booth, Abbey traveled the back roads of Arches and the area known as the "canyonlands"--now the name of a national park to Arches' south, which preserves some of the most remote and forbidding landscapes that Abbey traversed--hiking, paddling, and helping ranchers drive their cows from the deep canyons. I got to see that country this past week, although I'm more of an "industrial tourist" than Abbey would have approved of. And the best thing about Desert Solitaire is the way that Abbey evokes the landscape of the desert: its strangeness, its solitude, and its natural beauty. I was captivated by a section where Abbey descends into the Maze, a section of Canyonlands National Park known for its challenging remoteness. In another essay, Abbey describes being part of a search and rescue operation that brings back the body of an unprepared hiker not far from the park's Grand View Point. I stood at Grand View Point, and looked down at that landscape; the thought of being lost in it gave me chills. Abbey imagines, perhaps kindly, perhaps presumptuously, that in his last moments the man experienced something of the sublimity that only being alone in such a landscape can bring.

For a long time, Abbey was a patron saint of environmentalists, but many of the ideas in Desert Solitaire struck me as uncouth and outdated. The road, and the cars that drive on it, are bad for the soul--fair enough--but in Abbey's estimation, the people who arrive are bad for the soul of the park. The intrusion of the road is the intrusion of development; development is the result of a booming population; maybe you can see where I'm going for this. Even when Abbey's misanthropy is lighthearted, there is a tinge of the old eugenic idea that we'd be better off with fewer people. This attitude has always struck me as exclusionary--why should Abbey be the one who gets to enjoy the wilderness, while others are dismissed as the meaningless horde? Wilderness might be good for the soul, but it's also common property, and Abbey's beloved Arches belong to all of us. It's no wonder that, later in life, Abbey voiced support for ending immigration, not just to limit the number of people in the country, but because those coming in were less deserving. Such attitudes are inevitably hierarchical, and therefore ugly.

But Abbey's not wrong about "industrial tourism," and he knows the desert. I was struck by his explanation for what he finds so appealing about the desert, as opposed to the forest or the sea. The desert, in Abbey's mind, offers little in the way of symbolism or myth; it simply is itself. By its every existence it confronts us with something inhuman, and thus beautiful; it resists human attempts to assign meaning to it. Perhaps that's true. If it is, I wonder if it's true of the desert and nowhere else. Certainly you feel something alien in the landscape, something that cannot be possessed or handled. My friends described Canyonlands with words like alien and inhuman; to me, the word was aloof. "The desert says nothing," Abbey writes. "Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation. In its simplicity and order it suggests the classical, except that the desert is a realm beyond the human and in the classicist view only the human is regarded as significant or even recognized as real."

I think Abbey would have done better to realize that the human is significant, not as being separate from the desert, but from being in it. The Navajo he describes rather condescendingly might have told him as much. And yet, there's something to that description of the desert, which is indeed difficult to love, but lovely to contemplate, and which speaks to us by seemingly saying nothing at all.