Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
“What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What
are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us? Precisely what did these two
enraptured gopher snakes have in mind when they came gliding toward my eyes
over the naked sandstone? If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible
to fear I might have learned something new, or some truth so old we have all
forgotten it!”
The above passage appears near the beginning of Desert Solitaire, the first of Edward
Abbey’s books to catch my attention and reinforce my love of wilderness. His
descriptions of the parched landscape in and around Arches National Monument
The book, Desert
Solitaire, does not stop there. Abbey also included an angry polemic on
mechanized (he uses the term industrial) tourism, decrying the destruction of
natural parks by roads and motors. He felt that the parks are best seen on
foot.
The book also includes stories of the people of this desert land.
Abbey appears to be sympathetic with the solitary prospector, unable to compete
with corporate mining interests, the small rancher put out of business by
agribusiness, the unemployed cowboys, and the Indians. For a man sometimes
labeled a misanthrope, he includes a lot of sympathetic stories of these
people.
My favorite of all the essays and stories in this lovely
book though is simply titled “The Moon Eyed Horse.” In this narrative, Abbey
walks up a box canyon trying to recapture a feral horse, blind in one eye and
roaming the land after escape from a local ranch. The horse lived on its own
for several years. He fails to capture “Ole’ Moon Eye,” and seems sympathetic
to the horse, almost appearing to envy its wild state.
Though Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future
where the work of man continues to erode wilderness, his most prophetic
passages are perhaps those in the chapter titled “The Dead Man at Grandview
Point.” In this chapter, Abbey has joined a search party to find an elderly man
missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he recorded his feelings
of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial
in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last
request, years later:
“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place
like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert
colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of
the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding
landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a
twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and
sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of
rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah,
New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater
mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon,
and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the
curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world
of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”
- Reviewed
by Ray Zimmerman
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