Desert Solitaire

“The parks, they say, are for people. At the main entrance to each national park and monument we shall erect a billboard one hundred feet high, two hundred feet wide, gorgeously filigreed in brilliant neon and outlined with blinker lights, exploding stars, flashing prayer wheels and great Byzantine phallic symbols that gush like geysers every thirty seconds.”

Here, Abbey is excoriating the creeping commercialization and cultivation of the remaining American wilderness, with characteristic irony but uncharacteristic hyperbole. Clearly, he is angry. It is worth pondering: what are the values he sees that drive the despoliation of our national parks?

“I was enjoying good health, not yet quite to the beginning of the middle of the journey. I listened gravely as he spoke of death, nodding in agreement I did not feel.”

In this passage, Abbey is describing his conversations with Roy Scobie, who fears death almost constantly. Abbey seems to indicate that he himself has little or no thought of death, that he does not viscerally sense his own mortality because he is too young to do so. And yet, Abbey is very sober throughout the book regarding the presence of death all around him, and his own eventual demise. 

“Our life on earth is but the shadow of a higher life, I could tell him. Or, Life is but a dream. Or, Who wants to live forever? Vanity, vanity. Recall Sophocles, Roy: Lucky are those who die in infancy but best of all is never to have been born.”

Here, Abbey is imagining what he might say to Roy Scobie, to offer him existential comfort as Scobie ruminates on his own imminent death. It’s unclear whether Abbey himself believes in these prospective words of comfort, or if he muses on them with some measure of ironic humor. It is also unclear, given Abbey’s appreciative yet occasionally brutal accounts of natural phenomena, whether he himself believes life is a blessing or a curse.

“The cow didn’t want to get up; she preferred the shade. I beat her with the club, kicked her in the ribs, yanked at her tail. At last, groaning and farting with exaggerated self-pity, she hoisted her rear end, then her front end, and plodded off to rejoin the gang.”

Abbey’s casual brutality here is striking, and his ironic characterization of the cow is merciless. Objectively speaking, being kicked in the ribs seems an appropriate occasion to moan in pain; “exaggerated self pity” would not be required.

“There are lonely hours. How can I deny it? There are times when solitaire becomes solitary, an entirely different game, a prison term, and the inside of the skull as confining and unbearable as the interior of the house trailer on a hot day.”

Remarkably, this is the first time in the book that Abbey complains of loneliness. Yet even here, he only alludes to it in passing. He seems to observe his own loneliness with dispassion, and as a passing event.

“When the working cowboy disappears, along with the genuine nonworking Indian, the make-believe cowboys flourish and multiply like flies on a pecan pie.”

Here, Abbey gives vent to his contempt for things–and people–that are, to his eyes, inauthentic and lacking in true substance. He sees, in contemporary culture, the unstoppable creeping erosion and corruption of traditions and lifestyles that truly feed the soul, and that honor humanity’s place in the natural order of things. 

“Long enough in the desert a man like other animals can learn to smell water.”

Abbey is no doubt referring to himself here. Through statements like these, he affirms that he himself is becoming, more and more, a native creature of the desert through his sojourn in Arches. This statement also emphasizes the necessity of water, the continual shortage of water in the desert, and the urgent need to find where it may be.

“Although I hesitate to deprive quicksand of its sinister glamour, I must confess I have not yet heard of a case where a machine, an animal or a man has actually sunk completely out of sight in the stuff. But it may have happened; it may be happening to somebody at this very moment. I sometimes regret that I was unable to perform a satisfactory experiment with my friend Newcomb when the chance presented itself; such opportunities come but rarely. But I needed him; he was among other things a good camp cook.”

With this wry commentary, Abbey concludes his account of the rescue of his friend Newcomb from quicksand. This is consistent with his implicit determination to avoid maudlin sentiments, though one would imagine that the saving of his friend’s life must have had some emotional impact on Abbey. Still, insofar as he allows himself to express emotion in this book, it is reserved for his observations of and elegies to wild nature, not his interactions or relations with other human beings.

“To human ears, their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common life.”

Abbey is referring here to the croaking of frogs after a desert rain. As he often does, he extols the foreign raptures he imagines are transpiring in wild nature. Yet there is also an echo here, particularly in the phrase “common life,” to his own yearning for society, one which he has admitted to in the previous chapter.

“I refer to the tiny oasis formed by the drilled well, its windmill and storage tanks. The windmill with its skeleton tower and creaking vanes is an object of beauty as significant in its way as the cottonwood tree, and the open tank at its foot, big enough to swim in, is a thing of joy to man and beast, no less worthy of praise than the desert spring.”

This is the first praise in the book that Abbey offers for any artifact of human technology. It is an acknowledgment, in a small way, of his own dependence on the luxuries of post-primitive human life, or perhaps, at last, it is an embrace of that which is distinctly human, and human-made, within the larger world of nature.

“[…] protest alone will not halt the iron glacier moving upon us. No matter; it’s of slight importance. Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them, under dunes of glowing sand, over which blue-eyed Navajo Bedouin will herd their sheep and horses, following the river in winter, the mountains in summer, and sometimes striking off across the desert toward the red canyons of Utah where great waterfalls plunge over silt-filled, ancient, mysterious dams.”

Here, Abbey references large-scale, geologic time. The edifices of human modernity will eventually and inevitably be overcome by the far stronger forces of nature. Abbey evinces satisfaction in the ultimate triumph of wildness.  

“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.”

This is one of the key arguments made, both implicitly and explicitly, throughout the book. Humans need the existence of wilderness, for reasons both expressible and inexpressible. In this chapter, Abbey goes on to argue that wilderness may come to be of very practical use if there is ever a need in this country to resist the domination of an authoritarian regime. But there are spiritual, emotional, and elemental reasons why humans need wilderness, many of which Abbey points to in the book, and in this general statement, Abbey is likely alluding to all of them. 

“Why, we ask ourselves, floating onward in effortless peace deeper into Eden, why not go on like this forever? True, there are no women here (a blessing in disguise?), no concert halls, no books, bars, galleries, theaters or playing fields, no cathedrals of learning or high towers of finance, no wars, elections, traffic jams or other amusements, none of the multinefarious delights of what Ralph calls syphilization. But on the other hand most anything else a man could desire is here in abundance: catfish in the mainstream and venison in the side canyons, cottonwoods for shade and shelter, juniper for food, mossy springs (not always accessible) for thirst, and the ever-changing splendor of sky, cliffs, mesas and river for the needs of the spirit.”

This passage aptly summarizes Abbey’s vision of fulfillment in the natural world, with disdain for the trinkets and distractions of the human-made world. There is unmistakable machismo here, both with the gender-specific language and the flinty, stoic ethos of being able to live on juniper, venison, and catfish, while camping among the cottonwood trees. At the same time, there is a distinctly human, self-conscious cleverness in the word play. “Multinefarious” is a made-up word, implying that human civilization is comprised of multiple forms of wickedness and corruption, and “syphilization” suggests that civilization itself is, spiritually speaking, a disease.

“But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need–if only we had eyes to see.”

Here again, Abbey suggests that humans do not truly require all the various products of human manufacture, perhaps not even human-built shelter. He implicitly asserts that the love of wilderness is the ultimate virtue, and our most fundamental responsibility. This is, in essence, Abbey’s religion, though he might eschew that term.

“When I write ‘paradise’ I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite flash floods and quick sand, and yes–disease and death and the rotting of the flesh.”

Abbey enthusiastically embraces even those aspects of wilderness and nature that, to a human perspective, appear violent, morbid, and terrifying. The term “golden women” again suggests a somewhat outdated machismo, and can be seen as sexist, and the invocation of scorpions and tarantulas and so on again exemplifies the posture of toughness and stoicism in Abbey’s ethos. Passages such as these represent an implicit challenge to the reader to overcome conditioned aversion to all that is not curated and/or sanitized.

“The days became wild, strange, ambiguous–a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. I lived narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chuang-tse I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what.”

This passage describes Abbey’s five-week stay in the Indian village of Havasu, near the Grand Canyon, fifteen years before the main action in the book. There are echoes here of his overall experience in Arches National Monument–the warping or suspension of the flow of time, a more dreamlike and elemental experience of life. Abbey seems to seek this state in all his activities throughout the book. He perhaps believes that such a frame of mind represents a closer approximation of the truth about our existence than what we might call normal, waking consciousness.  

“I stretched out in the coyote den, pillowed my head on my arm and suffered through the long long night, wet, cold, aching, hungry, wretched, dreaming claustrophobic nightmares. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.”

This is the concluding passage of the chapter in which Abbey describes his harrowing nighttime ordeal, lost in the wilderness near the village of Havasu as a young man. The contradiction between the misery he speaks of in the first sentence and the elation in the second amplifies a number of the book’s central themes at once: a celebration of the sheer miracle of life; the necessary and virtuous ability to endure primitive and inhospitable conditions that nature may present; and an ecstatic embrace of the unpleasant together with the pleasant phenomena that earthly life offers as a single harmonious symphony of creation.

“Each day begins clear and promising in the sweet cool clear green light of dawn. And then the sun appears, its hydrogen cauldrons brimming–so to speak–with plasmic fires, and the tyranny of its day begins.”

This is how Abbey describes desert days in August, but the “tyranny” of the sun is a theme he returns to over and over throughout the book. The sun is, in essence, an all-powerful monster, ruling over everything, overwhelming all forms of life as well as making life possible. The sun is the entity that truly owns the day and all that lives under its dominion.

“We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we already have an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling.”

Here again, Abbey expresses his disdain for most of the human species and his outright contempt for placid, domesticated animals in favor of wilder ones. His comment about grinding up domestic dogs into hamburger echoes the earlier contempt he expressed for cows, another passive, domestic species of animal. He is being facetious of course, but the violence of his sentiment seems genuine, as it is consistent throughout the book.

“He had good luck–I envy him the manner of his going: to die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed. To die in the open, under the sky, far from the insolent interference of leech and priest, before this desert vastness opening like a window onto eternity–that surely was an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck.”

Abbey is observing the body of the tourist, found by his brother during their search for the missing occupant of an abandoned automobile near Grandview Point. It is notable that he puts priests on a level with leeches, as if to say that all of civilization’s habituated rituals and conventions, which would shield people from the dispassionate yet magnificent realities of nature, are parasitic and demeaning to the human soul. It is also striking and perhaps unsettling that the sight of a dead human body should stir “envy” in Abbey, regardless of the circumstances.

“His departure makes room for the living. Away with the old, in with the new. He is gone–we remain, others come. The plow of mortality drives through the stubble, turns over rocks and sod and weeds to cover the old, the worn-out, the husks, shells, empty seed pods and sapless roots, clearing the field for the next crop. A ruthless, brutal process, but clean and beautiful.”

Abbey is referring to the man whose body is found under the juniper tree near Grandview Point. He implicitly compares a human body to “husks” and “sapless roots,” implying an essential equivalency between human and nonhuman (and even non-animal) life. Affirming that the ongoing process of death is both brutal and beautiful encapsulates Abbey’s apprehension of nature as a whole.

“Then why climb Tukuhnikivats? Because I prefer to. Because no one else will if I don’t–and somebody has to do it.” (Chapter 15, Page 282)

This is apparently a tongue-in-cheek allusion to a famous quote by mountaineer George Mallory. When asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, Mallory reportedly replied, “Because it’s there.” Abbey’s words are a characteristically ornery re-rendering of the same sentiment.

“I strip and lie back in the sun, high on Tukuhnikivats, with nothing between me and the universe but my thoughts. Deliberately I compose my mind, quieting the febrile buzzing of the cells and circuits, and strive to open my consciousness directly, nakedly to the cosmos.”

Opening his consciousness directly to the cosmos is yet another rephrasing of Abbey’s overarching mission in taking the post as park ranger. Call it the cosmos, call it nature; Abbey seeks full immersion within it, even to the point of obliterating his accustomed sense of self. Given his facility with words, however, his proclivity to make judgments and evaluations, and his strong stated preferences for some beings over others, it may be that he is unlikely to overcome the “barrier” of his own human-bound thought processes.