Desert Solitaire

Despite all the things that human beings might naturally find frightening or unpleasant in nature–death, decay, violence, harshness–Abbey views nature as one vast harmonious symphony, staggering in its beauty and unfathomable in its depths. At one point in the book, he describes how all the desert creatures drink in turn at the desert waterholes in the night, obeying a temporary “truce” between predator and prey. This emblemizes the unity and cooperation within the natural world.

Whether it be in the form of new roads, dams or–perhaps worst of all–attractions constructed for human amusement, Abbey sees the sacred wilderness being despoiled by the encroachment of modern culture with its technology and its fetish for superficial stimulations and comforts. Throughout the book, Abbey mourns this slow, inexorable transformation and diminishment of wild nature. Seeing the artifacts of human society multiply within the boundaries of the wilderness, Abbey is often moved to eloquent, barely-contained rage, indignation, and contempt. Abbey despairs that the majority of “civilized” humanity is blind to the essential value of the wilderness, which human beings need whether they realize it or not.

Abbey often consoles himself with the knowledge that all of humanity’s impacts on nature are limited to a human-centered time scale, that the earth has existed for millions of years before the ascent of humankind and the earth will survive for many millions of years after humankind has exhausted itself. The wild nature that Abbey holds most holy will in the end triumph over the artifacts of humanity; it will recover completely from humanity’s insults. For example, he envisions a day when dams will be mere silted-over remnants of a long-forgotten era of humanity.

Solitude is a large internal space that Abbey explores and inhabits thoroughly, both during his easeful contemplations in and around his government-supplied house trailer and on his intrepid solo expeditions into remote regions of the parklands and canyons. He needs solitude to feel most free, and to immerse himself completely in the wild. Yet solitude is also a cause of loneliness for him at times, and a “suffocating” condition onto itself. Throughout the book, Abbey takes readers with him into solitude’s many different rooms. Most of these metaphorical rooms are vibrant and life-giving, while a relative few are desolate and challenging to his spirit. Even the latter, however, constitute a necessary aspect of his sojourn and his self-imposed discipline.

Death, both human and nonhuman, appears quite frequently in the book. Abbey is often moved to meditate on the inevitability of death, the necessity for death in the natural cycle of things, and the qualities of what he deems to be a good death. Fear of death is also an aspect of the human condition, as is illustrated through Roy Scobie’s obsessions. 

Abbey has numerous ambiguous “relationships” with the various creatures of the desert, most notably the gopher snakes in Chapter 3, but also with Moon Eye the horse, the mice he tolerates in his trailer house, and even the various birds he contemplates so often. These relationships are difficult to define in concrete terms, yet they pervade and enliven Abbey’s account. There is an intimation throughout the book that all beings are somehow in semi-conscious relation to one another, in a kind of complex, mysterious and symmetrical dance, and that humans are included in this relational matrix, though our rational minds may blind us to it.