A rock wren sang, a few flies came out of hiding and droned around the juniper tree. The natives must learn to accustom themselves to the spectacle of hordes of wealthy, outlandishly dressed strangers invading their land and their homes. Once inside the trailer my senses adjust to the new situation and soon enough, writing the letter, I lose awareness of the lights and the whine of the motor. What could I say? We eat a good, simple, sandy supper of onion soup, beef and beans, tinned fruit and coffee. The parks, they say, are for people. Through most of the afternoon he lay there. This is an expression of loyalty: "But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to 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 the eyes to see". Look at this in my hand, Moon-Eye.. To us these foamy waves. Wish them luck and (if lovers) innumerable offspring, a life of happily ever after. After thawing out my boots over the gas flame I pull them on and come back to the doorway. At four or five miles per hour much too fast we glide on through the golden light, the heat, the crystalline quiet. Are the Navajos grateful? Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (1988, Hardcover, Reprint,Anniversary) at the best online prices at eBay! For the one a consummation, for the other fulfillment. We fill the water tank buried in the slope above the housetrailer and have lunch together in the sunshine, sitting at a wooden picnic table near my doorway. The restless sea, the towering mountains, the silent desert what do they have in common? It was the best I could do for him; nothing else was available. Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbeys memoir of a summer spent in 1956, 10 years prior to writing the book, as a park ranger in Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah. Praise for Desert Solitaire "An American masterpiece. A familiar and plaintive admonition; I would like to introduce here an entirely new argument in what has now become a stylized debate: the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. In the afternoon he came into a larger canyon, through which flowed a small stream. Looks like youve clipped this slide to already. Nothing but the silence, the stark suspension of all sound. Thought-provoking and mystical. Mr. Graham frowned and cautioned Husk against displaying his funds too openly in a place like the Club 66. May the love I feel at this moment for columbine, girl, tree, symbol, grass, mountain, sky and sun also stay, also grow, never die. Thus failed again. When I take him outside into the wind and sunshine his favorite place seems to be inside my shirt, where he wraps himself around my waist and rests on my belt. On the wall inside is a large water-stained photograph in color of a naked woman. I knew that I was dealing with a madman. When rain arrives, threatening their ability to exit via the rock path, Waterman gives up his hope for asylum, and they leave in a hurry. High wind blowing now drives the sparks from our fire over the rim, into the velvet abyss. Am I awake or sleeping? The heroes, naturally, lived far longer, and not in that condition of medicated survival found in a modern hospital where the patient, technically still alive, cannot easily be distinguished from the various machines to which he is connected. Glad to get out of the Land Rover and away from the gasoline fumes, I lead the way on foot down the Flint Trail, moving what rocks I can out of the path. There I lived, mostly alone except for the ghosts, for the next thirty-five days. From now on we must subsist on our dehydrated food supplies survival rations or on whatever we can forage from the land. Mr. Turnbow in his despair fled to the arid wilds, to this very spot, built the cabin, lived on and on for many years and died, many years ago. For reply he clenches his right hand, extends the middle finger rigidly and thrusts it heavenward. Invoking the Deity? From the vicinity of Balanced Rock comes the cry of the great horned owl. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. In almost all of the cliff dwellings valuable property was abandoned arrowheads, pottery, seed corn, sandals, turquoise and coral jewelry which suggests that something happened which impelled the inhabitants to leave in a great hurry. Somehow he made his way to it, laid himself down and never got up again. I slowed to a walk; he did the same. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. Since I have no tennis shoes I take off the boots and sling them over my shoulder, proceeding barefoot. Sliding greasily forward the snout of mud dashed against the undercut wall on the outside of the bend, wallowed over ledges and swung back to the main channel in the center of the canyon floor. Husk was willing, even eager, and inquired as to the terms. There is a burlap sack in the cab of the truck which I carry when plucking Kleenex flowers from the brush and cactus along the road; I grab that and my stick, run after the snake and corner it beneath the exposed roots of a bush. I glissade down the slopes of sand, copper-gold and coral-pink, past isolated clusters of sunflowers, scarlet penstemon and purple asters, to the shade of the willows and the life of the river. That also may be true. When I heard a faint sound over my shoulder I looked and saw a file of deer watching from fifty yards away, three does and a velvet-horned buck, all dark against the sundown sky. I sit down to rest, daydreaming of iced limeade, chilled tomato juice, Moorish fountains. Moon-Eye, I said he listened carefully lets get out of here. Abbey also comments on some of the particular cultural artifacts of the region, such as the Basque population, the Mormons, and the archaeological remains of the Ancient Puebloan peoples in cliff dwellings, stone petroglyphs, and pictographs. (Modern politics is expensive power follows money.) Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. After the storms pass and the flash floods have dumped their loads of silt into the Colorado, leaving the streambeds as arid as they were before, it is still possible to find rainwater in the desert. A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness that. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic. The gradual cell-by-cell replacement or infiltration of buried logs by hot, silica-bearing waters in a process so exact that the original cellular structure of the wood is preserved in all its detail forms this desert jewelry agatized rainbows in rock. I walk out the foot trail to Double Arch and the Windows. Over my shoulder comes the sizzle and smell of frying bacon. The shallow-drafted almost weightless boat tends to turn in circles, pivoting beneath my seat; in order to make any headway I have to shift the paddle quickly from side to side, an awkward and tiring procedure. Forewarned and overcautious this time, despite ourselves, we paddle too far out of the main current and end up aground in the shallows. After sharing a meal together, the men leave, and Abbey is struck by how isolated he feels in his solitary lifestyle as a park ranger. For entertainment we have the murmur of the river, the drone of cicada and amphibians, the show of nighthawks plunging through the evening gulping bugs. Kept going, pushing through the heat. Not easy: one whiff of juniper smoke, a few careless words, one reckless and foolish poem , In answer to the original question, then, I find myself in the end returning to the beginning, and can only say, as I said in the first place: There is. He wants to stand and fight, but I am patient; I insist on herding him well away from the trailer. Instinctively we expect a miracle: the dam will never be completed, theyll run out of cement or slide rules, the engineers will all be shipped to Upper Volta. Then I went home to the trailer, taking a shortcut over the bluffs. Animals have no sense of sportsmanship. About a mile from the road we come to a ledge rising toward the rim of the mesa. But weve got all the indispensable conveniences: gas cookstove, gas refrigerator, hot water heater, sink with running water (if the pipes arent frozen), storage cabinets and shelves, everything within arms reach of everything else. On the way I pass Skyline Arch, a big hole in the wall where something took place a few years ago which seems to bear out the hypotheses of geology: one November night in 1940 when no one was around to watch, a big chunk of rock fell out of this arch, enlarging the opening by half again its former size. Very messy, filthy, wasteful. From there they carved and constructed a crude wagon road to the edge of the water and descended. Now that all is finally ready I am overtaken by the insane compulsion to be gone, to be elsewhere, to go, to go. From up here the sound of the river, until now a permanent part of my auditory background, is no longer perceptible, and the desert silence takes on a deeper dimension. But then they detected a trace of life. It is now late in the afternoon. Within this constellation, visible to the naked eye, is a great nebula, the first to be discovered. 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. Seventy dollars worth of cow, Roy explained, coiling his rope. Tea and cigar for the final course. I pick up one that fits well in the hand, that seems to have the optimum feel and heft. Around us the Green River Desert rolls away to the north, south and east, an absolutely treeless plain, not even a juniper in sight, nothing but sand, blackbrush, prickly pear, a few sunflowers. There may, of course, be obstacles; we dont know. To keep them out of the canteen I had to place a handkerchief over the opening as I filled it. After the meal, while Ralph washes the dishes, I take the canteens and walk up the creek to get some spring water if possible. Old Moon-Eye took a few steps away from me, stopped. However for the sake of their privacy I have invented fictitious names for some of the people I once knew in the Moab area and in a couple of cases relocated them in space and time. Take it easy, old buddy. Speaking softly. If you wish to see it as it should be seen, dont wait theres little time. I test the rope, it seems to be well anchored, and with its help and a few convenient toeholds and fingerholds I work my way to the top of the pitch. And a big one feet like frying pans.. This is true but do they eat enough? He didnt even smell like a horse, didnt seem to have any smell about him at all. I turned my back on the horse and went to the canteen, picked it up. Late in the afternoon I realized that I would not have enough time to get back to my camp before dark, unless I could find a much shorter route than the one by which I had come. It was even hotter inside the trailer than outside but I opened the refrigerator and left it open and took out a pitcher filled with ice cubes and water. Below the garden the cliff curves deeply inward, forming an overhang that would shelter a house; at this point the water is released from the draw of surface tension and falls free through the air in a misty, wavy spray down to the canyon floor where I stand, as in a fine shower, filling my canteen and soaking myself and drinking all at the same time. He looked at these things and he saw them but did not pause. You can use ? Well, let it be. Coming from a tradition which honors sharing and mutual aid above private interest, the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without. Forks of lightning illuminated nerves join heaven and earth. They were a survey crew, laying out a new road into the Arches. He imagines that the mans energy has been recirculated into the bodies of buzzards who eat him. The cowfly, or deerfly if you prefer, loves blood. While I debated the matter in my head, Roy opened his eyes, staggered up, glanced blearily at me to see that I was awake, nudged Viviano in the ribs with the toe of his boot. The rock follows hard upon me, almost at my neck. Assigned the southernmost sector, my brother and I drive down the road another five miles to where it dead-ends close to the farthest reach of the mesa Grandview Point itself. The horned owl may be the natural enemy of the rabbit but surely the rabbit is the natural friend of the horned owl. Where there are sunken rocks the water heaps up in mounds or even in cones. Edward Abbey We must concede that science is nothing new, that research, empirical logic, the courage to experiment are as old as humanity. About a mile past Temple Junction youll see a little dirt road heading east. One old cow, followed by her calf, slipped aside into the tamarisk and lay down. Then the canyon took on the slickrock character smooth, sheer, slippery sandstone carved by erosion into a series of scoops and potholes which got bigger as I descended. It looks rather like a loose pudding or a thick dense soup, thick as gravy, dense with mud and sand, lathered with scuds of bloody froth, loaded on its crest with a tangle of weeds and shrubs and small trees ripped from their roots. Mr. Graham laughed, patted him on the back, and reminded him that hed soon be riding around in Cadillacs. The lawyer smiled and said that he was quite serious. The big jump-off is only a few steps south and beyond that edge lies another world, far away. Abbey held the position from April to September each year, during which time he maintained trails, greeted visitors, and collected campground fees. Their manner of life was constricted, conservative, cautious; perhaps only the pervading fear could keep such a community together. From here it looks as if it might go. After what seems like another hour we see ahead the welcome sight of cottonwoods, leaves of green and gold shimmering down in a draw. I lie on my belly on the edge of the dune, back to the wind, and study the world of the flowers from ground level, as a snake might see it. Fresh snow on Tukuhnikivats and the other high peaks. We lash the boats together, side by side, which makes not only for better companionship and ease of conversation but also improves the maneuverability: Ralph paddles on one side, I on the other, giving us some control over our direction. Most of them are making good wages and/or doing work they like to do; they are, you might say, happy. As for the technical competence of the artists, its measure is apparent in the fact that these pictographs and petroglyphs though exposed to the attack of wind, sand, rain, heat, cold and sunlight for centuries still survive vivid and clear. The surface of the river is wide and gleaming, slick as glass; an immaculate stillness pervades the canyon, pointed up deftly now and then by a gurgling eddy near the shore, the call of a bird. If I were lucky I might find the trail of bighorn sheep, rumored still to lurk in these rimrock hideaways. But I can tell you where it was. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. As the ropes tautened and the horses prepared to pull, I slogged into the mud and tugged at the cows tail to give her hindquarters whatever lift I could. Sympathy, mutual aid, symbiosis, continuity. At Topocoba on the rim of the canyon the temperature was a tolerable ninety-six degrees but it rose about one degree for each mile on and downward. Billy-Joe watched the flood surge toward him, saw the light shine on the roiling tomato-red waters. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. And up above the clouds replied thunder. It would be his partners job, on the ground, to locate those deposits precisely. Mrs. Husk said that she was serious too and that on second thought perhaps $237,000 would be a more reasonable figure. Bouillon cubes and raisins are good enough for me, so long as they are seasoned with plenty of sun and storm and adventure, but Newcomb, somewhat of a gourmet, has different ideas. Let it be determined by the communitys mode of travel: if by foot, four miles; if by horseback, eight miles; if by motorcar, twenty-four miles; if by airplane, ninety-six miles. I listen for a long time. At the side of the road is a locked and empty automobile, first noted two days earlier. He sat down on the runningboard to rest, to regain his wind, and watched Husk crawling slowly toward him. In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey recounts his many escapades, adventures, and epiphanies as an Arches National Park ranger outside Moab, Utah. He comments on the decline of the large desert predators, particularly bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, and wildcats, and criticizes the roles ranchers and the policies of the Department of Agriculture have had in the elimination of these animals, which in turn has fostered unchecked growth in deer and rabbit populations, thereby damaging the delicate balance of the desert ecosystem.[7]. They are not. Roys no Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife. It is where we came from, and something we still recognize as our starting point: Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. Look here, old horse, have a sniff of this. I offered him the pebble with one hand and with the other unbuttoned a button of my shirt, preparing to ease out the rope when the chance came. More surprises. We were deep into the desert summer now and the stream had shrunk to a dribble of slimy water oozing along between sunbaked flats of mud. Whats up? Perhaps not at least there's nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me. Once there was a man named Turnbow who lived in the grimy wastelands of an eastern city which we will not mention here the name, though familiar to all the world, is not important. Our little boats are holding up well; despite all the rocks weve bounced them off and over, despite the sand and snags weve dragged them over, they have yet to sustain a puncture or spring a single leak. In the evening the wind stops. Sticky Polemonium has an engaging sound. Nearly exhausted, we rest for a while in the boats before paddling slowly into the dark canyon. I examine my soul: white as snow. When the sun went down the village went dark except for kerosene lamps here and there, a few open fires, and a number of lightning bugs or fireflies which drifted aimlessly up and down Main Street, looking for trouble. Im sure theyre as delighted by the return of the sun as I am and I wish I knew the language. I thought I could amble close, slip the hackamore over his head and lead him home like a pet dog on a leash. The next morning, after watching his first, breathtaking sunrise, Abbey wonders whether appearances equal reality. 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