Customer Reviews

Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

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This is a fine collect of 10 early hikes and float trips Abbey made mostly in the high deserts of the American Southwest. The last takes place in Alaska. In "A Walk in the Desert Hills" Abbey tells of a solo hike across more than 100 miles with only his backpack and the hope that water will be found in natural tanks. What, the reader may ask, compels a man to undertake such a trek with only a belief that salvation lies ahead in a bowl shaped stone (tanks) filled with rain water, and then further on, perhaps another, and hopefully another still? Throughout the book he answers this question by showing us the hidden beauty of slot canyons, how the Colorado looked beneath the flooded Glen Canyon before the dam and shares with us his discovery of petroglyphs and pictographs whose meanings still remains unknown. This is Abbey when his desert world was still new, before the roads and bridges and dams he hated changed it all. This is the world beyond the wall, his world. "Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poison the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains, Go there ...into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do."

Abbey was as about as free as a man can get.

Although Desert Solitaire is Abbey's most popular work of non-fiction and is an undeniable American masterpiece, Beyond the Wall in many ways surpasses it in its praise of the beauty and granduer of nature and as a meditation on humanity's place in it. As a work primarily concerned with Abbey's experiences on several hiking/camping trips alone in the Desert, from Southern Colorado, and West Texas, through theNew Mexico and Arizona wilds to the Sea of Cortez, the reader is allowed an glimpse into his psyche that is unsurpassed in these quiet revelations, documented in many a lonely, but not lonesome walk. In Beyond the Wall, Abbey is closest to his comparison with Thoreau, in the way that the simple description of Nature itself is the focus of this work. In many ways this book is both a eulogy and a celebration of Glen Canyon and raw unspoiled Nature.
Whether narrating "a Walk Through Desert Hills" or a "float trip down the doomed Glen Canyon, Abbey's awareness of the subtle force of nature is everpresent, and is expressed in the metaphoric image of Freedom and Wilderness versus industrial insanity and slavery. In many ways, what is beyond the wall is the possibility of our unmeditated communion with nature. And although this wall seems forminable, it can be overcome simply by venturing off the beaten path into a wilderness unknown to many. His solution lies in the simple concept of reestablishing an intimate relationship with Nature, which is deprived of so many today. Thus, in becoming acquainted with our environments and surroundings we will be much more involved in saving what is there. The case of Glen Canyon is a sad illustration of this, for despite its stunning beauty and granduer, which Abbey claimed surpassed even that of the Grand Canyon, it was destroyed simply because not enough people had experienced it and too few cared enough to save it.
In reading the essays in Beyond the wall, Ed introduces us to one way that we can all get beyond the walls that alienate us from nature and ultimately ourselves. And since this book can only guide us so far, it is we that must take the next step and decide on what side of the wall we want to live our lives.

ed abbey's tromp through the american wilderness in search of a definitive ideology and a few tankfuls of water allow the reader to believe in the underdog's points of view......whether you agree with them or not. Awesome book!!!!

Edward Abbey is well know for his love of the southwest and his environmental activism (well, at least he wrote and talked about it). He is less well recognized for his descriptions of place, even though these places, and descriptions, are central to all of his writing.

In Beyond The Wall, Abbey collects a series of essays that appeared elsewhere, particularly tabletop photography books. "Most of these books were expensive...; my enemies could buy them but few of my friends" (p. xii).

Many of Abbey's works explore his attitudes toward government officials, women, cattle, and the "deruralization" of the west. This volume really focuses on Abbey's gift of using words to paint a picture of places dear to him. Yes, there are a number of "Abbeyisms" scattered throughout, but it is not the central theme of this collection. Here are a few examples:

"To aid and abet in the destruction of a single species or in the extermination of a single tribe is to commit a crime against God, a mortal sin against Mother Nature. Better by far to sacrifice in some degree the interests of mechanical civilization, curtail our gluttonous appetite for things, ever more things, learn to moderate our needs, and most important, and not difficult, learn to control, limit and gradually reduce our human numbers. We humans swarm over the planet like a plague our locusts, multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and babies. The man-centered view of the world is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinature, antilife and - antihuman" (p. 40).

"Myself, I gave up fishing decades ago. Not so much on moral grounds - although I can see the point of animal liberationists when they argue that there is something unjust in fishing or hunting primarily for sport [italics here] - but on account of sloth. I lack the diligence and industry to stand in one place for hours, casting and recasting, reeling in and reeling out, endeavoring to outwit a simple creature with a one-digit I.Q. and one-twentieth my body weight. In the time one man spends trying to catch one fish I have ascended a small mountain, explored five miles of river valley, or probed to its secret heart a winding desert canyon" (p. 173).

Sound familiar?

The first two pieces in this collection provide the best introduction to Abbey I can think of. "A Walk in the Desert Hills" describes a 115-mile walk across the Sonoran Desert, in search of adventure, wisdom, and water. "How It Was" describes his first incursions into the Four Corners and Glen Canyon area, before the pavement came. "How It Was" will make you understand what got Abbey intoxicated with the desert. "A Walk ..." tells why it was still more magical than bourbon even thirty years later. For these two pieces alone this is my favorite of Abbey's books. The remainder of the pieces in the book, which describe forays around the Colorado River region, the Sea of Cortez, and a rafting trip in northern Alaska, are pure, delightful gravy.

This book simultaneously reveals the best and worst of Edward Abbey. The first essay, A Walk in the Desert Hills, is vintage Abbey (in his later stage). He is cranky, ornery, opinionated, observant, honest, sensitive and horny (thank goodness he does not show that too often in his books) at the same time. One can't help but think that Abbey is also somewhat hypocritical in some ways: he detests cattle but enjoys a sizzling T-bone steak, he loathes industrialization but drinks mass produced Budweisers and Jim Beam, he claims to be an environmental activist but bounces a old tire into the Grand Canyon (in Desert Solitaire), he denounces the "obscene anthropoid fecundity", "industrial mass production of babies and bodies", but he had 5 children in his lifetime! How's that going to help the cause? If everyone let their fecundity spill like Abbey, we would need 5 planets to support us. Don't get me wrong, I still like Abbey's essays and give this book a generous mark, but lately I started to read "beyond the pages".

The essays themselves in this book are fine, they lack a coherent theme (some were previously published) -- some are "been there, done that" kind of sketches; but on the other hand give one glimpses of different places, from the Mexico to Alaska. Besides "A Walk in the Desert Hills", "Gather at the River" which is about a river rafting (outfitted) journey down the Kongakut River in Alaska, is also an interesting essay, offering some of Abbey's ruminations about our last "frontier" (or, as he puts it, "the last pork chop"). "A Colorado River Journal", which is a jovial piece about another outfitted rafting trip, is somewhat different in style than his other essays and books.

I still think Desert Solitaire is his best book, even though in his old age Abbey thought that he was too tame in that book and he hated to be labeled a "naturalist" or "nature writer" (he explained some of this in the introduction of Beyond the Wall). But for myself, I think Abbey was rather too cranky for his own good in his later years.