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Desert Solitaire

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Edward Abbey's DESERT SOLITAIRE belongs on the shortest of several short lists of 20th century classics, whether we are talking of classic literature of the American West, nature writing, or environmentalism.

Why is this such a brilliant book? It isn't the originality of ideas. Other writers-Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, Mary Austin-had already articulated many of Abbey's central ideas either about nature or about Western policy. Bernard DeVoto was an innovator; Abbey is not. Nor is Abbey's anger and fury at exploiters and defilers unique: DeVoto was just as irate and just as incapable of pulling his punches. Nor is it Abbey's overall vision that makes his book so compelling. Again, both DeVoto and Stegner-and especially DeVoto-evidenced a broader and more systematic understanding of the broader issues confronting the West. None of this is accidental. DeVoto exerted a major influence on Stegner, and Stegner taught Abbey in the Stanford University Creative Writing Program.

What makes DESERT SOLITAIRE so marvelous is the almost tactile love and passion Abbey displays for the Desert Southwest. Over and over Abbey summons up specific places, particular mountains, individual landscapes. Although he can write about the desert in general, he more frequently writes about particular spots in Arches National Park and the surrounding environs that help explain his attachment to the West. He is the literary equivalent, in his more somber, reflective moments, of Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams. As a result, what one recalls upon remembering DESERT SOLITAIRE is not words so much as a collection of images.

Structurally, the book only resembles a memoir of his time working as a park ranger in the Arches National Park. The book makes it seems as if he worked there only one year, when in fact he worked there two. Furthermore, even what appears as a single year fails to account for all the content of the book. He uses, rather, the fiction of a single season as a framework upon which to hang tales, reflections, and rants. This intermixing of narrative with asides gives the book a richness of texture it might not otherwise possess. The narrative of his time as a ranger gives the book much of it structure, but the rants and sidetracking provides it with much of its content.

I hate to write something as trite as this being an absolutely essential book for anyone remotely interested in the subjects it touches upon, but such is the case. Abbey wrote many other nonfiction works and novels. All are interesting, several of them quite good, but DESERT SOLITAIRE is easily his greatest. It truly is a classic.

"I would rather kill a man than a snake," wrote Edward Abbey, and I suspect he even meant it. That sentence summed up, for me, this book: it is filled with Abbey's love of the wild desert and its inhabitants and his contempt for modernity and its inhabitants. I think Abbey was one of the early voices in modern environmentalism, and this is a classic book in that field. I appreciate his desert and his writing; even if you are not an environmentalist nor a lover of the desert, you may see why people are if you read this. At any rate, his deep naturalist reflections deserve consideration in our fast-food, internet, climate-controlled, sanitized and artificial age.

Edward Abbey didn't like to be known as a nature writer (he was far too proud of his fiction), but after reading this book I would have to say he is among the best. Before I read this book, I had never even considered traveling to the Southwest, this book changed that, and the way I look at nature forever. Abbey has rightfully been called the Thoreau of the American West, this book more than any other shows us why. In Desert Solitaire Abbey is at his best, doing for the Southwest what Thoreau did for Concord and Walden.

One of the great strenghts of this book is the way Abbey weaves together such a wide array of subject matter, which illustrates the seemingly endless variety of experience, in what is thought by many to be an inhospitable wasteland. In a collection of breif chapters Abbey touches on everthing from the incredible beauty of forgotton canyons, the Southwest's past inhabitants, a feral horse, the Colorado river, the perils of industrial tourism, and the story of a man who may have came to die at the edge of a cliff.

In this book you get a great sampling of everything Abbey has to offer, from his stinging wit and dark humor, rage and sadness concerning the destruction of nature, and finally to hope. Edward Abbey has accomplished on the printed page, what Ansel Adams' photography has done for the Southwest. And yes, both immortalize a time and a place that are being destroyed forever, little by little, day by day, but leaving for us a sad and yet wonderful record of what used to be, and why what is left is worth saving. Desert Solitaire is both a celebration and a lamentation for the disappearing landscapes, and hidden canyons that Abbey chose as his own paradise, and if you read this book it may become yours too. Like Abbey's says get out of your cars and crawl in the sand, and EXPERIENCE what nature has to offer, you might just be surprised at what you find.

Edward Abbey is a contradiction. A poet when describing the wonders of the desert and the joys of solitude; then he becomes a strident critic of his fellow man if they have the audacity to disagree with him. There is a definite will and intelligence driving the prose, but it is partially spoiled by the rants that Abbey goes on. The book has a split personality; celebrating the wilderness, but using a voice that often becomes so disagreeable that you might want to take asphalt to the park yourself. Finally though the poet wins out and you go along for the ride. I try to think of this book as rafting down the river, enjoying the wonders and trying to avoid the jagged rocks. A little white water is fine; just don't hold me underwater for hours at a time.

While in the main I loved this book, Abbey's hypocritical nature had me fuming at times. He makes fun of tourists for scratching their names in sandstone (rightfully), but then goes ahead and carves his name in trees. He makes fun of tourists for littering (rightfully), and a few chapters later describes rolling a tire into the Grand Canyon (nearly missing a mule train!). The book is riddled with other such examples. The thing is: I'm not sure he even recognized these glaring contridictions. But aside from not really liking HIM, I loved the BOOK... the last chapter left me weeping...

I just ordered Desert Solitaire for my dear friend Joel Stone after having a great conversation with him about his trip to Utah to visit his wife's family. It has been over twenty years since I read the book, back when I was living in Utah, teaching at East High School in Salt Lake City and going to the desert every chance I had. Abbey brings the desert to life like no other author I have read. In fact, he is the one writer who portrayed the desert as a real living scene. When I go back and read passages from Solitaire, it is like I am back in the desert trudging through the sand between some fins or gazing across the vistas watching the waves of heat undulate. Abbey's accomplishment in this book is his focus on the minute details of the desert and how it feels to be there. His description of how the whole world comes to a stop in the middle of the day when the heat hits hard is right on target. My wife and I and our oldest daughter Margo were camped in the Arches in July and had to seek refuge from the heat by climbing up between two fins and simply sit there on the slightly damp sand and spend the afternoon reading and playing games. There was a cool, damp breeze coming down between the fins less than a foot thick off the ground. This is the kind of experience that Abbey can bring to you with his writing and which gets you to the point where you want to go out and strap on the roof rack and head for the desert just to feel the heat and watch the eagles and vultures circle overheat. His treatment of the local human culture of Moab in his early desert days is outstanding. The characters are bigger than life, although essentially none of them were famous people. You can smell their sweat and hear their curses and feel the bumps as you ride around with them in their old pickups and jeeps. And you can hear the curses from Abbey himself as he eloquently and graphically described that which was happening to the desert, its ecology and its way of life decades ago. He seems quiet and sensitive but lashes out with anger or hatred at the endangerment he sees. This guy is not nice, accepting and philosophical. He is not like an environmentalist, but more like a mean old rattlesnake lying under a bush waiting for somebody to mess with his desert. Abbey's vision of that which might happen to the desert has, to a great extent, come to pass. Yet, he might be happy if he could know that vast tracts of land have been set aside and are less threatened, spoiled and polluted than back when he was there and mining and ranching were in their heyday. Whenever you read this book, it will still help you form a relationship with the desert in your time and your place and give you an awareness of its fragility and beauty and what must be done from here on. The scene has changed a lot, the decades have gone by, the Westerner Grill has closed, but the desert and Abbey's insightful perceptions of it remain the constant in whole equation. Reading this book takes you to a new, exciting, billion-year-old place. Even decades later.

To begin, I loved parts of _Desert Solataire_. Abbey seemed to be warbling between humility, confusion, and utter, unabashed egotism. This is charming, because it is honest, and one can't fault someone for being honest. Also, the man actually did something about his frustration, which is more than can be said for the lot of us.

Moreover, there were sections of the book that shocked me with their incredible, heartbreaking beauty and insight. For example, the chapter "The Moon-Eyed Horse": the writing in that chapter is utterly original and amazing in the complexity it demonstrates regarding both the narrator and the nature of the horse's character - and what it reveals and changes about Abbey.

Abbey is at his best when he gets out of the way and describes how he sees nature, rather than his own mind. Abbey says at one point that when a person goes into the wilderness he or she is at risk of either seeing merely his or her self in it, or just the opposite, seeing nothing but an opposite image of oneself.

This made me wonder about Abbey's exact philosophical position on his own place in nature; furthermore, the passage - in the chapter entitled "Episodes and Visions" - in which Abbey attempts to wax philosophical about civilization and culture was completely lost on me. Maybe it's because I've read too much Heidegger to think that Abbey really understands Heidegger, or maybe it's because I am confused.

I am confused because it seems as if Abbey upholds civilization as superior to culture, and yet does he not admire the American Indian tribal culture that he encounters in the park? How does he even define "culture"? If the U.K. and the United States are merely examples of cultures, then is civilization merely the mark of individuals that Abbey likes? I don't think I'm suffering from a lapse in intelligence; apparently, not a few people have agreed with my bafflement, including the "New York literary establishment," according to Susan Zakin in _Coyotes and Town Dogs_.

But - and it's a big but - there were certainly moments in which I felt his writing shone. And _Desert Solitaire_ was certainly the book that earned him well-deserved accolades. It made me want to drive to Utah and camp out under the stars, with nothing but the ground beneath me and the night around me, as Abbey would say. I felt a place in my bones when Abbey wrote about what he loved. The thing I can't take is diatribe and cliché - or, as writers politely put it, "received text."

Received text unfortunately found its way into _Desert Solitaire_ when Abbey decided to wax egotistical about industrial tourism and his facetious suggestions for a blazing, light bulb ridden sign over the entrance to the park. In those places, the writing's not just irritating, it's not original. Anyone can go off about how stupid mass culture is and how people should change their couch potato, gas guzzling ways, but if you're going to include it in a book, it should fit seamlessly into the design. And those parts, for me, stuck out like a sore thumb.

In spite of all his shortcomings as a "literary" writer, Abbey is endearingly human, and that seems to have been a crucial and necessary part of his character. In the end, I remain torn, and I feel sympathy for those who want to change the world and put themselves at risk for what they believe in. But I also firmly believe that, unless we respect and try to communicate with the person sitting across from us who we are opposed to, nothing will ever get done.

Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, is an autobiographical account of Abbey's stint working as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. At once this book is philosophical and poetic, yet at the same time, sardonic and polemical. Although the author would probably scowl at such pigeonholing, this book is also a significant environmental statement, as well as being a great piece of literature. In Desert Solitaire, Abbey identifies and adeptly defines a common frustration shared by many writers; the annoyance of not being able to adequately express one's self through the medium of words. He states, "You cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal." However, even through his self-styled "evocation", he successfully and intimately enfolds his readers within his unique experience. A reluctant naturalist, Abbey blames the human inability to discern the true meaning of nature, on a tendency to always project our own expectations on the natural world. These are tendencies that exasperate him, and yet when he does achieve a near-true communion, as he describes in his experiences in isolation in Havasu Creek, he finds the encounter more disturbing than ecstatic. He describes losing the power to distinguish between himself and the natural world, creating in him a fear that his sense of self was "ebbing away." In addition, throughout his career as a writer, Abbey refused the label "environmentalist." Nevertheless, his books are useful instruments with which to measure our progress, or lack of progress as the case may be, in our relationship to our natural environment. In this book's chapter entitled, "Industrial Tourism and the National Parks", he lays out his philosophy that "growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell." Looking today at the corruption of the wilderness areas that he warned readers about three and four decades ago, it is plain to see how correct he was in his estimation and condemnation of policies pertaining to our National Parks. Whether he admitted it or not, Abbey set a tone of uncompromising environmental advocacy. In looking at Edward Abbey, the reader is also confronted by contradiction. He passionately argues for the importance of untamed wilderness and against the danger of industrial tourism. He declares he would rather kill a human than a snake, and then casually bops a rabbit on the head with a rock, just to see what his own reaction will be. He beguiles us with his description of Arches, and then chides us for wanting to go there. These passionate paradoxes are the tools he uses most effectively to lure us away from our complacency. Most importantly, Abbey's work his work serves as an inspiration to new generations of Western writers and historians, making us realize that wilderness really is a necessary ingredient of civilization.

I've lived in the desert southwest for almost 30 years and have read many books about the area. Surprisingly, I never read one of Abbey's books until now. I guess something else always appealed to me more on the bookstore shelves.

As many reviewers have pointed out, Abbey captures the true feeling that one gets when surrounded by the beauty of the desert. It's true that there are other books out there that have also achieved this. What made this book special for me were the author's writing skills. He is truly a gifted writer and knows how to use language. This book is a real pleasure to read.

As I read the book I tried to glean a little about the man - Edward Abbey. As a resident of the Sonoran Desert, his name comes up frequently when environmental champions are listed. He is a man that truly believes that the deserts, and all wilderness areas for that matter, are sacred. They are areas to be preserved and enjoyed -- untouched, whenever possible, by the hand of man. What surprised me about this book is that Abbey describes how he engaged in some activities that seem to contradict this philosophy. A few that come to mind: Smashing a rabbit's head in with a rock, not for food, but just to see if he can. Killing a rattlesnake with a shovel just because it lives around his trailer and he is afraid that someday it "might" bite him. Recalling a large brush fire that he accidentally set in a wilderness area, not with remorse, but with humor. Rolling an old tire off the rim of a pristine part of the Grand Canyon just so he could watch it bounce of off the canyon walls (and leaving it there as trash on the canyon floor). He does not seem ashamed of any of these actions. However, I'm sure that if he saw one of the "automobile tourists" that he seems to loathe do any of these things that he would go on an irate tirade. However, although I found these types of things to be a little hypocritical, I respect Abbey candidness - other authors would have just left these transgressions out.

This is a wonderful book and should be on the bookshelf of anyone that enjoys nature. If you live in the desert - read this book - you will love it. Even if you a thousand miles away from a desert - read this book - you will love it. Abbey takes you on a journey to a special place that you will enjoy immensely.

Edward Abbey was an outspoken wilderness advocate, and his nonfiction writing falls somewhere between Thoreau and Hunter Thompson. "Desert Solitaire" is classic Abbey, written in the latter 1960s, when he was about 30, and it recounts a handful of summers spent ten years earlier in and around Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah. Here he was a park ranger, when the park was still mostly undeveloped. Living in a small trailer, keeping an eye on the campers and tourists, he mostly relishes the quiet, beauty, and indifference of the desert under its hot sun.

The book begins with his arrival in April and concludes with his departure at season's end in September. In between are chapters devoted to descriptions of his rambles across the terrain, helping a local cattleman round up cows in the side canyons, trying to capture a one-eyed feral horse, camping on a 13,000-foot local mountain, hiking with a friend into an uncharted wilderness call the Maze, and retrieving the body of a dead tourist. There's also a dark story concerning the unfortunate fate of some uranium prospectors. The longest chapter is a rapturous account of a week spent rafting down the Colorado River, he and a friend among the last to see the canyons about to be inundated by the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell.

Along the way, there are ruminations on the meaning of it all and diatribes against urbanization, intrusive government, the tourist industry, and the destruction of wilderness. The word "solitaire" in the title is an apt choice, as much of the time Abbey is alone, thinking his thoughts and observing this desert world, its plants and wild life, geological formations, and the big sky with its turns of weather. Even when paired up with a companion, he is often off alone, on a walkabout of his own, like as not shedding his clothes.

His thoughts, meanwhile, are informed by wide reading in philosophy, history, natural sciences, and literature. As a writer, he's frequently quotable: "Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless." "It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true -- nobody will ever take you seriously."

The vistas he describes so eloquently are not hard to picture in the imagination, but I recommend an accompanying volume of photography, such as Eliot Porter's "The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado." Unless you're familiar with borage, paintbrush, globemallow, and dozens of other desert species, a picture guidebook to the flora of the region would also be helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed Abbey's book, shared the excitement of his adventures, found his cranky, ornery, sometimes self-indulgent perspective refreshing, and felt saddened by the end-of-season farewell with which it closes. In any list of nonfiction books about the West, it should be near the top.