Customer Reviews

The Journey Home (Plume)

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Its been over ten years since I read Desert Solitaire and I've combed through a couple of his works looking for another collection of stories that hit me with the same "between-the-eyes" impact as Desert Solitaire. Well, I found it with Journey Home. To me Edward Abbey represents the second coming of John Westly Powell. He, like Major Powell, foresaw the westward expansion of the U.S. and in the case of the desert southwest instinctively knew that water would be the limiting factor. It's important to remember that Abbey saw the huge growth up tick coming some 25 years ago. And places like Phoenix, and Vegas have exploded in size ever since. Abbey puts it all in focus with "The BLOB Comes to Arizona." "Telluride Blues - A Hatchet Job" is another case in point. But for pure fun, nothing tops Abbey's "premarital honeymoon" adventure in "Disorder and Early Sorrow." If you're a fan of Abbey and you buy the book for that story alone, you won't be disappointed.

That claim may seem a little rash in the face of Abbey's great prose work, Desert Solitaire, but this book in my view offers a more intimate and personal look at Abbey himself and provides some great insights into his formation as writing placed within the context of the American west. One of the strengths of this work, as opposed to Desert Solitaire, is the broadness of subject matter covered. Abbey begins by recounting his life changing hitch-hiking, train jumping tour across America to the west in the summer of 1944. His style, however, is like Kerouac, but without the self consciousness and pretension. Through Abbey's eye's it is nature that is the subject, his personal exploits are merely secondary/accidental; Abbey is just along for the ride. He tells of his first glimpse of the mesa's of Hopi country on the fringes of the Painted Desert as viewed from the side door of the Pullman as he drifted down the tracks towards New Mexico. Throughout, he describes his love of the desert and the creatures that live there with a vitality and gentleness uncommon in contemporary environmental discourse. This sensitivity is even more pronounced when compared with his verbal protests against what he sees as the destroyers of his desert home, such as, the miners, developers, dammers, trappers and, yes, even the tourists. "The Journey Home" closes with a surrealistic celebration of the desert as seen through the detached lens of an anonymous camera, which I consider some of his most beautiful and original writing. For all those who have read Desert Solitaire, read this to get a more intimate look of the man behind the ideas. Abbey's contradictions are what makes him so great as an American writer. He is at once an anarchist, environmentalist, desert rat, river-runner, essayist, and novelist, but above all, he was just a man from Pennsylvania who became enraptured by the mysteries of the desert and dedicated his life to celebrating its beauty.

Edward Abbey says he's not a naturalist, not an ecologist, not a writer in the tradition of Thoreau. That's true and not, like so many things about this American original who passed from among us in 1989. Most of all, Abbey loved the American West, especially the desert, and he hated anything -- mass tourism, forces of modernization, greed -- that threatened to destroy it. His prose invites the reader to come west even as he inventories all the noxious creatures waiting to sting, spray, cut, or poison her. *The Journey Home* can be read as a set of separate essays, self-contained, each short enough to savor in a sitting; but the whole coheres around Abbey's passions, and will leave you, unless your heart has been wholly congealed in the embaling fluids of city life, yearning for the wilderness and enflamed with the mission to preserve it.

Much as others have already said Edward Abbey was a remarkable man. There is no doubt that Desert Solitaire stands out like a beacon in the desert of the usual literature, now called nature writing, available today. It is the shear life, zest and energy that permeates the work as it does here, although not all the time, in "The Journey Home". Abbey's stories this time are more personal and although still not at all self conscious they are deeper because of this. In this sense they are akin to the great work of Jack Turner, "The Abstract Wild" and Doug Peacock's "Grisly years". At no time do they suggest they are great writers, rather it is their spirit which wakes the reader with its realness. As yet I have only read these two books of his but each of them is different with its own seams to unwind, the first that of the younger man and the second that of the older. Its unfortunately rare to meet people like Abbey nowadays when much of the way the world is drives out this sense of adventure and joy in nature. This is not made easy by people's unfamiliarity with nature and even fear to tread outside their comfort zones, myself included. But if you want that kind of experience and living at the edge as Abbey knows well how to do then you have to jump off that cliff sometime.

When I sit down to write about Edward Abbey, I feel a pang of affection and sorrow, because through his writing I have really grown to like the guy. I wish I'd been able to meet him.
If you've read his works, I'll bet you know what I mean. He's the kind of guy you want to take camping with you. He's the first one you call when you get an itch to shoulder a pack and head out.
Even if you don't agree with everything he says (or how he says it)--and I know I don't--you just have to like him.
"The Journey Home" is Abbey at his most articulate, at his most candid. He takes on the issues of Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, and the Navajo Generating Station, though much of his information on the Navajo Generating Station is now extremely out of date.
He examines everything from the desert to walking to why people bother doing anything, always with his trademark sense of bitter humor.
On walking he says, "The iron tug of gravitation should be all the reminder we need that in walking uphill we are violating a basic law of nature."
On reasons for climbing mountains he says, "George H. Leigh-Mallory's asinine rationale for climbing a mountain--"because it's there"--could easily be refuted with a few well-placed hydrogen bombs."
Edward Abbey is a classic, and these essays are some of his finest, and his most fun.

This was my first Eddward Abbey book, but it certainly will not be my last. The book allows the reader to view many parts of "the West" from his authentic perspective. From his time in a firetower in Montana to retelling and following John Wesley Powell's story of exploration, Edward Abbey will have you hooked on each subject and adventure that he eperienced on his Journey. I think there is a part in all of us to want to live this type of life, but only a few of us have the courage to follow our heart and dreams the way Abbey did.

How can I describe this book. I found it in the balcony of the renovated Bookstop on Alabama about ten year's ago. When I picked it up, I started reading chapter 3, "No Road, Disorder and Early Sorrow". I was howling. I couldn't regain composure. I had to have it. We reread it out loud every year that we take our pilgrimage to Big Bend at Thanksgiving.

Reading Abbey reminds me of lines from the Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid:

I'll have no half-way house, but aye be where/ Extremes meet; it's the only way I ken/ To dodge the cursed conceit of bein' rich/ That damns the vast majority of men.

That's Abbey for you, and he has a helluva great time out there where extremes meet. Is there any other way to live?

I purchased both Desert Solitaire and The Journey Home by Edward Abbey as gifts for friends, having read both and loved them. These are both American classics as far as I am concerned and anyone who loves the southwest, has traveled there,wants to travel there, or even is an armchair traveler must read at least one of them.

Each chapter is a short story, each short story is a picture within a mural that represents a time, purely Americana.

The American West can be a harsh land of beauty and contrasts. There can be blistering heat and fierce blizzards separated by the span of only a few hours. Some of the World's most beautiful places mingle with landscapes far less sublime in a fascinating quilt work.

Edward Abbey has captured much the intriguing starkness of these wonderful places in The Journey Home. The book is a collection of essays, many of which were published separately of times and lands clearly dear to his heart. As such, I'm sure that different essays will strike different emotional chords with different readers depending upon her or his prior background or experiences, but as a whole, this is a work of haunting, Spartan beauty.

For me, his reminiscence of hitchhiking through the West in 1944 (Hallelujah on the Bum), `The Second Rape of the West', his wonderful descriptions in `Down the River with Major Powell', `Mountain Music', and `Freedom and Wilderness' rank among the best writing in its genre. Many of these describe places dear to my own heart and are written in a harsh simplicity that evokes strong emotion. Perhaps the strongest work in the book, though, is `Death Valley', an essay written so tellingly that I feel that I already know a part of the valleys character even though I've never been near its desiccated surfaces.

This is not a perfect work. Some of the essays do not reach the heights of those noted above but that mirrors in many ways the very nature of the West. Edward Abbey lived his life without apology, and here has created a wonderful collection of essays describing a land that he and so many others have deeply loved.