Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, a Season in the Wilderness, William Collins, 2020 (first published 1968).
Abbey takes a couple of strange turns. The first relates to the uranium boom. He recounts a tale of treachery and betrayal which he admits is probably apocryphal. He tells it well but it goes on for far too long and I cannot see the point of it. The second is his account of his involvement in rounding up cattle and herding them towards their final destination. His character descriptions are as zestful as ever but there is a good deal of brutality and cruelty towards the cattle, which sits oddly with his respect for wildlife. Do domesticated animals not count?
But then he knocks you sideways with a description of his fire dying to “a twist of smoke and a heap of rubies” and his informed thoughts and observations concerning the pictographs and petroglyphs on canyon walls.
Then there is the ‘problematic’ chapter abut the Navajo. Now that I have read all of it I still think that Robert MacFarlane may have missed the point in his introduction to the book. Abbey is never contemptuous or dismissive, he is interesting and astute. As he says, they and the old cowboys are in dire straits. He reserves his contempt for the ersatz cowboys and women he sees wearing the costume, the cult growing as the real cowboys disappear.
A recent letter to the press in response to an article by Matthew Syed saying that in the United States “the frontier spirit is no less alive today than when prospectors were pushing west into Comanche territory”, reminds us that the Native American population of more than ten million people was reduced to 300,000 (or fewer) by 1900 through war, massacre, forced displacement and above all the spread of old world epidemic diseases to which the Native Americans had no immunity.
Abbey continues brilliantly to evoke the landscape with the use of such wonderful words as tamarisk, cliffrose and cottonwood. The golden primrose plume, an indicator of the presence of selenium,
To return to our trip.
We must have stayed here, right on the Nevada state line, just outside Death Valley, before continuing eastwards.
Terrible’s Hotel and Casino, now closed, was originally the Gold Strike Hotel and Gambling Hall, opened in 1987.
Zion
Even in the context of the trip, I remember finding Zion National Park, Utah, a place of exceptional, breath-taking beauty and geological wonder.
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