Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, a Season in the Wilderness, William Collins, 2020 (first published 1968).
Having ordered a biography of Abbey and given my long history of dealing with archives, I wondered where Abbey’s might be. Pleased to see that it is with University of Arizona Special Collections and it looks to be very comprehensive: drafts, correspondence, journals and notebooks and more. Ms Clarke Abbey, the author’s fifth and final wife, holds copyright.
As I have often wondered about birdsong, Abbey wonders whether the night long croaking and clanking (what a perfect word to have chosen) of the frogs might be from a place of love and joy in spite of its to our ears bleak and mournful nature, rather than purely territorial or to attract mates.
He points out that there is no shortage of water in the desert, there is just the right amount – unless there is “a city where no city should be.” The constant desire for growth promulgated by our businessmen and politicians is madness but, to paraphrase Bob Marley, none of them can stop the time.
From his ramada, Abbey enjoys his enviable “33,000-acre terrace”. And he makes a point I have often tried to make in various contexts but especially in local planning matters. We need wilderness, or open space, whether we ever set foot in it or not. We need at least the possibility and hope of it. Authorities fear it and Abbey constructs a fake manifesto on their behalf, not all of which I am comfortable with, but – keep us in cities where we can be controlled, mechanise agriculture, encourage population growth, engage in foreign wars and … “raze the wilderness”.
In one chapter he tells of his attempts to catch a “moon-eyed” horse who had become more or less feral, surviving alone in the canyons following cruel treatment by people. Abbey is not above self-deprecation – the old horse completely outwits him at every turn.
He also wonders if he is misanthropic as, increasingly, do I. But no, he just wants independence, freedom. Freedom from “the incredible shit we put up with … the domestic routine … the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen … the hideous cities and towns we live in”, the tyranny of machines.
‘Down the River’ is an especially poignant chapter, although it is comical too, being an account of his journey with a friend along the Colorado River through Glen Canyon before it was drowned by the dam. They have only two flimsy inflatable boats but aside from a few minor rapids, the river carries them along without too much effort on their part. Mostly they drift and glide. They forgot to bring their life-jackets and their rum, they lose their only map early on and drank all the beer back in Albuquerque, but they do have Bull Durham and Prince Albert tobacco to fall back on. They try not to think about what is to come, the submergence of everything that is around them, to block out the sense of helpless outrage, it’s just too painful. But he wonders where the displaced wildlife will find new homes: “there are no vacant lots in nature.” Solastalgia ahead of the event.
It is the earth to which we should be loyal, a natural paradise if only we could see it, but our greed destroys it. He is no Utopian fantasist imagining “changeless perfection where the lions lie down [with the] lambs (what would they eat?)”, but says that the wilderness is a necessity of the human spirit and is ahead of his time on the dangers of isolating ourselves from it.
He loves and often mentions the song of the Canyon Wrens, a tinkling cascade, a descending glissando. It is very beautiful, very different from the more staccato notes of the Wrens I hear here, and easy to find online: Bing Videos.
He stands in a ‘dripping spring’, where ground water emerges from high on the canyon wall, nourishes greenery and finally falls in a misty spray – he showers, fills his canteen and drinks.
He sees in the canyons and subcanyons the true cathedrals and temples and asks “is this at last the locus Dei?“, a feeling I have truly had perhaps just once at the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania. We dare not lose our sense of wonder. This is from Animal Trust:
We visited the Ngorongoro crater on that trip, a steeply sided self-contained ecosystem. All the expected prey and predators are present and correct, except giraffes, which have never been able to negotiate the precipitous slopes. The crater is very heavily guarded and so there is no possibility of poaching. We spent a few hours at the bottom, blown away by the beauty of it. Once back at the top we gazed down in awe. I had a sort of spiritual moment, a rare thing I’ve previously only felt a handful of times: being blessed in a Buddhist temple (which left me shaking and happily tearful) was one. I’m an agnostic verging on atheist, but it did suddenly seem as though I were looking down on creation itself. Alan Root felt the same way, writing in Apes, Ivory and Peacocks that “if anywhere deserved that grossly overused name ‘Eden’ it was Ngorongoro”. I’d been thinking about Lucy the fossil, the discovery not so far away of which changed our understanding of human evolution, and the very plausible theories that all of us come from Africa in the end – is that why I always feel so at home on that continent? At that precise moment, I bent my head down to light a cigarette, needing to shelter it from the wind, when the whole world went white. One of my daughters saw it happen: the cheap, poorly made lighter had fallen apart, all the fuel went up at once, and my head was, briefly, engulfed in a fireball. My hair was singed but I was otherwise unharmed, although very shaken. If there is a god, I wonder what the message was supposed to be.
He paraphrases Joyce, “the deepest of Irishmen”, “I love all things which flow.”
On one of his solo expeditions along the way Abbey actually manages to forget his canteen and sucks a pebble in an attempt to stave off his thirst. Then he has to suck on wet sand for moisture.
“Be true to the earth” he urges us.
They lose track of the days.
Those who hate wildlife and wilderness are frightened of it, not because it can be dangerous and hostile but “something far worse – its implacable indifference.”
As they approach the site of the Glen Canyon Dam, there’s a sign forbidding boats from the construction zone. “Violators will be prosecuted” says the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. My italics.
Abby would not have approved of our visits to Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the latter created by the Hoover Dam. We hired fast powerboats and bombed around. We didn’t ignore or forget the beauty of our surroundings although we were ignorant of what lay beneath, but I cannot deny that we also had a lot of fun.
This is Lake Powell.
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