Desert Solitaire With Edward Abbey

In our culture, the Loner always gets the bum rap.  People doing very bad things are often labeled Loners.  Someone seeking solitude is running away from society; he is antisocial, prone to mental illness, existing outside the boundaries of what is wholesome and proper.  He does not play by the rules or cultivate friendships.  He forsakes his parents and siblings.  He was always a difficult child, according to those who once knew him.  Not a team player.  A puzzle, a person not easily read or figured out.  A wild card participant in the human endeavor, he is elliptical and ethereal, lofty and arrogant.

Today, we do not have Loners because we live in an age of communication and instant gratification, right?  Don’t be so sure.  When I get on the overfilled elevator at the college, I ride with five to ten people in dead silence except for the motor raising us up through the Humanities Building.  No one says a word; they are all looking down at their phone screens, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.  We are all together alone.  My students struggle with social skills, making small talk, making eye contact for that matter, and when I speak with them, they are hesitant to open up.  We are all not in a good place, socially, especially in an environment where engagement is necessary, required even, to pass a class.  But to engage may bring conflict, and we have been taught from an early age to avoid conflict.

A Loner may not be lonely, but he or she might crave solitude.  Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing.  One can be lonely with a crowd of people; someone who seeks solitude may not be a misanthrope.  Edward Abbey in his book, Desert Solitaire (Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1968 and 1990) is someone who decides to live his life deliberately, as Thoreau commanded, and experience Nature with a capital N in a pure, unadulterated form.  So he went to the Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah near the town of Moab three seasons running to work as a park ranger and revel in the silence, the heat, and of course, the incredible beauty of such an austere landscape.

Edward Abbey

Deserts play an intricate part in the history of humankind.  Great figures in human history sought the desert:  Moses and his people; Jesus, alone with evil; Mohammad receiving his revelations; Buddha and his asceticism; and Brigham Young, the American Moses, leading his people through the deserts of this country to the Promised Land of Utah, very close to Abbey’s stomping grounds over those three summers.  Deserts have a long tradition of purification for those who brave the heat, the animals, the lack of water.  They contain elements of the divine, the mystic, the hermitage.

Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Pennsylvania.  He was drafted into the war in 1945, and although he applied for a clerical position, he wound up as a military police officer.  What followed were a series of promotions and demotions over the next two years.  He was honorably discharged and went to college on the G.I. Bill.  He became a sharp critic of culture and society, and advocated for a banishment of the draft.  His Master’s thesis focused on the morality of violence, and over the course of his life, Abbey advocated anarchy as a way to social change.

In the late 1950s and 60s, Abbey worked as a ranger in the National Park System.  Although the book focuses mainly on his adventures in and around the Arches National Monument, he served in other parks as well.  He not only spent a considerable portion of his life in the deserts and harsh landscapes of the western United States, he was buried there in Arizona.  It was a fitting end for a man who could be cantankerous, angry, and yes, often mystical.  He challenged oil companies and mining corporations who wished to destroy what he considered divinely sacred.  He fought to preserve these monuments and parks, and made their defense his life’s work.

Desert Solitaire gives us the difficulty Abbey encountered in his first foray into Arches.  He was not far from Moab, but he was isolated and had to rely on his wits to get by between deliveries of water, food and supplies.  He had several encounters with wild life:  desert mice in his dilapidated trailer; a rattlesnake who camped out right under the steps down from that trailer’s door; and, while off duty, livestock that needed herding and protecting to avoid predators.

He is not shy in the book about his point of view.  He speaks of the “solitary confinement of the mind,” as a theory that “solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for the brains) and conversation-clogged seminars.”  His prescription for all that ails humankind is a foray into Nature, a deep, immersive interaction that restores the perspective and the respect that should be afforded the natural world.

His observations are sharp and clear, and when he tells a story, especially the one about discovering a dead body with a crew searching for a lost person, he is riveting.  One does not need to decipher Abbey’s positions on environmental issues, and he does not romanticize the harsh landscape in which his story is set.  We taste the grit and sand in the wind; we see creatures, strange and delicate, as they flee the sun.  Throughout, Abbey is clear and factual in his rendering of the desert and his place in it.  He is a Loner here who opens the door for us and allows us insight into the nature of this universe.

In a time of climate change, and climate change deniers, we need to read Edward Abbey.  Through his pages, we access the natural world and discover our place in the universe.  We are but small fragments of star dust and fluid, part of the great Oversoul of which Emerson so nobly spoke.  Abbey’s story is set against the harsh and Martian-like landscape of Arches National Monument, a mystical and deeply moving world of evolved species that can survive the difficult environment where they live.  It is a world of plants that retain water from limited rains, and the bones of those who have dried out and turned to fossil or dust.

This book opened a door for me.  It changed the way I see the world, as all literature and art should.  However, what I am most thankful for, Edward Abbey led me to another great environmental writer and scientist:  John Muir.  More on him shortly.

Arches National Monument