I turn off the main dirt road and take one narrower, rougher, with a high grass-grown center, drive through a meadow where the golden eyes of more deer gleam in my headlights, and enter groves of quaking aspen, tall straight slim trees with bark as white as that of birches, easy to cut with a knife, much in favor among sheepherders, hunters, lovers. And they stay away because of the unpaved entrance road, the unflushable toilets in the campgrounds, and the fact that most of them have never even heard of Arches National Monument. The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. In a blue dawn under the faintest of stars we break our fast, pack our gear and launch the boats again. The pitch of the snowfield is less steep toward the bottom; it should be possible to slow down or stop before smashing into the rocks at the lower edge. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely;. I build a fire and toast my bare feet lightly in the flames until sensation is restored. A sculptured landscape mostly bare of vegetation earth in the nude. I think weve about said it all we communicate less in words and more in direct denotation, the glance, the pointing hand, the subtle nuances of pipe smoke, the tilt of a wilted hat brim. It began as a dim toneless resonance in the distance, like the sound made by a train entering the far end of a very long tunnel. The dead mans nephew, excused from this duty, walks far ahead out of earshot. They will be needed on the trail. We were in the mouth of the canyon. A crimson sunrise streaked with gold flares out beyond Balanced Rock, beyond the arches and windows, beyond Grand Mesa in Colorado. We drive the dirt roads and walk out some of the trails. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dantes paradise could equal it. 1:00. While the actual working cowboy disappears, along with the genuine nonworking Indian, the make-believe cowboys flourish and multiply like flies on a pecan pie. He meets the park superintendent and chief ranger. Rural insurrections can then be suppressed only by bombing and burning villages and countryside so thoroughly that the mass of the population is forced to take refuge in the cities, where the people are then policed and if necessary starved into submission. My saddle horse raised his dripping muzzle from the water and waited. In some places you find only petroglyphs, in other places only pictographs, in some places both. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. It may be however that Los Angeles will come to me. That a median can be found, and that pleasure and comfort can be found between the rocks and hard places: "The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." And as the tree drifted southward and west through the labyrinthine canyons of the river, through the immense silence, the light came down on his naked body from above, from the burnished walls on either side, from the dazzling play and sparkle of the water itself. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey 46,902 ratings, 4.19 average rating, 3,286 reviews Open Preview Desert Solitaire Quotes Showing 1-30 of 221 "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. My sun-bleached bones, dramatically sprawled at the bottom of the chasm, would provide the diversion of the picturesque for future wanderers if any man ever came this way again. Waterman shifts into low range; I get out and walk along behind to assist on the turns. [15] In Episodes and Visions, Abbey meditates on religion, philosophy, and literature and their intersections with desert life, as well as collects various thoughts on the tension between culture and civilization, espousing many tenets in support of environmentalism. Slowly, tentatively, he started down the bed of the ravine, downhill. While his former comrade struggled on mile after mile and day after day through the willow thickets and over the talus debris on the rivers shore. Or the departing Indians, having no domesticated animals except dogs, may simply have been unable to carry away all of their possessions. A little later in the season I was able to buy sweet corn, figs and peaches from the Supai. Too much for some, who have given up the struggle on the highways in exchange for an entirely different kind of vacation out in the open, on their own feet, following the quiet trail through forest and mountains, bedding down at evening under the stars, when and where they feel like it, at a time when the Industrial Tourists are still hunting for a place to park their automobiles. (2) No more new roads in national parks. Roy and Viviano discussed the situation briefly; we went to work. Slowly, without visible physical aid, the door groaned shut. Navajo National Monument. Were both satisfied with the arrangement as it is. Minor points on the same issue: I like horses. Viviano Jacquez, leading the ride, lost his temper and gave the horse a savage beating. While Ralph goes fishing I start off through the willow jungle, around tangles of poison ivy and up enormous sand dunes toward the Hole. We were here, say the hunters. If it were not so late in June, following a dry winter, the river consequently lower than usual, we would probably not notice these trivial ripples at all. The arches were formed through hundreds of thousands of years by the weathering of the huge sandstone walls, or fins, in which they are found. A fine silt accumulates beneath the door and on the window ledge. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table. Nearly exhausted, we rest for a while in the boats before paddling slowly into the dark canyon. The road ends at the Double Arch campground. Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well-known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism. Theres a horse living up that canyon, I announced; a wild horse. Sticky Polemonium has an engaging sound. Take care of yourselves as best you can, Im thinking your slave is off to the high country. If the happy thought arrives too late, crawl into the shade and contemplate the lonely sky. The dry wash, dry gulch. The storm is building up, the wind colder and harder than ever, but luckily for us the heavy rain has not yet come down. Abbey puts these ideas about solitude to the test during another trip: in Havasupai Canyon, near the Grand Canyon, Abbey spends six solo weeks in perfect communion with nature, occasionally celebrating with nearby Native Americans and, once, nearly dying in a recessed rock pool. As the weather improves so does the terrain. It is the southern end of the Waterpocket Fold, a fifty-mile-long monocline or ridge of warped sandstone, eroded along its base into triangular studs of naked rock that look, from here, like the teeth of a mowing machine. Why, a man could lose his mind in those incomprehensible distances. Beyond this point there could hardly be any returning, yet the main canyon was still not visible below. Suppertime, for the owl. At first look it all seems like a geologic chaos, but there is method at work here, method of a fanatic order and perseverance: each groove in the rock leads to a natural channel of some kind, every channel to a ditch and gulch and ravine, each larger waterway to a canyon bottom or broad wash leading in turn to the Colorado River and the sea. Consider the sentiments of Charles Marion Russell, the cowboy artist, as quoted in John Hutchens, I have been called a pioneer. We see a few baldface cows, pass a corral and windmill, meet a rancher coming out in his pickup truck. For everything appeared to him as equally strange. It includes the motel and restaurant owners, the gasoline retailers, the oil corporations, the road-building contractors, the heavy equipment manufacturers, the state and federal engineering agencies and the sovereign, all-powerful automotive industry. I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue. What about the aged and infirm? I let my arm dangle over the side and trail my hand in the flow. Real cattle country all right. Farther on a pair of mule deer started from the brush and bounded obliquely through the beams of my lights, raising puffs of dust which the wind, moving faster than my pickup truck, caught and carried ahead of me out of sight into the dark. I stopped to swab the sweat from my face. I emerged from that treacherous little canyon at sundown, with an enormous fire in the western sky and lightning overhead. No travelers, no campers, no wanderers have come to this part of the desert today and for a few moments I feel and realize that I am very much alone. Of these only a rare few are too hot or too briny or too poisonous to support life the great majority of them swarm with living things. But Roy had lost interest in the subject. I follow them for a short distance, still plagued by curiosity, before remembering my place and the requirements of common courtesy. Impossible to go on but a fixed rope dangles there, hanging from some belaying point out of sight above. His life became dreamlike. Small doses will not keep you going or alive and a deep drink will force your body to expend water in getting rid of the excess salt. Concealed by the flowers at this time are the leaves, small, tough, wax-coated, bitter on the tongue thus the name quinine bush but popular just the same among the deer as browse when nothing better is available buckbrush. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. The fear born of nightmares, the nightmares that rise from fear? A treasure not in money but in beauty. He freed himself by stripping off what was left of the shirt. Everywhere you see them now, from California to Florida, from Texas to Times Square, crowding the streets in their big white hats, tight pants, flowered shirts, and high-heeled fruity boots. There was only one thing I could do. It drops away rapidly, picking up speed and throwing a spray of snow into the air, turns on edge and rolls and bounds like a clumsy wheel all the way to the bottom, shattering on the rocks below. If not him, his twin brother. Id been spending some of my days off at his ranch, doing a little work around the place in return for room and board. I was going to use nothing but sympathy and understanding, in direct violation of common sense and all precedent, to bring Moon-Eye home again. The boulders, carried down from the flanks of Navajo Mountain, cause the rapids which lie before us. Not quite within eyeshot but close by, in a shady dampish secret place, the sacred datura moonflower, moonlily, thornapple blooms in the night, soft white trumpet-shaped flowers that open only in darkness and close with the coming of the heat. He sat down on the runningboard to rest, to regain his wind, and watched Husk crawling slowly toward him. Has this particular canyon been seen and named by earlier river-runners? I touched the rope and hackamore bunched up inside my shirt. At the next turn in the canyon, a mile farther, I found a pile of fresh droppings on the path. I had wished also to see the red rock of our 33,000-acre garden, the arches and buttes and pinnacles and balanced boulders, all lit up in evening light but the sun too is buried in clouds. I look in the gullies and fissures and in the enormous potholes drilled by wind and sand in the solid rock holes like wells, with perpendicular sides mantraps. He has only one good leg, had an accident with the other, cant hike very well in rough country, tends to lag behind. As summer rages on through July, the heat becomes unbearable. We argued all night long. The desert waits outside, desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny, thorny, stunted and twisted as they are tenacious. The men managed to get ashore still alive. Is this true? Activate your 30 day free trialto continue reading. You cant see the desert if you cant smell it. he said. I rolled up my sleeping bag and in the filtered light of the stars followed the trail that wound through thickets of cactus and up around ledges to the terrace above the mining camp. He meets the park superintendent and chief ranger. Sold. In this respect the desert of the Colorado is opposite to that of the Nile in Egypt or the Rio Grande in New Mexico where, in both cases, life, men and the cities are gathered along the shores of the rivers. With regulations enforced by water cops in government uniforms. The deerslayers come by the thousands every autumn out of Salt Lake and California to harvest, as they like to say, the surplus deer. I stood on the top of the pile and stretched upward, straining my arms to their utmost limit and groped with fingers and fingernails for a hold on something firm. We started early, about six, after a hot breakfast in the morning twilight. We sit outside our tent, enjoying the weather. It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This memoir of life in the American desert by the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a nature writing classic on par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Taking the Windows road first, I drive beneath the overhanging Balanced Rock, 3500 tons of seamless Entrada sandstone perched on a ridiculous, inadequate pedestal of the Carmel formation, soft and rotten stone eaten away by the wind, deformed by the weight above. Aside from discovering natures spiritual qualities, Abbeys extended time with Ralph Newcomb renews his affection for humanity, and he ruminates on how feeling liberated in nature makes individual people capable of love. When he began to feel a little dizzy he sat down again to rest. On with the death march. The plow of mortality drives through the stubble, turns over rocks and sod and weeds to cover the old, the worn-out, the husks, shells, empty seedpods and sapless roots, clearing the field for the next crop. One bird, however, is singing, if you could call it singing. Look at this in my hand, Moon-Eye.. What does it mean? and walk, Sorry lady, we have no Coke machine out here. Behind the slogan is the assumption that the majority of Americans, exactly like the managers of the tourist industry, expect and demand to see their national parks from the comfort, security, and convenience of their automobiles. The shade of the tree was pleasant and I made no hurry to get up. The next morning I bought a slab of bacon and six cans of beans at the village post office, rented a large comfortable horse and proceeded farther down the canyon past miniature cornfields, green pastures, swimming pools and waterfalls to the ruins of an old mining camp five miles below the village. The dull, painful creaking of the branches in the wind indicates, however, an internal effort at liberation. Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. Though the murder leaves Husks son Billy-Joe for dead, the young boy spends several telling days in the wilderness, much like Abbey himself, bonding spiritually with nature in a way that his greedy father never could. Slowly and painfully, leaning as much of my weight as I could against the sandstone slide, I applied more and more pressure to the stick, pushing my body upward until I was again stretched out full length above it. Weve forgotten to keep a close track of time, have no clock or calendar, and no longer know for certain exactly how many days and nights weve been on the river. After banning private automobiles the second step should be easy. Surprised by delight, I stood there in the heat, the bright sun, the quiet afternoon, and watched the monster roll and roar toward me. Much depends on the season. Dehydration: the desert air sucks moisture from every pore. I have to keep my promise. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. And whether good or bad in strictly pecuniary terms, industrial tourism exacts a spiritual price from those dependent upon it for their livelihood. Darkness has already descended as he drives his pickup truck toward the trailer house. One day in late June Ralph Newcomb and I arrive on the shore of the Colorado River at a site known variously as Hite, White Canyon or Dandy Crossing, about one hundred and fifty miles upriver from the new dam already under construction. Suppose, I say to myself, you were out here hungry, starving, no weapon but your bare hands. Obviously the only sensible thing to do was to turn back. Cowboyism rides rampant as never before on a field of golden neon dollar signs but job openings for working cowboys are scarce. There are no bugs, which in itself is a warning sign, in case the smell were not sufficient. The folk poetry of the pioneers: Desolation Canyon, Labyrinth Canyon, Stillwater Canyon, Dark Canyon, Happy Canyon, Cohabitation Canyon, Nigger Bill Canyon, Recapture Canyon; Mollies Nipple, The Bishops Prick, Queen Annes Bottom; Dirty Devil River, Onion Creek, Last Chance Creek, Salvation Creek, Moonlight Wash, Grand Gulch; Cigarette Spring, Stinking Spring, Hog Spring, Squaw Spring, Frenchmans Spring, Matrimony Spring, Arsenic Spring; Woodenshoe Butte, Windowblind Peak, Looking Glass Rock, Lizard Rock, Elephant Hill, Turks Head, Candlestick Spire, Cleopatras Chair, Jacobs Ladder, Copper Globe, Black Box; Waterpocket Fold, Sinbad Valley, Beef Basin, Fable Valley, Ruin Park, Devils Pocket, Robbers Roost, Goblin Valley, Soda Springs Basin, Potato Bottom Basin, Cyclone Lane, Buckhorn Flat, Surprise Valley, The Big Draw, Professor Valley, Kodachrome Flats, Calamity Mesa, Upheaval Dome; Poison Strip, Yellowcat, Hidden Splendor, Happy Jack, Rattlesnake, Mi Vida (all uranium mines); Ernies Country, Petes Mesa, Zekes Hole, Pappys Pasture; Pucker Pass (where the canyon puckers up) and Hooray Pass (hooray we made it); Tavaputs, Kaiparowits, Toroweap, Owachomo, Hovenweap, Dinnehotso, Hoskinnini, Dot Klish, Betatakin, Keet Seel, Tes-Nos-Pas, Kayenta, Agathla, Tukuhnikivats; Grand Mesa, Thunder Mesa, Wild Horse Mesa, Horsethief Point, Dead Horse Point, Grandview Point, Lands End; Capitol Reef, San Rafael Swell, Dandy Crossing (a dandy place to cross the river), Hells Backbone, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Book Cliffs; Hondoo Arch, Angel Arch, Druid Arch, Delicate Arch; The Needles, The Standing Rocks, The Maze; Dugout Ranch, Lonesome Beaver Camp, Paria, Bundyville, Hanksville, Bluff, Mexican Hat, Mexican Water, Bitter Springs, Kanab; Bedrock and Paradox; The wind stops, completely, as I finish my lunch. How should I know? Instant access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts and more. This Turnbow had consumption. Are saints human? Hire a crew of pretty girls, call them rangerettes, let them sell the tickets and give the campfire talks. And they should. The gopher snake. But tomorrow well worry. Why such allure in the very word? We even supply the firewood, in the form of pinyon pine logs and old fence posts of cedar, which it will be my task to find and haul to the campgrounds. The superstition, my visitor pointed out, is based on a piece of trickery, statistical sleight-of-hand: e.g., in a primitive culture without modern medical techniques, perhaps half of all the babies born die within the first year of infancy; the remainder survive and live for the normal, usual seventy years; taking the total born and dividing by the number of full-lived survivors, the statistician announces that the average life expectancy at birth for the members of this hypothetical society is thirty-five years. Their sharp hooves clatter on the rock. The heat in this deep and narrow canyon seems dense, stifling, almost sickening after a day on the wide and breezy expanse of the river. The flow may reappear farther down the canyon, surfacing briefly for a second time, a third time, diminishing in force until it vanishes completely and for good. A fresh golden light breaks through and now in the east, over the turrets and domes, stands the rainbow sign, a double rainbow with one foot in the canyon of the Colorado and the other far north in Salt Wash. Hell never have another chance as good as this. If you look hard enough and long enough. Here was a treasure. Like it or not I am on my way: It does not, after all, sound unpromising. No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a years toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise.. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Jumping ahead in time to 1967, he notes that this highway was realized and how Archesalong with many other parkshas flooded with tourists and industry. The sun reigns, I am drowned in light. Light. A very small spring: the water oozes from the grasp of moss to fall one drop at a time, one drop per second, over a lip of stone. Evening on the river, a night of moonlight and canyon winds, sleep and the awakening. Looks like youve clipped this slide to already. The wicked rabbit is dead. Never in a hurry to get anywhere or do anything, an indolent and contemplative bird, he hovers on a thermal, rocking slightly, rising slowly, slips off, sails forward and upward without lifting a feather, primaries extended like fingers at his wingtips. On the crest of the dune is a curving cornice from which flies a constant spray of fine sand. Whimpering, Billy-Joe pressed his hand to his eyes and felt the joints of his bones grate together like glass. He was picking peaches one day in his own backyard, taking it easy, and he had a stroke. Of course its dusty this is Utah! Until now. Shakily I tamp my pipe and fumble through the pockets of my shirt. I am on the north face of Tukuhnikivats; blocking the view to the east and northeast are Mounts Peale and Mellenthin but north and west and southwest the world is open and I can see the knobs and domes of the Arches, the gray-blue Roan Cliffs beyond, the town and valley of Moab 7000 feet below, the looming headlands of Hatch Point, Dead Horse Point and Grandview Point, and farther away, farthest of all, wonderfully remote, the Orange Cliffs, Lands End and The Maze, an exhilarating vastness bathed in morning light, room enough for a lifetime of exploration. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence; how necessary. The interior of the Grand Canyon, a fiercely hot and hostile abyss, is visited each summer by thousands and thousands of tourists of the most banal and unadventurous type, many of them on foot self-propelled, so to speak and the others on the backs of mules. Its a fact. When I got back to my horse I was too tired to climb immediately into the saddle; it seemed easier for a while to walk and lead the horse. Hell work for nothing, almost, if necessary, requiring only a token wage or salary in recognition of his professional status. Looking down at the graceful curve of the thousand-foot snowfield it seems to me that the descent should not require more than five minutes. Id speak a sentence and wait about ten minutes for the next thought and speak again. The horned owl may be the natural enemy of the rabbit but surely the rabbit is the natural friend of the horned owl. Public domain. Hed made a little money in the rodeo game and offered me this advice on riding the broom tails: Always give a bronc a fair shake. A rivulet of clear water pours into the pool; glints and flecks of light reflected from its agitated surface dance over the dark-golden walls of the glen. 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