On Rereading Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey
Not long ago I did some research and wrote up a list of books on solitude. I thought that if I could absorb some of the viewpoints of other writers on the subject I might find some clues on how to turn my loneliness into a positive experience. Most of the books I listed, once I found them in the library and perused their contents, turned out to be not as interesting as I had originally hoped. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, though, is a classic. He does not have the literary or moral complexity of Thoreau in Walden; he is considerably rougher and more rugged, but in his own way he celebrates and elevates the condition of aloneness.
The essays in Desert Solitaire mainly concern a few seasons Abbey spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah in the late 1960s shortly before it was redesignated as Arches National Park. When he arrives, he lives alone in a house trailer in a primitive location accessible only by dirt road. He writes: “I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.” But he sees government surveyors planning a paved road as harbingers of doom. He loves the barren desert, the canyonlands, and the as-yet only partially dammed Colorado River, and he wishes that developers would just stay away and keep it as it is. However, he realizes that the incursions of progress are inevitable, and he documents the stark beauties of the wilderness before they are irreparably trodden underfoot by tourists and industries.
In one long essay, he and a companion take a long, leisurely ride in rubber rafts down the Colorado River before it is forever changed by the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell. He laments the soon-coming loss of the beautiful landscapes they encounter, which will soon be covered with mud and water.
Abbey has a deep abiding love for the environment in which he lives. To increase his sensitivity to it, when taking walks at night he uses his flashlight as seldom as possible so that he will not be limited by its circle of light, and he turns on the generator that furnishes electricity only when absolutely necessary because its noise disturbs the desert’s profound silence. He admits that he has occasional bouts of loneliness, but to combat it he moves out of the house trailer, instead constructing a cot and an open air tent nearby. When he sleeps under the stars, he feels more of a part of the universe around him and his loneliness dissipates.
He argues that the predators and vermin in the desert are as essential as any other life forms; he sees a symbiotic whole in the desert biome where many of us would discern only irritations and dangers. This is one of the values of his vision for me. When I read Abbey’s descriptions I realize that there is great beauty in unexpected places in the wide world and that I should not jump to conclusions before I understand in depth the realities of a place. And, in truth, it can take a lifetime to truly explore only a tiny fraction of our wonderful world. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines in the movie The Last Samurai. Ken Watanabe as the Warlord Katsumoto is speaking with Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren in his garden; as he admires his blossoming trees he says, “A man could search all his life for the perfect blossom, and it would not be a wasted life.” At the end, of course, as he is dying, he looks up at a tree full of blossoms and says, “They are all perfect.” This is the message that Abbey gives about the desert land he loves: it is perfect just as it is, and he wishes that it could forever remain that way.
