When did I first run into Edward Abbey? My 20s, certainly: a dangerous age to make his acquaintance. Had life gone in a different direction, I might have blundered out into the desert and died there. Lots of young men get tempted to do stupid things after reading certain authors.
Nearly 40 years later, nearly the same age as Abbey when he passed, I found myself in his neck of the desert, the place he most felt at home. In Prescott Arizona's Old Sage Bookshop, a copy of Desert Solitaire appeared. My wife spotted it, thank God, because I'd given my old paperback away and had been hankering to read the book again while we were in the West. I wanted to see if Abbey could cast his spell on me a second time.
The essays in the 1968 book, set during Abbey's time as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 50s, opened up for me in a way they'd never earlier. Partly I've lived a lot more, and partly I have become familiar with authors Abbey notes well, from Joyce to Chuang-Tzu. The man Abbey, at least his younger, angry self who did this writing, did not escape my censure so easily. He was in his late 20s and early 30s when he did this writing, and he comes off as a bit of womanizing misanthrope, a guy we might call a Doomer today, eager to see technological civilization collapse. Easy to claim that at such an unripe age, I thought; one broken ankle and your post-collapse adventures would end forever. The naive enthusiasm and egotism that leads him to get trapped in a side-canyon that nearly kills him remind me of the antics of the Beats; they too have sent more than a few young men to their dooms. I'm looking at you, Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadwell.
Yet Abbey redeems himself, in the prose he crafts and in his ultimate, hard-earned humility. His epiphanies of being so small in so vast and uncaring a landscape make an older reader nod in recognition, something a selfish 20-something could never do.
And the writing! Kerouac would never type a sentence like this:
Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
The beautiful indifference of wild nature, moving according to its own calendar, redeems Abbey and his essays, published in the rebellious year of 68. Time does that; petroglyphs from 700 years ago look permanent, until one grapples with the deep-time of a 600-million-year-old vista where the artists put down their marks. As Abbey learns these truths, he's at his best when confronting a stubborn rattlesnake or when the side-canyon temporarily defeats him and he breaks down crying, facing starvation, then mummification, in a spot he cannot escape. Nature repeatedly slaps him silly, and he learns from the harsh lessons. Kerouac and Neal Cassady never learned; Kerouac died a sad drunk, and the same year as Abbey published the book, Cassady's body was found beside a railroad track in Mexico, dead from exposure following a party. Neither Beat made it out of their 40s. They had raced across the desert in a car they drove to pieces, saying they were "digging" it but really only digging the sound of their own unceasing voices. They should have shut up for a while and listened to their friend Gary Snyder. Or Abbey.
Conversely, Abbey spends a lot of time in this book being quiet. After all, he's alone for much of it. To whom is he going to speak? A Prickly Pear?
If you do not know Abbey's fiction, save them and start here first, but read with care if you are still young or impressionable. The book spawned a cult following for many reasons, some good. Abbey and the writers he knew and influenced, like Terry Tempest Williams, in turn changed the nation's ideas about the sanctity of untouched wilderness. Even as what he called "industrial tourism" thrives, we rarely hear any longer calls to dam the Grand Canyon or run paved roads into every remaining tract of wilderness. The Park Service is not perfect, but it stands a little closer now than in the late 50s to Abbey's vision in its "leave no trace" philosophy. Tourism helps to fund preservation.
Perhaps I'm overly charitable in a time when a new and global threat to civilization has arisen. The pressures on us grow every year with additional gigatons of carbon dioxide. We might end up, in a few centuries, with little more to show for our folly than postmodern petroglyphs beside drowned coastal cities.
I would like to leave a better world to the bright and eager young people I teach. Their children will hate and curse our selfishness and laziness, as bitterly as Abbey did at his bleakest moments.
I am uncertain if I will read Desert Solitaire again. I don't have another 40 years, but one other fact remains clear. The past 40 mark how far I have come from the angry young man who, like young Abbey, felt it best for a rotten and rapacious civilization to fall.
Now I want us to make it. Not for my short-lived self, for a human nation sure to fall some day, or even for an undying God. I'm a Deist and know now in my bones that God, who blessed us with this lovely world, does not meddle. I learned that from Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. We are free to wreck or thrive. God made chaos and put evil inside us too. Get behind me, Satan, you sham, you lie. Loser in the basement, you don't exist, but we have hell enough in each of us to make a hell right here.
Why keep hoping we'll endure and do better? Hope makes one happy. Even if it is all just rock and sunlight, we have others around us. Human contact is sacred, too, in whatever time each of us has.
