Desert Solitaire Still Bites

Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is usually filed under nature writing, which is accurate in the way that calling a knife a kitchen utensil is accurate. First published in 1968, the book draws on Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument. It contains ravishing descriptions of rock, heat, silence, snakes, and stars, then turns around and starts an argument.

That argument is the book's real force. Abbey despises what he calls "Industrial Tourism": the roads, cars, facilities, and bureaucratic thinking that make wilderness easier to consume while steadily removing the wildness. His anger can be funny, precise, and exhilarating. It can also become tiresome. He is arrogant and far too pleased with his own performance as the solitary man who sees through civilisation.

I wouldn't sand those qualities away. They give the book its difficult energy. Abbey's desert isn't a backdrop for personal healing. It is indifferent, dangerous, and valuable without needing to serve us. The University of Arizona Press description stresses his love of the canyonlands and his disgust at the "improvements" intended to increase visitation. Abbey wants people to encounter wilderness, yet still resents the machinery that lets more of them arrive.

The prose is strongest when he stops lecturing and pays attention. A stone, a moonlit road, or the body of a dead animal receives an intensity that makes urban vision seem half-awake. Abbey makes solitude feel less like escape than a necessary correction to the scale at which modern life operates.

More than fifty years later, the polemic still bites because the problem has not gone away. We preserve landscapes partly by opening them to public love, then risk wearing them down through that same access. Desert Solitaire does not solve the contradiction. It makes comfort with it impossible.

Sources:

Desert Solitaire — University of Arizona Press

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey — EBSCO Research