SOURCE: Scheese, Don. “Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden.” North Dakota Quarterly 59, no. 2 (spring 1991): 211-27.

[In the following essay, Scheese identifies Abbey primarily as a cultural and social critic in the same vein as Henry David Thoreau.]

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

—Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”

I first encountered the work of Edward Abbey during a cross-continental train trip in December 1977. To help me endure the wintry, interminable monotones of the Great Plains, a friend suggested a few books to take along. I can recall but one of them now: Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” Thoreau wrote in Walden (107). After reading Desert Solitaire a new era began in my life: I made it my vocation both to study the nature writing tradition and devote a significant portion of time to living in the wild. I took up Abbey's suggestions in the introduction to Abbey's Road on whom to read—Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, Ann Zwinger, and Peter Matthiessen (xx)—and followed his example of inhabiting the wilderness: for the past ten summers I have worked as a fire lookout for the Forest Service in Idaho. While living in the woods I have had ample time in which to read hundreds of works of nature writing (to paraphrase Thoreau, in “Natural History of Massachusetts,” “Books of natural history make the most cheerful [summer] reading”) and meditate upon the significance of one of America's great contributions to world literature.

The label “nature writer” is one that Abbey has resisted. “This is a title I have not earned, never wanted, do not enjoy,” he writes in a new preface to Desert Solitaire (1988: 12).¹ Many of his self-assessments remind one of what D. H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (8). The truth of the matter is that Abbey, for all his disclaimers, is a nature writer. Like Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, all of whom sought to transcend natural history's purpose of merely naming and classifying natural phenomena, Abbey understood his role to be that of culture critic. “The few such writers whom I wholly admire,” he continues, “are those, like Thoreau, who went far beyond simple nature writing to become critics of society, of the state, of our modern industrial culture. … It is not enough to understand nature; the point is to save it” (12). Abbey's disclaimers notwithstanding, he falls squarely in the tradition of nature writing established by Thoreau and carried on by Muir and Leopold—those leading figures in the conservation movement whose works we turn to most frequently for inspiration and insight. All four writers sought to instill a land ethic in the American public. Abbey is yet one more inhabitor of the wild—with two important distinctions. The environment he chose to inhabit was the desert; and he is the most radical, iconoclastic figure of the lot.

Prior to his death in March 1989, Edward Abbey wrote nineteen works of fiction and non-fiction. (Hayduke Lives!, a sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang, was published posthumously in 1990.) Most of Abbey's writing is about the American West, and most of the writing about the American West is about the Southwest. The desert. Born in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, he first visited the region as a seventeen-year-old in 1944 while hitchhiking and riding the rails cross-country, prior to his induction in the armed services. In Arizona he encountered

a land that filled me with strange excitement: crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, hard-edged clouds. For the first time I felt I was getting to the West of my deepest imaginings—the place where the tangible and the mythical become the same.

(“Hallelujah” 5)

Following a stint in the Army, Abbey moved to the Southwest permanently (more or less) in 1947. He enrolled at the University of New Mexico under the GI Bill, taking ten years to earn a master's degree in philosophy, for which he wrote a thesis on “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.” Like Thoreau, Muir, and (to a lesser extent) Leopold, he was troubled by the quest for a suitable vocation, faced with the difficult choice of earning “bread money” (Muir's phrase) to provide for his succession of families (he was married five times and fathered five children), and finding work he found fulfilling. For a time he resolved the dilemma by working as a seasonal employee with the Park Service. In 1956 and 1957, and again several years later, he worked as a ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah, spending April through September maintaining trails, greeting the public and collecting campground fees, and generally functioning as “sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer, and custodian” (Desert Solitaire 1968: 5). He stored his gear and food in a housetrailer provided by the government, and ate and slept outdoors under a ramada he constructed himself. For three six-month periods he observed the passage of the seasons and inhabited 33,000 acres of slickrock wilderness, accumulating four volumes of notes and sketches. His first three works, all novels, were commercial failures; so, following the advice of a New York publisher to “write about something you know,” he typed up an account of “those [first] two seamless perfect seasons” at Arches and sent it to his agent (Abbey's Road xix; Desert Solitaire 1988: 9-11). Thus Desert Solitaire was born.

Like Walden and Part I of A Sand County Almanac, Desert Solitaire is an example of what Thomas Lyon in his taxonomy of nature writing calls “Solitude and Backcountry Living” (4-6). Other similarities exist among the three works. Desert Solitaire represents “compressed time,” the distillation of years of experience into a seamless account of intimate participation in the cycle of the seasons; and in recording a significant portion of one's life it also qualifies as a work of autobiography (Sayre 19). Most importantly, Abbey's work, like that of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, presents the author as an exemplary inhabitor of the wild. Abbey's term, “usufructuary,” is crucial in understanding the advantages of immersion in the wild while simultaneously formulating and adhering to a land ethic. The resulting encounter with nature becomes a myth of self-education, a realization of autobiography and ecotopia, and heartens the receptive reader “by showing us new and true possibilities and how much may be achieved in life and art by conscious endeavor” (Paul 233).

Abbey's specific contributions to the genre of nature writing are threefold: following in the tradition of John Wesley Powell, John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin, and Joseph Wood Krutch, he popularized an aesthetic of a different kind in celebrating the harsh beauty of the desert landscape; he articulated new arguments, distinguished by a rhetoric of rage, for wilderness preservation; and he advocated political activism in order to defend wild nature. Since the publication of Desert Solitaire nature writing and environmental politics have been significantly transformed. Abbey's life and work have become a counterfriction against those forces that would destroy the wilderness.

The opening line, “This is the most beautiful place on earth,” affirms Abbey's joy at the prospect of living in a desiccated Eden and places him in a relatively brief tradition of desert appreciation (Limerick 7). “What is the peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape?” (240) he asks, mentioning the handful of American writers who have dealt with this question: Powell, Austin, Van Dyke, and Krutch. Powell, along with his crew of nine the first (in 1869) so far as we know to run the length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, wrote The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, the record of a journey which Abbey partially retraces in Desert Solitaire. In a pantheon of anti-pioneers Abbey praises Powell (along with Thoreau and Muir) for recognizing in nature “something more than merely raw material for pecuniary exploitation” (168). In his book on exploring the Grand Canyon, and later in his career as head of the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell tried to dispel the myth of the American West as Garden by pointing to its low rainfall totals and suggesting that if settlement were to take place the best approach would be communitarian rather than the individualistic style characteristic of much of American frontier development (Stegner 202-42).

Subsequent writers also came to terms with the crucial fact of the desert's aridity. Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) is based on nearly two decades of residence in the Mojave Desert of eastern California. Austin treats such themes as the harmonious adaptations of animals and Indians to sparse resources, the need to dwell on the land for a significant period of time in order to understand its rhythms, and the careless exploitation of natural resources by Anglo-Americans. The white man, she observes, “is a great blunderer going about in the woods. … The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor” (40).

John C. Van Dyke treated themes also taken up by Abbey. An art critic, Van Dyke emphasized the aesthetic value of desert landforms. He found the adaptation of the flora and fauna to the harsh climatic conditions particularly beautiful. He denounced the settlement of the Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahan deserts through which he traveled at the turn of the century, declaring that they “should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever” (59). But not only for utilitarian reasons did he believe that the desert should not be over-exploited. In The Desert (1901) he argues that regardless of whether or not humans ever witness the beauty of the desert Southwest it has a right to exist.

The same pellucid skies celebrated by Van Dyke, literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch sought out after leaving New York City in 1950. But Krutch quickly discovered that the sunny climate of the Southwest was attracting increasingly greater numbers of Eastern immigrants like himself, leading to the befouling of the air and overcrowding of the land. He tempered his anger over the desecration of the desert environment by suggesting in a number of works how to best appreciate the fragile ecosystem. In distinguishing between the tourist's and the resident's perceptions—“In nature, one never really sees a thing for the first time until one has seen it for the fiftieth” (Desert Year 4)—he was both harkening back to Austin and anticipating Abbey in their emphasis on keen perception fostered by long periods of inhabitation.

Desert Solitaire thus owes significant debts to these earlier writers. Yet the work is unique for its passionate defense of the anti-pastoral environment. Although the writing is overtly autobiographical, with Abbey's ego looming large in almost every chapter, the perspective is more eco- than ego-centered, emphasizing the harmony and delicate balance of the desert ecosystem. Chapter three, which bears the oxymoronic title “The Serpents of Paradise,” nicely illustrates this theme. Abbey presents a desert aesthetic, an explanation of how to appreciate a land that, though antithetical to the traditional notion of the pastoral, is lovely for its spareness and openness and efficiency. Absent are humans, verdure, domestic animals; in their place are rattlesnakes, malevolent (if colorful) cacti, and naked red rock. Slickrock country.

Drinking coffee one morning on the steps of his housetrailer, Abbey looks between his feet and discovers a rattlesnake. What to do? The snake obviously represents a physical threat. But as a ranger he is by law duty-bound to protect all creatures within the park. Moreover by predilection he cannot compel himself to kill the rattler. Paraphrasing a line from Robinson Jeffers' “Hurt Hawks,” he says, “I prefer not to kill animals. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake” (17). So he chooses an ecological alternative. He captures a gopher snake, a species known to drive off rattlers, and keeps it as his pet in the trailer and on his person while patrolling the park. His affinity for wild creatures is further revealed when the gopher snake escapes, only to be rediscovered by Abbey during an elaborate pas de deux mating ritual with another member of its species. What follows is a fine example of participation in the wild, comparable to, say, Muir's joy while swaying in a treetop during a violent storm. A shameless voyeur, Abbey approaches the snakes at ground level, mesmerized by their slithering caduceus-like glide. Though he is reminded that humans have lost their wildness when he is repelled “by a fear too ancient and powerful to overcome” (21), he does learn a valuable lesson. He acquires a biocentric outlook, the knowledge of the deep ecologist (Sessions and Devall 65-108). “We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to bear, that all living things on earth are kindred” (21).

The integrity, stability, and beauty of the desert are the dominant concerns of Desert Solitaire. Integrity, stability, beauty: these criteria of ecological health were established by Aldo Leopold in “The Land Ethic,” the concluding essay of A Sand County Almanac. The ultimate concern of both nature writers is the preservation of the land, its harmony, and the equilibrium of natural relationships in a particular environment. This becomes evident on another occasion in Abbey's work when he points out how predator control conducted by the government on behalf of the livestock industry (in which Leopold had participated while he worked with the Forest Service in the Southwest) led to an extermination campaign against coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves, and caused an irruption of the deer population. The warfare practiced by the exterminators, with all their modern military apparatus, is contrasted with the solitary quest of the hunter seeking his prey. To illustrate the distinction Abbey performs an experiment of sorts. He hurls a rock at a rabbit to determine whether he could survive in the wild by dint of his physical skills. The projectile lands true to its mark and kills the rabbit; after the initial shock passes, Abbey experiences a mild elation. “I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul; white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one.” Some might consider the rabbit's death gratuitous. Not Abbey. By killing it he participates again in the natural environment; he becomes part and parcel of nature's economy; he is now a bona fide member of the desert's biotic community. Whether he eats the rabbit or not (he doesn't, fearing the prospect of tularemia) doesn't matter. His point is that, unlike the indiscriminate slaughter committed by the agents of predator control, he has engaged in the noble, one-on-one pursuit of the hunt.² “We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!” (34).

Leopold of course later recanted his “sin” against predators in “Thinking Like a Mountain.” He would have appreciated Abbey's fear of the consequences of overpopulating the desert, the taxing of natural resources to an ecologically unhealthy degree. The perceived threat of a water shortage prompts this reaction from Abbey: “There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount” (126). But a significant difference between the two writers is in tone; Leopold rarely displayed anger or impatience while Abbey denounces mass migration to the Sunbelt region with an extravagance that has become his trademark: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” (127).

The uses to which facts about the desert's natural history are put remind us of Abbey's ultimate purpose in nature writing. Unlike Thoreau and Leopold who are detailed record-keepers of phenology, the study of seasonal fluctuations of plants and animals, Abbey in his journals is more impressionistic, more interested in the impression a fact of natural history makes upon him than the fact itself (to be sure, the same is true of much of Thoreau's Journal). Not that the scientific information recorded by Abbey is inaccurate; as he explains in one of his works, “All the technical information was stolen from reliable sources and I am happy to stand behind it” (introduction to Journey Home xiii). Yet for all the precise floral, faunal, and geological description, “the desert figures more as medium than as material” (xii) in Desert Solitaire. As in all compelling nature writing, the account of the relationship between self and nature, nature and culture, evokes important truths about self and society. Abbey does indeed write works of personal history. But I suggest that they are works of cultural criticism as well. And it is in his role of culture critic, defender of wildness and wilderness, that his rhetoric becomes increasingly more vociferous. As Patricia Limerick observes, “An extreme and intractable landscape might … appeal to a more extreme and intractable man” (149).

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau writes in “Walking.” “From the forests and wilderness come tonics and barks which brace mankind” (112). The value of wildness Thoreau deems most important is spiritual (Nash, Wilderness 88). “When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of mature” (“Walking” 116). Wild places are where spiritual re-creation—recreation we now call it—takes place. Muir echoes Thoreau's declaration when he writes in his journal that “In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness” (John of the Mountains 317). During the era of conservation at the turn of the century, Muir reiterated Thoreau's belief in the spiritual value of wildness, but he also enhanced its worth by giving ecological reasons for wilderness preservation; in the 1890s he insisted that forest reserves be created in the West to protect watersheds (Cohen 151-204). Leopold reprises these arguments in A Sand County Almanac, paraphrasing Thoreau in “Thinking Like a Mountain” to read “In wildness is the salvation of the world” (133). In addition to making a case for the aesthetic, spiritual, and recreational values of the wild, Leopold believes it has a “split-rail” or cultural-historical significance for Americans. He also suggests that there is a scientific value in that wilderness functions “as a base datum of normality,” “a laboratory for the study of land health” (196).

To these multivalent qualities of the wild Edward Abbey adds yet another: wilderness should be preserved for political reasons, “as a refuge from authoritarian government,” because “history demonstrates that personal liberty is a rare and precious thing” (130). Citing as contemporary examples Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria, Abbey points to the existence of wilderness in these countries as a haven for revolutionaries, a base for guerillas to mount effective resistance to totalitarian regimes. Although he professes a love for cities and, indeed, plans to return to one come season's end, he fears that the urban setting, “which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp” (131). Readers familiar with Abbey's oeuvre know well his obsession with an Orwellian scenario. George Washington Hayduke, the most militant of the four “eco-raiders” of The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives!, fears the prospect of a military-industrial takeover of the American West. In a later tour de force essay, “The Second Rape of the West,” Abbey writes of encountering businessmen and U.S. Army officials near a Montana strip mine. This prompts him to remark, “There is something in the juxtaposition of big business, big military, and big technology that always rouses my most paranoid nightmares, visions of the technological superstate, the Pentagon's latent fascism, IBM's laboratory torture chambers, the absolute computerized fusion-powered global tyranny of the twenty-first century” (181). This vision succinctly describes the plot and setting of his later novel Good News (1980), which depicts the Southwest in horrific straits, a military dictatorship in control of Phoenix and at war with renegades who remain at large in the wilderness.

“A wild place without dangers is an absurdity,” Abbey once wrote in defense of grizzly bears in Glacier National Park (“Fire Lookout” 33). A larger truth is that a world without wilderness is a dangerous place in which to live. Leopold expresses a similar idea in “Thinking Like a Mountain”: “Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run” (133). He is referring to the personal cost of cautiousness to the individual; Abbey extends the argument by concluding that in wildness also lay the hope for continued preservation of political freedom in the world. To those skeptical of his argument he asks: “What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organizations of men and institutions?” (130). Evidence of wilderness invaded by the U.S. government already existed in his most cherished place: Glen Canyon.

Why are river accounts so often elegiac? I raise this question in response to “Down the River,” the longest chapter of the book, which describes Abbey's farewell journey through Glen Canyon, an exquisite wilderness along the Colorado River prior to its damming. The paeans to rivers which come to mind—Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, John Graves's Goodbye to a River, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It—all possess an elemental sadness. In Abbey's case the sadness is not over a lost brother, as in the works of Thoreau and Maclean, but (as in Graves's) a lost river; and so, as Patricia Limerick says, his excursion is another jornada del muerto, a journey of death. Even as Abbey was writing Desert Solitaire Glen Canyon Dam took shape, and he capitalizes on this historical circumstance to create a double-vision, a retrospective celebration of the past conjoined with a foreboding view of the present and future. He chronicles a trip from ecotopia to dystopia.

Leopold elegizes the Flambeau River in Wisconsin in A Sand County Almanac after encountering two young men on a canoe trip. Learning that they are about to be inducted into the army, Leopold realizes the motif of their journey: it is “the first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks.” He concludes that “perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom” (113). But future wilderness excursions will have to be experienced elsewhere; the Flambeau was dammed following World War II.

Abbey writes partly with the same elegiac purpose. But his intent is also clearly polemical. His elation in realizing freedom when putting in on the river is juxtaposed against his rage over the regimentation of recreation now enforced by the federal government on the stagnant slackwater of the reservoir. “The delirious exhilaration of independence” has been replaced by a system of play spelled out clearly in official signs: “PLAY SAFE. SKI ONLY IN CLOCKWISE DIRECTION: LET'S ALL HAVE FUN TOGETHER!” (152) Abbey once wrote (echoing Thoreau in Walden) that in modern society “all men must march to the beat of the same drum, like it or not” (“Numa Ridge” 36), and here his worst fears of an Orwellian future seem to be realized. As a member of the countercultural movement of the 1960s he prefers a form of recreation that runs counter to the type promoted by the government, one which allows for his re-creation. He chooses not to waterski (even counter-clockwise) since to do so would be to engage in a form of motorized transportation in a wilderness where motors should be prohibited. In order to re-create himself spiritually he must participate in the environment, and the difference between a float trip—leisurely exploration of a river—and waterskiing—fast-paced thrill-seeking—is the difference between perception and blindness, immersion and non-participation. As Leopold writes: woodcraft in the modern era has become the art of using gadgets. To use too many is to interfere with one's perception. “The outstanding characteristic of perception,” Leopold claims, “is that it entails no consumption and no dilution of any resource. … To promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering” (173).

Abbey sets an example of how to participate in the wilderness by floating down the river for two weeks. He and his male companion immerse themselves in its details—exploring the side canyons, discovering the landscape's sparse human history of Indian petroglyphs, Mormon trails, and mining camps—and in the process experience what Abbey calls “intersubjectivity”:

We are merging, molecules getting mixed. Talk about intersubjectivity—we are both taking on the coloration of river and canyon, our skin as mahogany as the water on the shady side, our clothing coated with silt, our bare feet caked with mud and tough as lizard skin, our whiskers bleached as the sand—even our eyeballs, what little you can see of them between the lids, have taken on a coral pink, the color of the dunes. And we smell, I suppose, like catfish.

(185)

However, with the intrusion of motor culture, desecration occurs. Abbey recounts his six-mile hike to Rainbow Bridge, one of the most famous natural spans in the canyon, and predicts that its beauty will be lessened once the waters of the reservoir make it accessible to motorboats. When the hike is replaced by an effortless motorized excursion, “the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world” (192). Actually, as Abbey records in a later work, a worse contingency comes to pass: the convenience of motorboat camping along the shores of Lake Powell, the reservoir formed by the dam, leads to extensive littering (“Lake Powell” 90).

Abbey attempts to dismiss such desecration by taking a long view of things, professing a natural philosophy of sorts when he concludes that “Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—[yet] the earth remains, slightly modified”’ (194). This view is something of a sham, however, because the reality and longevity of the dam, considered in human as opposed to geologic time, loom long and large. So he fantasizes over its destruction even while he celebrates his final trip through the canyon. “Some unknown hero,” he schemes, “will descend into the bowels of the dam” (165) and blow it up.

As others have noted (Ronald, New West 203), this fantasy anticipates a theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang. It is the great desire of the four protagonists to “blow that dam to shitaree” (66). Abbey's rage over the building of the dam and his fanatical quest to “deconstruct” it is a recurrent theme in a number of his other works.³ Not only is he more outrageous in tone than most other nature writers; he has also transformed the genre by openly advocating and participating in violent acts to preserve wilderness.

Nowhere is Abbey's rage more evident than in an extended diatribe against industrial tourism in “Episodes and Visions.” Wendell Berry points out that Abbey's contribution as a nature writer has been to make clear that the root of our ecological crisis is cultural. “Our country is not being destroyed [merely] by bad politics,” Berry writes, “it is being destroyed by a bad way of life” (“Few Words” 10). The Labor Day influx of tourists provokes this outburst over the sedentary experience of most visitors to national parks:

What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it. Dusty? Of course it's dusty—this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that piece of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and take a walk—yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it'll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over the rocks hunting for rattlesnakes and scorpions and anthills—yes sir, let them out, turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes, sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk—walk—WALK upon our blessed land!

(233)

I quote this passage because it is representative of Abbey's harsh, iconoclastic, extravagant narrative voice; no other sample of his prose indicates better the difference in temperament between him and most other nature writers. Yet the outrageous rhetoric should not distract from the message: rid yourself of gadgets which interfere with participation in the natural environment. Afford the time to allow for prolonged engagement with and meditation on nature. Enter the wilderness and experience freedom. Be alive to the redemptive possibilities of the wild.

It is the machine in the garden which provokes Abbey's outrage. Leo Marx has observed that “the ominous sounds of machines, like the sound of the steamboat bearing down on the raft or of the train breaking in upon the idyll at Walden, reverberate endlessly in our literature” (16). In Desert Solitaire the machine figures most prominently in “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” of which Abbey has written: “it protrudes, like an enflamed member, in the midst of an otherwise simple pastorale” (1988: 12). Rapt in a revery one spring evening, enjoying the moonrise, Abbey suddenly hears

the discordant note, the snarling whine of a jeep in low range and four-wheel drive. … The jeep came in sight from beyond some bluffs, turned onto the dirt road, and came up the hill toward the entrance station. Now operating a motor vehicle of any kind on the trails of a national park is strictly forbidden, a nasty bureaucratic regulation which I heartily support. My bosom swelled with the righteous indignation of a cop: by God, I thought, I'm going to write these sons of bitches a ticket. I put down the drink and strode to the housetrailer to get my badge.

(43)

This passage describes a paradigmatic encounter with the machine. The jeep represents the intrusion of modern technology into the wilderness garden. It also stands for industrial tourism and everything that is wrong with the philosophy of the Park Service. For the jeep belongs to the federal government—the Bureau of Public Roads—and is driven by government employees whose job is to survey a route for a paved road that will attract more visitors to Arches. The surveyors are fulfilling part of the Park Service's “Mission 66” goal to increase dramatically the carrying capacity of the national parks by improving roads and constructing tourist accommodations (Runte 173). One can almost hear the distant voice of Aldo Leopold: “To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs” (101).

Marx argues that in many classic works of American literature when the machine invades the garden “discord replaces harmony and the tranquil mood vanishes” (225). Certainly Abbey is outraged by the jeep's intrusion. Yet Marx's conclusion “that American writers seldom, if ever, have designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables” does not hold true for Desert Solitaire or for most works of nature writing in general. Contrast Marx's characterization of the typical fate of the American hero, “either dead or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless” (364), with Abbey's reaction to the work of the surveyors. He spends little time arguing with them, for he knows that “one brave deed is worth a thousand books” (Beyond the Wall xvi). After the jeep departs he waits for the full moon to illuminate the terrain and then retraces the route of the surveyors, uprooting their stakes along the way. “A futile effort, in the long run,” he concedes, “but it made me feel good” (59). Thus occurs a significant moment in the history of nature writing: committing an illegal act against the government transforms the work that tells of it into a truly subversive, revolutionary genre.

It is as if Abbey anticipates Marx's conclusion that “the machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics” (365). Uprooting the stakes of the surveyors signals Abbey's realization that cultural criticism obligates the critic to go beyond mere words, to engage in political activism—even rebellion. This is the credo of Earth First!, a radical environmentalist group inspired by Abbey's words and deeds. Since its inception in 1980, the group (which now has more than 10,000 members) has spiked trees to prevent logging of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and sabotaged machinery to halt road construction in potential wilderness areas. Abbey himself joined with some members in March 1981 in a startling bit of environmental theatre to fulfill, at least symbolically, his greatest fantasy: the deconstruction of Glen Canyon Dam. By unfurling a 300-foot black plastic tarp down the concrete face of the dam it appeared from a distance that the eco-raiders had succeeded in cracking it (Nash, Rights 189-98). Abbey has even gone so far as to contribute a “Foreward!” to Earth First!'s manual Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching, as well as articles to the organization's newsletter. Together they have advanced the cause of biocentrism and deep ecology (McKibben 177-209).

The vehemence of Abbey's prose and his radical actions have indeed “incited a generation of environmentalists” (Sipchen 25). Abbey may echo Thoreau when he writes that “wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread” (169); he may call to mind Muir's religious rhetoric when he declares that “the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches” (52); and he may recall Leopold's denunciation of our car culture when he scorns Americans on vacation who “roll up incredible mileages on their odometers, rack up state after state in two-week transcontinental motor marathons, [and] knock off one national park after another” (51). But none of these key figures of the conservation movement openly advocated and practiced illegal acts against the state to protect the wilderness. It is impossible to imagine calm, gentle, rational Leopold engaged in radical acts; and Muir, for all his rage over the damming of Hetch Hetchy, never suggested violent opposition in protest. Only Thoreau, in the white heat generated over the issue of slavery prior to the Civil War, committed civil disobedience and the illegal act of harboring a fugitive slave (Harding 315). Only Thoreau called for war against the state by letting one's life “be a counter friction to stop the machine” (“Resistance to Civil Government” 73-74).

In all but his most recent work Abbey is systematically careful not to suggest that intentional violence to humans be done in order to defend wilderness. But in Hayduke Lives! an accomplice of the Monkey Wrench Gang shoots and kills an armed guard who defends the GEM (Giant Earth Mover), a mega-machine which threatens to obliterate the canyon country of southern Utah. This event confirms the opinion of Paul Bryant who feels that Abbey is more radical in his fiction than in his essays (37-39); and it suggests that near the end of his life Abbey was more radical than he had been about the means by which wilderness is to be defended.⁴

What, in sum, is Abbey's eco-vision? His philosophy is not so much refined as merely repeated in subsequent works, and so Desert Solitaire stands as an accurate statement of his views. His consistent criticism of science and technology misapplied places him squarely in the Thoreauvian tradition of antimodernism. His own lifestyle of plain living and high thinking, the preference for conscientious over conspicuous consumption, also links him to the tradition of the simple life (Shi 3-7). And his celebration of solitude and careful, prolonged, meditative engagement with the wild place him in the long-standing and distinguished line of nature writing, associated in particular with those writers who developed “an intimate acquaintance with one cherished spot on earth” (Brooks 141). Like Thoreau at Walden, Muir in Yosemite, and Leopold in the sand counties of southern Wisconsin, Abbey succeeded in creating one more sacred place in American culture, continuing the “American apotheosis of pastoral retreat” begun by Walden (Buell 189). When making a pilgrimage to Arches National Park in 1978 I noticed a number of tributes to Abbey. Backpackers scrawled messages such as “Hayduke Lives!” on a blackboard at one trailhead, perfect strangers greeted each other with nicknames from Abbey's works, and yes, deep in the bowels of the canyon-lands, prospective monkey-wrenchers plotted the downfall of the machine in the garden. If the turn of the century was the era of the “Back to Nature” cult, the 1960s and 70s marked the emergence of a “Back to the Wilderness” movement, and—thanks to Desert Solitaire—Arches became one of its meccas.

The fact that Abbey popularized a relatively unknown portion of America's wilderness poses a problem, however. “If Abbey's books only convinced readers that the desert was worth seeing,” Patricia Limerick suggests, “he would encourage a flood of automobile tourists, compounding problems of overcrowding and use” (161). Then one of the reasons the desert appealed to Abbey, its solitude, might be destroyed by his very effort at celebrating—and in effect selling—the place. The wilderness would have to be managed to control the number of visitors, which could very well destroy or significantly reduce the freedom it represented. That is, if Abbey was correct in his missionary-like certainty that he knew best what kind of outdoor recreation Americans should experience.

To the charges of elitism and causing overcrowding of wilderness Abbey, I believe, had two responses. First, if wilderness visitation did indeed increase—and he most certainly hoped it would, such was one of the aims of his twenty books—then the solution was to create more wilderness. Less than two percent of America consists of official wilderness, Abbey points out; surely we could afford to preserve yet more. Second, to the charge of elitism he pleaded guilty. As a secular prophet of the modern religion of environmentalism he believed that he stood for time-honored American values produced in response to the frontier: independence, self-reliance, self-sufficiency. His task, as he saw it, was that of a moralist out to convert the American public. Joseph Sax describes the essence of this preservationist message:

Though he knows that he is a member of a minority, [the nature writer] believes he speaks for values that are majoritarian. He is, in fact, a prophet for a kind of secular religion. You would like to emulate the pioneer explorers, he says to the public; you would like independently to raft down the wild Colorado as John Wesley Powell did a century ago. You would like to go it alone in the mountain wilderness as John Muir did. Indeed that is why you are stirred by the images of the great national parks and why you support the establishment of public wilderness. But you are vulnerable; you allow entrepreneurs to coddle you and manage you. And you are fearful; you are afraid to get out of your recreational vehicle or your car and plunge into the woods on your own. Moreover you want to deceive yourself; you would like to believe that you are striking out into the wilderness, but you insist that the wilderness be tamed before you enter it. So, says the secular prophet, follow me and I will show you how to become the sort of person you really want to be. Put aside for a while the plastic alligators of the amusement park, and I will show you that nature, taken on its own terms, has something to say that you will be glad to hear.

(15)

Following Abbey's death in March 1989 a flurry of obituaries appeared, many placing him in the same exalted ranks of the conservation movement as Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold. “Can Edward Abbey be compared to them?” Edward Hoagland asked, then answered in the affirmative in one of many tributes (45). Abbey, I think, bears closest resemblance to Thoreau. Both were cantankerous, contradictory, great defenders of individual freedom and vociferous critics of the state. In an introduction to Walden Abbey confessed that “Thoreau's mind has been haunting mine for most of my life,” an acknowledgment, long in coming, that the many critical comparisons drawn between him and Thoreau were not, after all, that far-fetched. In paraphrasing the conclusion of Emerson's eulogy to Thoreau he then crafted his own best self-tribute: “Wherever there are deer and hawks, wherever there is liberty and danger, wherever there is wilderness, wherever there is a living river, Henry Thoreau will find his eternal home” (13, 48).

Notes

1. In introductions to other of his works Abbey issues the same disclaimer. See The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West xi; and Abbey's Road: Take the Other xviii-xxi.

2. It should be noted that Abbey was once a hunter but, like Thoreau and Muir, gave up the sport. See Cactus Country 113-17; “Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge,” 50-53; “The Right to Arms,” Abbey's Road 130-32; “Gather at the River,” Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside 173; and “Blood Sport,” One Life at a Time, Please 33-40.

3. See for example Slickrock (1971; Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1987) 64-69; and “The Damnation of a Canyon,” Beyond the Wall 95-103.

4. I disagree with Ann Ronald who claims that “anyone who finds in Abbey's world a prescription for violence misreads his books completely” (“Edward Abbey” 7). In Desert Solitaire, The Journey Home, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and subsequent works, Abbey endorses violence against machines; and, as I have noted in Hayduke Lives! appears to endorse violence to humans who threaten the wilderness. It is also significant that Abbey was a regular contributor to the newsletter of Earth First!, a group which has done violence to machines on numerous occasions.

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———. Cactus Country. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1973.

———. Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.

———. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.

———. Good News. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980.

———. “Hallelujah on the Bum.” The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977: 1-11.

———. “Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge.” The Journey Home: 30-57.

———. Hayduke Lives! Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

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———. “Lake Powell by Houseboat.” One Life at a Time, Please. New York: Henry Holt, 1988: 85-93.

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———. “The Second Rape of the West.” The Journey Home: 158-88.

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———. Wilderness and the American Mind. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

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———. “Resistance to Civil Government.” Reform Papers. Ed. Wendell Glick. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973: 63-90.

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———. “Walking.” The Natural History Essays: 93-136.

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