Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness - Edward Abbey.epub

In the third sentence of Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" reads: Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary." For him, this is the desert, beyond the end of the roads, in the stark canyonland of southeast Utah.

As the sole park ranger at the Arches National Monument, 20 miles from Moab, he knew it before the paved roads, before the high tide of beer cans, gum wrappers, cigarette stubs, bottle caps and discarded Kleenex, before the parked trailers, their windows blue tinged at night while the inmates, instead of watching the desert stars, watch TV and listen to the canned laughter of Hollywood. Based roughly on the months of the April-to-September season of the ranger--with side excursions, mental and physical--his book is a voice crying in the wilderness, for the wilderness.

It is the outgrowth of a bitter awareness of all that has been lost, all that is being lost, all that is going to be lost in that glory of our American democracy, our system of national parks. Designed to set aside, for all the people, wild areas of special beauty, this system originated with a two-fold purpose: to serve the public and to preserve the areas. These two goals are now in head-on collision. For "to serve the public" has come to mean "to serve the public in automobiles."

Seventy-five years ago, when John Muir and his fellow conservationists organized the Sierra Club, one of its early aims was to attract people to Yosemite. Now the summer problem there is the traffic problem, what to do with all the people in automobiles creeping bumper to bumper along the roads of this confined valley. The same problem has overtaken other parks and threatens almost all eventually. The solution, according to the "developers" among park administrators, is to build more roads. Yet the dilemma is that each of the proliferating roads subtracts something from the wild scene the park is supposed to preserve and at the same time attracts more cars as inevitably "as water under pressure follows every channel open to it." Unless something is done to exclude or confine the swelling tide of cars, the author maintains, the gradual destruction of our national parks, as we know them, is inevitable.

To the "builders" and "developers" among park administrators, his book may well seem like a wild ride on a bucking bronco. It is rough, tough and combative. The author is a rebel, an eloquent loner. In his introduction, he gives fair warning that the reader may find his pages "coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced." But if they are all these, they are many things besides. His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book. It has philosophy. It has humor. It has sincerity and conviction. It has its share of nerve-tingling adventures in what he describes as a land of surprises, some of them terrible surprises.

Understandably for one who has watched changes for the worse in an area known and loved, who has seen the splendors of a Glen Canyon doomed to flooding and silting until, like the Taj Mahal buried in mud, it will be beyond the power of any human agency to restore, Abbey writes with a deep undercurrent of bitterness. But, as is not infrequently the case, the bitter man may be one who cares enough to be bitter and he often is the one who says things that need to be said. In "Desert Solitaire" those things are set down in lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty. Rather than a balanced book, judicially examining in turn all sides, its is a forceful presentation of one side. And that side needs presenting. It is a side too rarely presented. There will always be others to voice the other side, the side of pressure and power and profit.

To quote Abbey: "Industrial Tourism is a big business. It means money. 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. These various interests are well organized, command more wealth than most modern nations, and are represented in Congress with a strength far greater than is justified in any constitutional or democratic sense.

Through Congress the tourism industry can bring enormous pressure to bear upon such a slender reed in the executive branch as the poor old Park Service, a pressure which is also exerted on every other possible level--local, state, regional--and through advertising and the well-established habits of a wasteful nation."

He proposes: "No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs--anything--but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. . . . What about children? What about the aged and infirm? Frankly, we need waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on their parents' backs need only wait a few years--if they are not run over by automobiles they will grow up into a lifetime of joyous adventure. . . . The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled."

To those who subscribe to Mencken's definition of nature as "a place to throw beer cans on Sunday" and to those to whom the desert is but a blank place on the map to be traversed at high speed with thankfulness that the car is running all right, the author's passionate love of wild places will be baffling. But there are others--an ever-growing number--for whom he speaks when he writes:

"A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins. . . . If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss."