Desert Solitaire. Edward Abbey

by an utterness of matter, a deep-time vastness of space and earth-history; a place that humbles the human presence, and that should be left – in the (gendered) phrasing of the US Wilderness Act of 1964 – as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’.

      I write this essay fifty years since the first publication of Desert Solitaire, and I write it in a month when parts of the landscape that Abbey surveyed from that rimrock above the Colorado stand imperilled by the legislative actions of Donald Trump. In December 2017, Trump announced his intention to dramatically shrink the extent of two ‘National Monuments’ in the state of Utah: Grand Staircase-Escalante, which he reduced by almost half of its former extent, and Bears Ears, cut by 84 per cent. This reduction of two million acres of public land – which came into force on 2 February 2018 – is the biggest rollback of federal land protection in the history of the United States, and a centrepiece of the Trump administration’s broader assault on both conservation as idea and practice, and public land preservation specifically. One of the explicit intentions of the rollback is to open up both areas to the extractive industries (for coal and uranium in particular); as such it symbolically furthers Trump’s alignment with white working-class – especially mining and ranching – communities.

      Announcing the shrinkage of Bears Ears in San Juan County in December, Trump both stoked and spoke to what Jedediah Purdy has called a ‘public-lands populism’; that is, a populism which ‘favors local, motorized and extractive uses of [western] public lands over federal policy-making, non-motorized recreation, and reservation for aesthetic or cultural purposes.’ In the view of this populism, all federal public lands – ‘National Monuments’, ‘National Parks’, ‘Wilderness Areas’ – in the western states represent ‘an illegal form of domestic colonialism’, an unjust land-grab begun by Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt over a century previously. Public-lands populists argue for the drastic reduction of federal control on grounds of historical illegitimacy, and the anomalously large extent of federal land in western states as compared to eastern and Midwestern states. This anti-regulatory, anti-federal narrative is itself tangled up in older western narratives about masculinity, liberty, self-reliance and the defence of sovereignty, all of which reach back into the earliest white incursions into these regions. Most problematically, proponents of contemporary ‘public-lands populism’, as Purdy has shown, have often sought to ‘de-legitimate the Native American presence in the West’, casting pro-preservation movements as a conspiracy of ‘green’ (environmentalist) and ‘brown’ (Native American) groups.

      Since Trump declared the rollback in December, I have been considering what Abbey’s response would be to the proposals. It’s tempting just to quote Hayduke, the hell-raiser hero of Abbey’s cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975): ‘My job is to save the fucking wilderness,’ declares Hayduke unambiguously, ‘I don’t know anything else worth saving.’ Hayduke would, certainly, have poured sand in the fuel-tanks of mining machines and waged eco-guerrilla war on the infrastructure of incursion. But Hayduke is not Abbey and Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s fullest exploration of the ideas of wilderness, is a book from which it can be surprisingly hard to extract hard-and-fast positions, built as it is – in Abbey’s own phrase – on both ‘paradox and bedrock’.

      Abbey pledges his allegiance above all to land, sandstone and the more-than-human world. ‘Long live diversity, long live the earth’ is the rallying cry he raises early in the book. He is unwaveringly against the development of wild land either for resource exploitation or for what he contemptuously calls ‘Industrial Tourism’. These positions form his bedrock. His paradoxes, though, are numerous. He despises motor vehicles, except when he is driving one. He celebrates personal liberty but also wishes to ‘lose’ his sense of self in the desert. He is an eco-centric misanthropist but also a localist whose sympathy lies most with blue-collar workers, including miners. He is suspicious of the federal state and a keen supporter of the Second Amendment. He contradicts himself repeatedly and with relish: ‘I’m a humanist: I’d rather kill a man than a snake.’ Doctrinally, he might be said to lie somewhere between Bakunin, Ammon Bundy and David Attenborough. But as Emerson observed, ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds’. Abbey’s mind was expanded by the desert lands in which he took his stand, and his compellingly uncategorizable book is fully hobgoblin-free.

      Like many great works of place-writing, Desert Solitaire has no plot. It describes – as the subtitle has it – a ‘season in the wilderness’ of Arches National Park. Like many great works of place-writing, Desert Solitaire also plays fast and loose with time, for into that single ‘season’ Abbey in fact collapses the stories and reflections of several years spent in the wider desert landscapes of the American south-west. What is presented as an almanac, running from April to September, is in fact more of an anthology of episodes from what he modestly describes as ‘God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the red wasteland.’

      Within his calendrical structure, Abbey also dives, dolphin-like, between the continuous present and the archaic deep time of canyon and mountain. He lives variously in ‘the undivided, seamless days of those marvellous summers’, and in the immensities of earth-history, which have seen the roaming dunes of ancient deserts petrified into the slickrock of the desert states, itself in turn eroded by ice and wind into mesas, arches, bridges and arroyos. The alternations between these modes of time is one of the distinctive actions of Abbey’s book – the one vibrantly immediate, the other vertiginously ancient.

      Desert Solitaire – like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1977) and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949) – stands in clear relation with Henry David Thoreau’s founding work of American retreat literature, Walden (1854). Thoreau’s refuge was a log cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, Leopold’s was a shack in a meander of a Wisconsin river, Dillard’s a house in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains – and Abbey’s is a tin house-trailer that is ‘cold as a tomb’ in spring and hot as a furnace in summer. Like Thoreau, Dillard and Leopold, Abbey undertakes his retreat as a means of philosophical sequestering: he goes to nature in order not just to think about nature but also to think with nature, and even more radically to be thought by nature. ‘The personification of nature is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good,’ he says early on. The desert will rasp him free of anthropomorphism. Lying skin to skin with sandstone will give him fiercest focus on the otherness of matter.

      In this respect, we should also understand Desert Solitaire as crookedly kindred with the practice of the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers, who removed themselves to remote desert places in order to maximise askesis and sharpen their faithfulness to its point. The ancient Greek word for this pure desert space was ‘paneremos’, from which arise our terms ‘eremitic’ and ‘hermit’. Abbey is a cranky kind of hermit, however – and he would have made a very poor monk. Though he flirts with the possibility of divinity a few times, he professes no belief in any kind of god (except, as he once jokes, ‘the smell of frying catfish’). His only theology is geology, really; his only spirituality is, he writes, ‘a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow still survives intact, individual, separate.’

      Let us pause a little on the notion of that ‘hard and brutal mysticism’, for Abbey’s wrangles with this idea constitute one of the ongoing intellectual dramas of the book, and his accounts of it are riven with contradiction. How might the ‘naked self’ merge with matter yet remain ‘intact’? ‘Paradox and bedrock,’ Abbey would probably reply with a grin. He longs for an existence of pure noumena, and wants to use the spiky, scouring surfaces of the desert – ‘a realm beyond the human … spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless’ – to abrade away anything ‘Kantian’, leaving only ‘the bare bones of existence’, ‘devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities’. Abbey calls this world-without-us the ‘antehuman’, and acknowledges that seeking it might ‘mea[n] risking everything human in myself’. Certainly, there is a brutality to any ontology that acknowledges only materialism. But there is an exhilaration, too, in exposing oneself to what he at one point calls the ‘monstrous’ inhumanity of ‘rock and cloud and sky and space’. ‘One must have a mind of winter,’