Desert Solitaire

The passage I remember most from when I first read Desert Solitaire over twenty years ago recounts the mesmerizing mating dance of two gopher snakes. These snakes emerged from beneath Edward Abbey’s trailer when he worked as the seasonal park ranger “and sole inhabitant” of Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah in the 1960’s. As Abbey watches the snakes “intertwine and separate, glide side by side in perfect congruence, turn like mirror images of each other and glide back again,” he crawls quietly toward “the living caduceus” on his hands and knees. Rereading that passage now (in the chapter “Serpents of Paradise”), I am not disappointed for Abbey’s powerful yet intimate prose still captures the raw beauty of the red rock wilderness in which he believed “all that is most significant takes place.” When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, the author sought to protect remote national parks from widespread human intrusion. “I’d rather kill a man than a snake” he famously wrote. Despite the fact that Abbey’s first book of essays sometimes reads like a preemptive strike at forces he even then saw barreling down on the wild desert southwest, his love for the slickrock wilderness and beautiful descriptions of all that he observed there remain the reasons why hundreds of people continue to buy this book at our shop every year. Although Ed died in Tucson in 1989, his work endures. As a lamentation, a warning, and a love song, Desert Solitaire still has the power to ignite conversations about wilderness that can go on into the night. So if you are drawn to the great American Southwest and haven’t read this modern nature classic, waste no time in discovering the grace, violence, humor, and wonder of “Abbey’s Country.” And if you ever enjoyed reading Desert Solitaire twenty, thirty or –wow—forty years ago, now is the perfect time to once again be provoked, amazed, and ultimately revived by Ed Abbey’s still untamable voice. (DH)

For more Edward Abbey, see The Monkey Wrench Gang