#9 - Desert Solitaire
Cactus League Championship banners fly forever, but we can definitely screw things up with dams.
I just finished Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey’s account of his time as a National Park Service Ranger in Arches National Monument* in 1956 and 1957. It was my second dalliance with Abbey’s work, the first time being The Monkey Wrench Gang, where its heroes plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam, which follows the publishing of Desert Solitaire by seven years.
*It was granted National Park status in 1971, 42 years after being designated a National Monument.
While neither were quick reads for me, there was a charm to Desert Solitaire that I do not recall being present in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Both took me longer than they probably should have to complete, but there wasn’t a time where I was resenting having started Desert Solitaire. I can’t say the same for The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Having been to Arches and southeastern Utah multiple times, Abbey does a spectacular job of capturing the mysterious beauty of the region while decrying the changes inherent in the modernization of the region and the park to bend the land to Civilization’s needs. The most striking section of the book speaks to this theme—the book is comprised of chapters which vary from anecdotal excerpts from a journal to philosophical ramblings about man’s relationship to the desert to accounts of expeditions of various sorts—one in which he and a friend recreate John Wesley Powell’s voyage down the Colorado River through what was soon to become Lake Powell with the impending completion of the Glen Canyon Dam. Having read this section devoted to a stunning canyon that man obliterated 66 years ago for hydroelectric power that helped and a reservoir whose water keeps desert golf courses green when it’s not evaporating and dwindling so low as to render its continued existence a serious question.
As someone with a true affinity for the desert who constantly jokes that I was born a 75-year-old man and fantasizes about a life in the desert where I somehow have a source of potable water but little other tethering me to society, Desert Solitaire definitely spoke to my inner curmudgeonly crank. Abbey’s philosophizing may not have always been 100% consistent, but it still scratched my desert itch, and it’s striking how much his complaints from 65 years ago still hold water.
It’s also fun to read a book where quicksand is a very real threat and not just a puzzling motif in cartoons.