Desert Solitaire

I brought this up in my second season and didn’t understand it. Brought it back up this year and understood it fine. That’s the whole review if you want the short version, but I’ve got the time, so here’s the rest.

Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger at Arches in the late fifties, back when it was a dirt road and a tent and nobody much came. The book is built out of that season, more or less, though he’s honest enough in the introduction to say he compressed a few years into one and you should read it as a personal history rather than a field log. I appreciate that kind of disclosure. I keep a logbook myself, twice-daily radio checks, and I know how much a single season blurs into the others once you’re a few years in.

What holds up is the noticing. He’s got a long section on a flash flood in a slot canyon that I’ve reread three times now, not for the danger of it but for how precisely he tracks the light changing and the air pressure dropping before the water shows up. That’s a lookout’s kind of attention, whether he’d call it that or not. Weather first, always. You learn to read the sky as a set of instructions.

What doesn’t hold up as well is the anger, or rather how undifferentiated it gets by the back third. He’s furious at “industrial tourism,” at pavement, at anyone who wants a bathroom near the campsite, and after a while the fury stops discriminating between real threats and mild inconveniences. I agree with him more than not about what a paved loop road does to a place like Arches. I agree less with the general contempt for anyone who isn’t willing to hike eight miles with no water, which is a position easier to hold when you’re thirty and it’s 1968.

Still. The chapter where he floats Glen Canyon before the dam finished flooding it is the best writing about disappearance I’ve read, better than most books that are only about disappearance. He knew what he was documenting was already gone in some slower sense, the water rising a foot a year behind the gate, and he wrote it anyway instead of just grieving it in his head. There’s a lesson in there about what to do with the last season of something, which felt relevant enough that I copied two pages of it into my own logbook, which I don’t usually do.

Four coyotes crossed the meadow below the tower the evening I finished it. Didn’t mean anything. Just noting it, the way he would have.