And we dont have much food left. Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air. The horse moved only once in all that time, lowering his head for a sniff at a bush near his foreleg. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. Ralph has also had sense enough to bring along a bit of line and a few fishhooks the river is lively with catfish, as well soon discover. Gas up at Green River, he says itll be your last chance. In the afternoon he came into a larger canyon, through which flowed a small stream. Refine any search. Come on, Moon-Eye, I want to take you home. Based on Abbey's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in the late 1950s, the book is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. Why anyone with any sense would volunteer to spend August in the furnace of the desert is a mystery to me; they must be mad, these brave tourists, as I am mad. Equipped with powerful scintillometers, they cruised in airplanes back and forth above the Colorado Plateau, mapping the hot spots. This must be it, the way to Rainbow Bridge; it appears that we may have come too late. The walls that rose on either side of the drop-off were literally perpendicular. You might think, beginning to die of thirst, that any water however salty would be better than none at all. The light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. Like a cork from a bottle the cow was being drawn from the suction of the quicksand. The other four walk alongside to relieve when needed. He sang and whistled continually, winked and grinned when he caught my eye and charged after straying cattle like a maniac, spurring his thin-skinned palomino through the brush, up over rocks, down mudbanks and between trees with what looked to me like complete indifference to life and limb, the vulnerability of the flesh. [28], He also criticizes what he sees as the dominant social paradigm, what he calls the expansionist view, and the belief that technology will solve all our problems: "Confusing life expectancy with life-span, the gullible begin to believe that medical science has accomplished a miraclelengthened human life! All night long we thrashed the matter out, burning up half a pinyon pine in the process, transforming its mass into energy, warmth, light, and toward morning worked out a rough agreement. You goddamned nightmare of a horse Moon-Eye, look at this. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. Others have been here before. Another small gem in the park system, a group of three adjacent natural bridges tucked away in the canyon country of southern Utah. [6] Cliffrose and Bayonets and Serpents of Paradise focus on Abbey's descriptions of the fauna and flora of the Arches area, respectively, and his observations of the already deteriorating balance of biodiversity in the desert due to the pressures of human settlement in the region. This was sandstone, soft and porous, not marble, and between it and my wet body and wet clothing a certain friction was created. Deliberately, I was sure. Where are you, Billy? From up here the sound of the river, until now a permanent part of my auditory background, is no longer perceptible, and the desert silence takes on a deeper dimension. [10], Several chapters focus on Abbey's interactions with the people of the Southwest or explorations of human history. Though all the windows are wide open and the blinds rattle in a breeze the heat is terrific. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs anything but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. In the technical sense of the mountaineer not a. I can hear the pikas all around me signaling each other with their whistles but never catch a glimpse of one. I urge them again; grudgingly they come up. I parked my beast for a minute close to a mudbank and hauled myself onto the saddle the easy way. Sand sage or old man sage, a lustrous windblown blend of silver and blue and aquamarine, gleams in the distance, the feathery stems flowing like hair. When the sun passes beyond the rim I get up and start to return to Newcomb and our camp. We get some strange ones out here. We are now around a bend and out of sight of the river. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if its possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. While the bacon broils above the coals I crack eggs in a skillet five eggs add slices of green chile and scramble. If its not a horse it must be a unicorn. Most of the cowboys I know are out of work or about to lose their jobs or doing something else. We mounted again, rode on to the head of the canyon where a forty-foot overhang barred the way, turned and rode back the way wed come, clearing out the cattle from the brush and tamarisk thickets, driving them before us in a growing herd as we proceeded. They seem to include the work of different cultures and a great extent of time: on a wall of rock near Turnbow Cabin is pictured a man on horseback, which must have been made after the arrival of the Spanish in North America; on another rock wall a few miles southwest of Moab is the petroglyph of what appears to be a mastodon a beast supposedly extinct more than twenty thousand years ago. This could never work. The sun goes down, I face the road again, we light up our afterdinner cigars. The new moon finally comes, edging above the rimrock, bright as a silver shield. I wonder where we are. There are interesting differences, of course, both in kind and degree between the plight of the Navajo Indians and that of their brothers-in-poverty around the world. Endless, too, Im beginning to feel, before I see at long last the glimmer of coals ahead, the embers of a fire, and in the dimness the Outline of the rubber boats, a comforting sight. A sixth example and my favorite is, of course, Major J. Wesley Powell, one-armed veteran of the Civil War, sitting in a chair lashed to the deck of the small wooden boat with which he led his brave party into the unknown canyons of the Green, Grand and Colorado rivers. We faced each other across some fifty feet of sand and rock. This plant, not a cactus but a member of the lily family, is a type of yucca called Spanish bayonet. Why I went there no longer matters; what I found there is the subject of this book. If there are midget rattlers in the area there may be diamondbacks too five, six or seven feet long, thick as a mans wrist, dangerous. Id been spending some of my days off at his ranch, doing a little work around the place in return for room and board. Unlike most desert waterholes you will find around Onion Spring few traces of animal life. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. Nobody comes to drink. Why, we ask ourselves, floating onward in effortless peace deeper into Eden, why not go on like this forever? A few bats flicker through the air near the ramada making tiny clicking noises sonar. Cupping my hands I take a drink. At night whenever he awoke for a few moments he saw flashes of lightning reflected in the sky. Not quite within eyeshot but close by, in a shady dampish secret place, the sacred datura moonflower, moonlily, thornapple blooms in the night, soft white trumpet-shaped flowers that open only in darkness and close with the coming of the heat. Heeyah! In the Needles country high above the inaccessible Colorado River there is a small spring hidden at the heart of a maze of fearfully arid grabens and crevasses. A large stain discolors the crotch of his trousers. Here the canyon walls are a little wider, permitting the sun, for perhaps a couple of hours during the summer day, to shine directly down into this cul-de-sac. When the A.E.C.s ten-year guarantee ran out most of the independents went out with it out of business. Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your nose, prick, asshole, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses aides the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned. Far above I could see the sky, an irregular strip of blue between the dark, hard-edged canyon walls that seemed to lean toward each other as they towered above me. This turned fatal when Graham killed Husk in a fit of rage and accidentally got himself killed too. On the way, in an area where spruce and fir mingle with quaking aspen, in a cool shady well-watered place, I discover a blue columbine, rarest and loveliest of mountain flowers. Geologic resource evaluation report /, Epitaph for a desert anarchist : the life and legacy of Edward Abbey /, The geologic story of Arches National Park /, http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4387113, The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud, Polemic: Industrial Tourism and The National Parks. I lie on my belly on the edge of the dune, back to the wind, and study the world of the flowers from ground level, as a snake might see it. In mountainous areas it may be desirable to build emergency shelters along the trails and bike roads; in desert regions a water supply might have to be provided at certain points wells drilled and handpumps installed if feasible. The photographs, Before & After, prove it. On the local level, for example, the first thing that the superintendent of a new park can anticipate being asked, when he attends his first meeting of the areas Chamber of Commerce, is not Will roads be built? but rather When does construction begin? and Why the delay?, (The Natural Money-Mint. Three of us Roy, his Basque hired man Viviano Jacquez, myself. We waited then, the horse and I, enduring the endless afternoon, the heartbreaking heat, and passed the time as best we could in one-sided conversation. The great Balanced Rock floats a few inches above its pedestal, supported by a layer of superheated air. One firefly flickered in and circled my bacon, suspended from the roofbeam on a length of baling wire. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. In coat and hat and scarf and gloves and long underwear, freezing, I linger on my terrace near the ramada, which is now being unroofed branch by branch in the winds, the red flag whipped to shreds, the windbells jangling like a Chinese fire alarm. PART II, THE HEAT OF NOON: All things are in motion, all is in process, nothing abides, nothing will ever change in this eternal moment. Ralph awakes, stirred to life by the aroma of food, takes a bath in the river, combs and pomades his hair, his long black evil sheepherders beard. The livestock interests and their hired mercenaries from the Predator Control Agency have pursued all of these animals with unremitting ferocity and astonishing cruelty for nearly a century, utilizing in this campaign of extermination everything from the gun and trap to the airplane and the most ingenious devices of chemical and biological warfare. In low gear at full throttle I gun the truck across the wash, anxious not to get bogged down, and roar up over the rocks and ruts on the far side. When I reach one of the islandlike areas of solid rock in the midst of the scree I lie down for a while to catch my breath and examine at close range, six inches, the buttercups, the Sticky Polemonium, the moss campion (lovely name) and the miniature alpine violets with their flowers no bigger than the head of a thumbtack. In the evening of that first day below the falls I lay down to sleep in the cabin. After lunch we paddle hard across the current again to the west side of the river, seeking shade. Nobody knew for sure; perhaps in a couple of years, depending on when the Park Service would be able to get the money. I tramp on through the winding gorge, through the harsh brittle silence. Although it was still day the new moon could be seen in the slot between the canyon walls, drifting among clouds. The water and soap dry on my face as I reach for the razor: aridity. Most of the major points of interest in this park are presently accessible, over passable dirt roads, by car Grandview Point, Upheaval Dome, part of the White Rim, Cave Spring, Squaw Spring campground and Elephant Hill. Thats a fact. His words trail off into the vague mumble, Slept on rock all my life, goddamnit The empty stare follows: a foolish thrift is driving him to ruin and all he cares about is his heart; he is thinking about falling off his horse again like Ernie Faye fell off the ladder picking peaches. I think weve about said it all we communicate less in words and more in direct denotation, the glance, the pointing hand, the subtle nuances of pipe smoke, the tilt of a wilted hat brim. The gopher snake and I get along nicely. Second, the Colorado River carries its great volume of water swiftly seaward well. It will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. The heart-shaped prints of deer are plain in the dust of the road and I wonder where the deer are now and how theyre doing and if theyve got enough to eat. Hes under the doorstep and in the shade where the ground and air remain very cold. For Abbey, the desert is a symbol of strength, and he is "comforted by [the] solidity and resistance" of his natural surroundings. Malcom Brown?). I come to a fork in the canyon, the main branch continuing to the right, a deep dark narrow defile opening to the left. CarriC No signs. With each visit to the home camp she seemed a little more irritable, more disinclined to intimacy, somehow more distant. I open my eyes and see the summer constellations, pale, dim, oddly misplaced in the sky the Big Dipper, for example, half sunk beyond the northern horizon. We shove off, keeping to the shady side of the canyon, and commence the second day of our journey. The sun rises higher, fierce on our faces; the western wall blazes like hot iron. The search for what? The Navajos are. But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost. There was a serpent, a red racer, living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there, slipping among the stones or pausing to mesmerize me with his suggestive tongue and cloudy haunted primeval eyes. Its surely after midnight but who wants to sleep? We begin the search by dividing as evenly as we can the area to be investigated. Someone radioed for an airplane, the boy was flown to a hospital in Flagstaff. Being a cold-blooded creature, of course, he takes his temperature from that of the immediate environment in this case my body. Later on a few boys from town came out to try to catch the horse and almost got him boxed up in Salt Creek Canyon. Im going to bring a boxful of Christmas tree decorations silver-blue tinsel, red candles, peppermint canes, silver bells, golden stars and frosted baubles and Im going to pick out the loneliest, most forlorn of those little junipers and dress it in splendor, gay and glittering, and leave it there shining in the wilderness for a season or two, until the winds and the sun and the birds strip it bare again. They began to move. Not true. (One leap and he was in the saddle; five beers and he was on the floor.) Thirteen miles more to the end of the road. The most artful among them like to land in your hair and attach themselves to the scalp, where they will not be noticed until too late. I am here not only to escape for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us."[18]. October. I drive past more free-standing pinnacles, around the edge of outthrust ledges, in and out of the ravines that corrade the rolling terrain wind-deposited, cross-bedded sand dunes laid down eons ago in the Mesozoic era and since compressed and petrified by overlying sediments. Or skin a paleface, I reminded him. Struggling with distance learning? Angry and loving. He never came back, never opened his eyes, never spoke. Though he fails to bring Moon-Eye home, Abbey talks more to the emaciated horseusing human logic, persuasion, and kindnessthan to any other character in the book. The wind is rising. And after a pause Billy-Joe heard Mr. Graham say a thing about his new mother his fathers new wife that was strange and ugly. Abbey stresses this by opposing Immanuel Kanta philosopher who believed that this reality was inaccessible to humanity. Everywhere the cliffrose is blooming, the yellow flowers shivering in the wind. Feeling much better we sit in the shade of the trees and eat some lunch. And old Roy? I am already close enough to the snowfield to hear the muted roar, as of an underground waterfall, of the melted snow rushing downward through the piled slabs over which I struggle. Near the top of the rise is a juniper, rooted in the rock and twisted toward the sky in the classic pose of its kind in the canyon country. See those big black scrawny wings far above, waiting? I am thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephone![27]. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. He stood with his ragged broomtail and his right-angled pelvic bones toward me but had that long neck and coffin head cranked around, watching me with the good eye, waiting to see what I would do next. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon we shove our fragile boats once more into the water, climb aboard and paddle slowly out of the Escalantes womb, back to the greater world of Glen Canyon and the steady, powerful, unhurried, insouciant Colorado. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to cecate a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. In the morning Ralph and I pack our gear, load the boats, and take a last lingering look at the scene which we know we will never again see as we see it now: the great Colorado River, wild and free, surging past the base of the towering cliffs, roaring through the boulders below the mouth of Forbidden Canyon; Navajo Point and the precipice of the Kaiparowits Plateau thousands of feet above, beyond the inner walls of the canyon; and in the east ranks of storm-driven cumulus clouds piled high on one another, gold-trimmed and blazing in the dawn. Persistent as a mosquito, it will keep attacking until either it samples your blood or you succeed in killing it, or both. When these aspects are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world. Rainy season in the canyonlands. To the northeast we can see a little of The Maze, a vermiculate area of pink and white rock beyond and below the ledge we are now on, and on this side of it a number of standing monoliths Candlestick Spire, Lizard Rock and others unnamed. About a mile past Temple Junction youll see a little dirt road heading east. At evening we come to historic Hole in the Rock. Within this vast perimeter, in the middle ground and foreground of the picture, a rather personal demesne, are the 33,000 acres of Arches National Monument of which I am now sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian. My Saturday night campfire talks are brief and to the point. Farther on a pair of mule deer started from the brush and bounded obliquely through the beams of my lights, raising puffs of dust which the wind, moving faster than my pickup truck, caught and carried ahead of me out of sight into the dark. This park will be difficult to protect under heavy visitation, and for years it was understood that it would be preserved in a primitive way so as to screen out those tourists unwilling to drive their cars over some twenty miles of dirt road. A, Most of my wandering in the desert Ive done alone. Alone-ness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Mr. Graham found a flashlight in the truck, also Husks rifle. Down the river. I listen for a long time. In each there is the sense of something ultimate, with mountains exemplifying the brute force of natural processes, the sea concealing the richness, complexity and fecundity of life beneath a surface of huge monotony, and the desert what does the desert say? A mile from where we stand is the mesas edge and a twelve-hundred-foot drop straight down to what is called the White Rim Bench. Thank God its Monday, I say to myself the next morning. A wisp of bluish smoke goes up and the wood, arid as the rock from which it came, blossoms out in fire. The people of Supai or at least a majority of them voted to reject the proposal.) As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. He vows not to apply human-centric language to nature, hoping to bring himself closer to it and to understand its mysteries more clearly. You are doomed., Lets drink to that. Above me the clouds roll in, unfurling and smoking billows in malignant violet, dense as wool. What else do we need? We will not have another opportunity. Chapter 5 Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks, Chapter 10 The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud, Chapter 14 The Dead Man at Grandview Point, Chapter 15 Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert, Chapter 17 Terra Incognita: Into the Maze. What to do. From my place in front of the housetrailer I can see several of the hundred or more of them which have been discovered in the park. I climbed on my horse, loading the poor brute down not only with my own weight but with two bootfuls of mud and water. Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert Episodes and Visions Terra Incognita: Into the Maze Bedrock and Paradox The First Morning Solitaire The Serpents of Paradise Cliffrose and Bayonets Polemic: Industrial Tourism and The National Parks Rocks Cowboys and Indians Cowboys and Indians: Part II Similar Items Its a cold, snowy night when he arrives, after a 450-mile drive, at the mice-ridden little tin government house trailer (3) that will serve as his home for the next six months. The climb up from timberline had taken about two hours. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. God is there and man is not., God? Theyll smell you dying, theyll come flapping down on you like foul and dirty kites and roost on your neck and drink your eyeballs while youre still alive. Mr. Graham shielded his eyes from the glow of the campfire and looked for him with the gun. The temperature out in the sun must be well over a hundred degrees. that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself. This is an expression of loyalty: "But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see". In the meantime we refill the water bag, get back in the Land Rover and drive on. Husk reeled out of the bar into the blinding sunlight, Mr. Graham following, and after some confusion led the way to the camp in Courthouse Wash. Mrs. Husk was pleased to make his acquaintance and the children also took to Mr. Graham at once except for Billy-Joe who was a very shy boy. At Topocoba on the rim of the canyon the temperature was a tolerable ninety-six degrees but it rose about one degree for each mile on and downward. He dragged the body into the cab of the truck and slammed shut the doors. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak there were no other people around and there still are none but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. Well, damn the lot of them, I think, rolling down the broad asphalt trail to Moab at a safe and sane eighty-five, not forgetting to keep one eye skinned for a sign of Fred Burkett the local highway patrolman, whose favorite hiding place north of town was behind a Chamber of Commerce billboard welcoming tourists to Moab, Uranium Capital of the World, was until I leveled the billboard to the ground one night with a bucksaw which I had borrowed for the job from the United States National Park Service, Department of the Interior (Help Keep America Beautiful) good thing Fred wasnt there at the time; his new Plymouth Interceptor wouldve got badly wrinkled assuming he was asleep as usual. The lambs, accustomed by tradition to their role, do not complain; and the sheepmen, who run their hooved locusts on the public lands and are heavily subsidized, most of them as hog-rich as they are pigheaded, can easily afford these trifling losses. Watching the sky I see shooting stars, blue-green and vivid, course across the narrow band of sky between the canyon walls. Perhaps the tree is mad. In the morning my visitor, whose name I didnt quite catch, crawled into his sack and went to sleep. It was a gray jeep with a U.S. Government decal on the side Bureau of Public Roads and covered with dust. Pine nuts are delicious, sweeter than hazelnuts but difficult to eat; you have to crack the shells in your teeth and then, because they are smaller than peanut kernels, you have to separate the meat from the shell with your tongue. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Mr. Graham did his best to encourage Husk, bought him drinks at the Club 66 and staked him to new batteries for the Geiger counter. We make tea but have no appetite for any supper but a tin of fruit each. Its name is Progress. ), no concert halls, no books, bars, galleries, theaters or playing fields, no cathedrals of learning or high towers of finance, no wars, elections, traffic jams or other amusements, none of the multinefarious delights of what Ralph calls syphilization. When a beach of white sand comes in sight, backed with a stand of green young willows, we get out the paddles and work toward it, paddling strenuously across the current. He walks down to the creek once a day for a drink. It will not be easy for the Navajos to forget that once upon a time, only a generation ago, they were horsemen, nomads, keepers of flocks, painters in sand, weavers of wool, artists in silver, dancers, singers of the Yei-bei-chei. We pile our baggage under the canvas shelter and unroll our sleeping bags in a hollow among the white dunes, under the open sky. Then his attention wanders. 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