Standing By Words

Nature writing—it’s a specialty genre, one assumes, as the national parks are “special” places, and ecologically sensible habits are a “specialty lifestyle.” Annie Dillard, John Muir and Thoreau are all considered “nature writers,” though we’ve adopted similarly arbitrary monikers for all types of writing, and John Updike is taught under the heading of “Massachusetts bourge-lit.” Such categorization confers a marginality on what ought to be seen as normal, even central. Until then, I submit that we wean our tongues of the term “nature writing,” just as we’ve learned not to speak of “women doctors.”

When we’ve done that, perhaps Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) will become more broadly recognized for the wonderful work it is. Though his novels are better known—i.e., the likable but flawed Monkey Wrench Gang—Abbey wrote best when he wrote as himself. Monkey Wrench’s characters sound like aspects of Abbey’s magnificent essay voice—split up. In contrast, Desert Solitaire allows us full contact with that voice, like a force of nature, or as he named one of his published journals, a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the desert.

Solitaire is a memoir of Abbey’s summers as a ranger in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. The writing is lean, clear, funny in the style of Twain, and studiously innocent of metaphysics: “It will be objected that this book deals too much with mere appearances,” he writes, “and fails to engage and reveal … the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any.” Instead, he focuses on the “poetry … in simple fact,” though there is nothing simple about his descriptions of facts: “The sun is not yet in sight but signs of the advent are plain to see. Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold … Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, on the canyon walls and through the windows in the sandstone fins. … The snow glitters between us, acres of diamonds almost painful to look at. Within an hour all the snow exposed to sunlight will be gone, and the rock will be damp and steaming.”

The rest of the book is less effusive but still amazing. In the same chapter, Abbey challenges himself “to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider … devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities.” In this, he necessarily and rightly fails. The book is aflame with metaphor (description is, in part, ascription), by turns peaceful, bawdy, bathetic and polemical (especially in its attacks on “development”)—a book about hermitry that has something to say to all of us.