We were only about ten miles from the stockpens near Moab, but would have to check out all the side canyons along the way. I stirred myself, got up painfully, and stepped out of the wreckage of the juniper. His long yellow fingers, holding a cigarette, trembled. Inside were three sunburned men in twill britches and engineering boots, and a pile of equipment: transit case, tripod, survey rod, bundles of wooden stakes. Though everyone has his or her own ideal place of beauty on Earth. That stumped me. Make a fire, put water on to boil for tea, lay thick slices of bacon tenderly across the grill. You are approaching the land of the horned gods. For the rest of the afternoon, keeping to the shady side, we drift down the splendid river, deeper and deeper and deeper into the fantastic. Something vital is lacking. In the aforementioned chapters and in Rocks, Abbey also describes at length the geology he encounters in Arches National Monument, particularly the iconic formations of Delicate Arch and Double Arch. Then comfortably readjusted, the river flows on and the only noise, aside from that of scattered birds, is the ripple of the water, the gurgling eddies off the sandspits, the sound of Newcomb puffing on his old pipe. [13], Down the River, the longest chapter of the book, recalls a journey by boat down Glen Canyon undertaken by Abbey and an associate, in part inspired by John Wesley Powell's original voyage of discovery in 1869. Meanwhile the tribal population continues to grow in geometric progression: 2 4 8 16 32 64, etc., onward and upward, as the majority of The People settle more deeply into the second-class way of life, American style, to which they are fairly accustomed, with all of its advantages and disadvantages: the visiting caseworker from the welfare department, the relief check, the derelict automobiles upside down on the front yard, the tarpaper shack next to the hogan and ramada, the repossessed TV set, the confused adolescents, and the wine bottles in the kitchen midden. In late August came the Great Havasupai Sacred Peach Festival and Four-Day Marathon Friendship Dance, to which I was invited and in which I did participate. I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief like a whisper of wind when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man. At one time for a period of three days my bowels seemed in danger of falling out, but I recovered. Usually they stop their singing and retire into the rocks, out of caution, soon after the sun comes up. Enjoy access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more from Scribd. Therefore let us behave accordingly. In color they shade from off-white through buff, pink, brown and red, tones which also change with the time of day and the moods of the light, the weather, the sky. First I built the fireplace on a level bench of sandstone about fifty yards to the rear of the trailer. The two prospectors never got through at all. 2 pages at 400 words per page) View a FREE sample Rather than hunt for his supper the owl seems to be calling his supper to come to him. The Indio desert was bumping into the wee hours of the morning as the 2023 Coachella Music and Arts festival rocked out on the Empire Polo Fields with some of the world's best talent, both on and . such are my feelings, a mixture of revulsion and delight, as we float away on the river, leaving behind for a while all that we most heartily and joyfully detest. Is there any spot on earth that men have not proved accessible by the simplest means feet and legs and heart? One afternoon in June I squatted there for an hour two hours? And again. You can use double quotes to search for a series of words in a particular order. Rejoicing in my innocence and power I stride down the trail beneath the elephantine forms of melting sandstone, past the stark shadows of Double Arch. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. I can see the switchbacks of the trail, the fan of greenery at the outlet of the side canyon, but no sign of Newcomb or the boats, deep in the shade of the willows. From here it looks as if it might go. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. And his reaction is the typical one; he responds to prejudice by cultivating a prejudice of his own against those whom he feels are even lower in the American hierarchy than he is: against the Indians, the Mexicans, the Negroes. Or, Who wants to live forever? One hiked up a side canyon and struck off west across-country toward the hamlet of Hanksville, some forty miles away by airline. Keep bearing north and east. He saw the tree lodged against his landing dock and what resembled a shriveled human figure attached to the trunk of it. 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. However, I keep my cowardly doubts to myself, waiting for Ralph to speak of them first. I continued with the sermon. Also invisible but invariably present at some indefinable distance are the mourning doves whose plaintive call suggests irresistibly a kind of seeking-out, the attempt by separated souls to restore a lost communion: No doubt this line of analogy must be rejected. If Housman were here hed alter those lines to. He had almost stepped on the starter before he realized the danger. Not so hostile as the snowy peaks, nor so broad and bland as the oceans surface, it lies open given adequate preparation to leisurely exploration, to extended periods of habitation. Some I begin to recognize a mockingbird, killdeer, Mexican finches. You might find a geode: a lump of sandstone the size and shape of an ostrich egg, or sometimes much larger; slice it through with a diamond wheel and you may find inside a glittering treasure trove of crystals. Coming from a tradition which honors sharing and mutual aid above private interest, the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without. Listing different nearby species, Abbey cant help but personify the animals as he marvels at their beauty and complexity. It seems odd that the mountainside should be covered with this loose debris but so it is with Tukuhnikivats; nearly symmetrical, like a volcano, it has weathered evenly on all sides, unlike its neighbor Mount Peale for instance, which can be reached over spurs and ridges of solid base rock. The moon was high enough to cast a good light when I reached the place where the gray jeep had first come into view. All through the day clouds gathered in the sky, wind whistled above the walls, and by evening he could hear from far away the mutter of thunder. He didnt intend to exert himself unless he was forced to. Buy some cows of my own.. But the rest, the majority, most of them new to the out-of-doors, will need and welcome assistance, instruction and guidance. You cant get them out of there they wont go home. Hed shrug his shoulders, sigh, and take another pull from his Tokay bottle. Ask Everett Reuss. Even if the reservation could attract and sustain large-scale industry heavy or light, which it cannot, what have the Navajos to gain by becoming factory hands, lab technicians and office clerks? If its not a horse it must be a unicorn. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry. I follow them for a short distance, still plagued by curiosity, before remembering my place and the requirements of common courtesy. More secure are those who live in and around the deserts few perennial waterholes, those magical hidden springs that are scattered so austerely through the barren vastness of the canyon country. I think of the second movement from Beethovens Eroica. The owls, of course, and the nighthawks keep to holes and crevices during the day. In all of this vast well of space enclosed by mesa and plateau, a great irregular arena of right angles and sheer rock in which the entire population and all the works of Manhattan, say could easily be hidden, there is no sign whatever, anywhere, of human or animal life. Timberline at this latitude is in the neighborhood of 11,000 feet; therefore I have about 2000 vertical feet to climb. My favorite juniper stands before me glittering shaggily in the sunrise, ragged roots clutching at the rock on which it feeds, rough dark boughs bedecked with a rash, with a shower of turquoise-colored berries. A variety of asters are blooming along the road and among the dunes; with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible. Let us therefore steal a slogan from the Development Fever Faction in the Park Service. When rain arrives, threatening their ability to exit via the rock path, Waterman gives up his hope for asylum, and they leave in a hurry. Not a fly, not a single fly crawled over his arid skin or whined around his rheumy eyeballs. In the morning my visitor, whose name I didnt quite catch, crawled into his sack and went to sleep. Why, we ask ourselves, floating onward in effortless peace deeper into Eden, why not go on like this forever? Sliding greasily forward the snout of mud dashed against the undercut wall on the outside of the bend, wallowed over ledges and swung back to the main channel in the center of the canyon floor. The work is simple and requires almost no mental effort, a good thing in more ways than one. It wont hurt them to work off a little office fat; itll do them good, help take their minds off each others wives, and give them a chance to get out of reach of the boss a blessing for all concerned. I rest for a while in the shade, dream and sleep through the worst of the midday glare. Farther down a few boulders were wedged between the walls; I climbed over and under them. This I wish to explore for I have heard that back in its meandering depths are natural bridges and arches, cliff dwellings and hanging gardens and other spontaneous marvels. I heard later. The cows groan against the forced migration as if they know where it will eventually bring them. What is he up to? Of course in an emergency we could always descend again into The Maze, hike down to the river, build a raft, float fifty miles down to Hite, and hitchhike a ride from there back to civilization, if anyone happened to be going that way. His only request is that they cut their strings first. In a few minutes the river obliges; a second group of rapids appears, wild as the first. Everything else they needed, from boots to beans, perhaps even the jeep, must have been brought in by way of the river, for this camp is a long long way from any road known to the mapmakers. I let my arm dangle over the side and trail my hand in the flow. It was in fact the same pool of quicksand that I had walked over myself only about an hour earlier. Moon-Eye tried to back again but his retreat was blocked. Get out of that piece of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! I come out on the surface of a rolling plain of cross-bedded sandstone, the petrified dunes of the Navajo formation, and win the view Id been hoping for. At noon when I return he is gone. In all these years of prowling on foot through the canyons and desert mountains of the Southwest I have yet to see, free and alive in the wild, either a lion or a bighorn. [15] In Episodes and Visions, Abbey meditates on religion, philosophy, and literature and their intersections with desert life, as well as collects various thoughts on the tension between culture and civilization, espousing many tenets in support of environmentalism. Mostly I live out of it., You must get awfully lonesome way out here., No, myself. (They laugh; they all think Im kidding. Scorpions and spiders go underground for the duration. One afternoon two young Indians Navajos? Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. At night the mammals come deer, bobcat, cougar, coyote, fox, jackrabbit, bighorn sheep, wild horse and feral burro each in his turn and in unvarying order, under the declaration of a truce. I had to go to work. It seems to me an equally proper solution to the problems besetting our national parks. Mr. Graham accepted. Contents Desert Solitaire is a collection of treatises and autobiographical excerpts describing Abbey's experiences as a park ranger and wilderness enthusiast in 1956 and 1957. In places you will find clear-flowing streams, such as Salt Creek near Turnbow Cabin, where the water looks beautifully drinkable but tastes like brine. Ecstasy and danger: well never get the Land Rover up those switchbacks if it storms. What for? he said. As they plumb potentially unexplored caves, grottos, cliff paths, and shorelines, as well as the great Rainbow Bridge, Abbey comes to believe that its a divine area. I am to use it in patrolling the roads within the park, for assisting tourists in trouble, and for hauling firewood to and garbage from the campgrounds. Stepping carefully around the straggling prickly pear I come after a few paces over bare sandstone to a plant whose defensive weaponry makes the cactus seem relatively benign. Climbing higher, I enter by degrees into the Hudsonian life zone, leaving behind the Canadian with its aspen and Douglas fir, and find myself in the dark cool depths of the silver fir and spruce forest. Over the rocky wagon road that trail of dust and sand and washouts which I love, which the tourists hate so deeply I go jouncing, banging, clattering in the old Chevy, scaring the daylights out of the lizards and beetles trying to cross the road. Better fill your water cans there; might be your last chance. We rushed the herd through but one cow, the same one as before, got herself bogged down. But it wasnt necessary. In other words the journey is the central thing, the expectation of what is to come; the ocean itself is merely a medium of travel. My feet are wet and cold. In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolation, all things recede to distances out of reach, reflecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert. I mean, enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. Many of the junipers the females are covered with showers of light-blue berries, that hard bitter fruit with the flavor of gin. About ten years ago I took a job as a seasonal park ranger in a place called Arches National Monument near the little town of Moab in southeast Utah. A single motorboat could easily circumnavigate the lake in an hour; ten motorboats would begin to crowd it; twenty or thirty, all in operation, would dominate the lake to the exclusion of any other form of activity; and fifty would create the hazards, confusion, and turmoil that make pleasure impossible. In sudden alarm he grabbed for the parking brake and found the handle missing. Blinking the sweat out of my eyes I looked harder and saw the trousers transform themselves into the legs of a large animal, focused my attention and distinguished through the obscurity of the branches and foliage the outline of a tall horse. Getting dark: I switch on the lights and keep moving. What do the pilgrims see? Mrs. Husk said how much? But there are many of these Moore-like formations, hundreds of them, in the canyon country. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. Wrong again, he said, after a moments consideration. But already the current is pulling us to the middle of the river and everything is farther away than it looks. Onion Spring wears such a deceitful guise. I walk lightly across shoals of quicksand and ford the river when necessary, but over the pebbled and rocky stretches the going is hard and slow. 5000, one hundred miles away. Crescent-shaped, the dune shelters on its leeward side a growth of sunflowers and scarlet penstemon. The horse made no move. In the shade of the big trees, whose leaves tinkle musically, like gold foil, above our heads, we eat lunch and fill our bellies with the cool sweet water, and lie on our backs and sleep and dream. ), In any case, when a man must be afraid to drink freely from his countrys rivers and streams that country is no longer fit to live in. These brief thundershowers are not entirely without effect: I can see these days a dull green fuzziness spreading like a mold across the distant swales of Salt Wash Valley. The quicksand gurgled a little and made funny, gasping noises, reluctant to let him go, but when he was free the holes filled up at once, the liquid sand oozing into place, and everything looked as it had before, smooth and sleek and innocent as the surface of a pudding. Better yet, build a paved road to every corner of the park; better yet, pave the whole damned place so any damn fool can drive anything anywhere is this a democracy or aint it? Advanced Searching Investigating the wreckage we found only the broken bodies, the broken bottles, the stain and smell of Tokay, and a couple of cardboard suitcases exploded open and revealing their former owners worldly goods dirty socks, some underwear, a copy of. But it wasnt always a fake. Rock and sun. An iron lung it is, with windows and Venetian blinds. On my first walk down into Havasupai Canyon, which is a branch of the Grand Canyon, never mind exactly where, I took with me only a quart of water, thinking that would be enough for a mere fourteen-mile downhill hike on a warm day in August. In some of these basins there was a little water left over from the last flood, warm and fetid water under an oily-looking scum, condensed by prolonged evaporation to a sort of broth, rich in dead and dying organisms. Mr. Graham was sweating badly, his hands shaking, his chest painfully constricted. ), The day before I leave. (I say it with a smile; they laugh. Burdened only with canteen, a stick and a lunch of raisins and chipped beef I march up the firm wet sand of the canyon floor, reading the register: many deer, one coyote, the three-toed track of a big bird, many killdeer or sandpipers, many lizards, the winding trail of a snake, no cattle, no horses, no people. 6. [36] He continues by saying that man is rightly obsessed with Mother Nature. It is not after all the mighty diamondback. Comfort yourself with the reflection that within a few hours, if all goes as planned, your human flesh will be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. The temperature is still falling, presaging snow. On top of one of the walls stand four gigantic monoliths, dark red, angular and square-cornered, capped with remnants of the same hard white rock on which we have brought the Land Rover to a stop. I cannot attempt to deal with it here. CarriC Fear betrays the rabbit to the great horned owl. The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. Yet their song, if not a mating call or a warning, must be what it sounds like, a brooding meditation on space, on solitude. Dont worry, they said, this road will be built. The rare metals lithium, cobalt, berylium, mercury, arsenic, molybdenum, titanium and barium. Not from any peculiar moral weakness but simply because such well-adapted administrators are themselves believers in a policy of economic development. Im coming closer. All over the slickrock country there are natural cisterns or potholes, tubs, tanks and basins sculptured in the soft sandstone by the erosive force of weathering, wind and sand. Knees shaking, I stepped toward the horse, pulled the ropy hackamore out of my shirt to Moon-Eye it must have looked as if I were pulling out my intestines and threw the thing with all the strength I had left straight at him. He sat down on the runningboard to rest, to regain his wind, and watched Husk crawling slowly toward him. For five minutes the deluge continues under the barrage of thunder and lightning, then trails off quickly, diminishing to a shower, to a sprinkling, to nothing at all. It would not be the first time that a blizzard hit the high plateaus in mid-September. Parallel to the highway north of Moab is a railway, a spur line to the potash mines. You know. Only the slow swing of the canyon walls overhead and the illusory upstream flow of willows, tamarisk and boulders on the shore reveal and indicate the sureness of our progress to the sea. three? Abbey and his search party find the dead photographer at Grandview Point, leading Abbey to envy the man his natural death out in the open, away from hospitals and priests. Nevertheless the Park Service had drawn up the usual Master Plan calling for modern paved highways to most of the places named and some not named. There may be some among the readers of this book, like the earnest engineer, who believe without question that any and all forms of construction and development are intrinsic goods, in the national parks as well as anywhere else, who virtually identify quantity with quality and therefore assume that the greater the quantity of traffic, the higher the value received. Whos going to carry it?, Ill carry it, he says cheerfully, through a magnificent, sandy beard; you can carry the water.. Come back here! I shout. Had the sun moved at all? We expect to spend about ten days on the river and will not see any human habitation, after Hite, until we reach the dam site a hundred and fifty miles downstream. Seven more miles rough as a cob around the crumbling base of Elaterite Butte, some hesitation and backtracking among alternate jeep trails, all of them dead ends, and we finally come out near sundown on the brink of things, nothing beyond but nothingness a veil, blue with remoteness and below the edge the northerly portion of The Maze. That sounds grand and dramatic but then why not Tablets of the Sun, equally so? My sweat dries as fast as it forms the parched air is sucking at my pores. From the rear many of them look like women; many of them. PART II, THE HEAT OF NOON: Now weve mentioned quicksand. In places the wagons had to be lowered on ropes. He would be taught that the danger of attack was always present, that in any hour of the day or night, from up or down the canyon or over the rim, the Enemy might appear cruel, devious, hungry, terrible perhaps in the shape of those red-horned, hollow-eyed, wide-shouldered monsters painted on the walls of Sego Canyon north of Moab. The climb gives me some comprehension of the fact that we are. This meant first of all bulldozing a road into the claim; then if they had any money left or could borrow more they had to hire or lease a drilling rig. A veil of dust floats above the sneaky snaky old road from here to the highway, drifting gently downwind to settle upon the blades of the yucca, the mustard-yellow rabbitbrush, the petals of the asters and autumn sunflowers, the umbrella-shaped clumps of blooming wild buckwheat. The insect-eating lizards dart from shelter to shelter, never lingering for more than a few moments in the open blaze. Through the ceiling and on through the rock for a thousand feet above, there is a narrow, winding skylight; and this is all carved out by a little stream which runs only during the few showers that fall now and then in this arid country.. He lived now a dream. As I sit there drinking water from cupped hands, I happen to look up and see on the opposite wall, a hundred feet above the floor of the canyon, the ruins of three tiny stone houses in a shallow cave. Although I sometimes cook at the fireplace outside, it is certainly easier to use the gas stove in the trailer, despite the heat. Or at any rate his tracks were still here, fresh prints in the dust that looked as if they might have been made only minutes before my arrival. Follow. Abbeys last retreat, with his student friend Bob Waterman, is to a complex of dangerous canyons known as The Maze. Turnbow Cabin itself is a well-preserved ruin (nothing decays around here) made of juniper, pinyon and cottonwood logs, no two alike in shape or size. The wall at this point is somewhat overhanging, requiring a free rappel of forty to fifty feet easy enough going down but cruel hard work to get back up. Most of the sky is lidded over but the sun remains clear halfway down the west, shining in under the storm. There are no Indians in the Arches country now; they all left seven hundred years ago and wont be back for a long time. I stuff my share into my shirt pockets and lace up the boots, hang a canteen over my shoulder and march off. Teachers and parents! I find a trail but its a poor one, little more than a deer path, which peters out completely a mile up-canyon. Mondays are very nice. Until now. Navajo National Monument. I could have opened his skull with a bottle of his own Lowenbrau, and was powerfully tempted. One day on Grand Mesa he came on a bear and roped it, planning to lead it home; he changed his mind when the bear took the rope in both paws and walked toward Les and his horse, coiling up the rope as he came. Once more I attached myself to the wall, tenderly, sensitively, like a limpet, and very slowly, very cautiously, worked my way into the corner. Tap here to review the details. The more difficult places, such as Angel Arch or Druid Arch, can be reached by jeep, on horseback or in a one-or two-day hike. The men managed to get ashore still alive. Im not going to look for their lair, for that might frighten them away, and we need coyotes, need them badly, in Arches National Monument. This may seem, at the moment, like a fantastic thesis. With a shred of it he made several turns around his left forearm and slung it from his neck. After the first wave of utter panic had passed I began to try to think. Will Tuesday never come? We stop for the night only three fourths of a mile below the last camp Darkness is coming on; but the waves are rolling with crests of foam so white they almost give a light of their own. A soft pink mist of light, the alpenglow, lies on the mountains above timberline. (3) Wheres the Coke machine? It is also quite insane. 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