Desert Solitaire

Billy-Joe is an 11-year-old boy who perishes in the Canyonlands after fleeing the murder scene of his father, the amateur uranium hunter Alfred T. Husk. Though probably a myth, the history of Billy-Joe and his father appears in Abbey’s book as a cautionary tale against Utah’s uranium rush. After Husk is murdered by Charles Graham as an indirect result of his greed in the uranium business, Billy-Joe wanders for days in search of help, eventually baking to death in a floating cottonwood tree trunk. After eating a strange flower, Billy-Joe hallucinates a burning bush: a scene which refutes Moses’s biblical vision and bolsters Abbey’s belief that the earth, not the Christian deity, is holy. Further, as Billy-Joe wanders, he removes his clothing (an echo to Abbey’s own primal, naked revelations in the Havasu area of the Grand Canyon), he watches the canyon walls “breathe,” and he sympathizes with the stars. Alongside Abbey’s experiences, Billy-Joe’s moments of oneness with the earth suggest that humans are a natural part of the landscape rather than masters of it, as Billy-Joe’s father believed himself to be. To complete the analogy, Billy-Joe wears a straw hat (as Abbey does in Havasu) and at one point takes shelter in a hollowed-out tree trunk (as Abbey does when hunting the wild horse Moon-Eye). With these parallels to a child’s life, readers see that Abbey’s convictions about the earth’s primacy aren’t just the labored arguments of an intellectual writer; these same beliefs are also the instinctive, immediate experiences of an uneducated boy. If Billy-Joe can intuitively draw the same value from the wilderness that Abbey does, then so can anyone else.