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The Moon-Eyed Horse
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Desert Solitaire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty
Nature, Wonder, and Religion
Language and Reality
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance
Summary
Analysis
To Abbey’s great anger, the government has dammed the Colorado River and thereby flooded Glen Canyon. The damn serves no purpose but to generate money through electricity. Abbey thinks that the resulting body of water, Lake Powell, is an insult to its namesake, John Wesley Powell, the first American to explore the dangerous area. A decade ago, however, one could walk through the beautiful Canyon, an Eden, as Abbey did. Now, it’s as if Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal were covered in mud.
In the Christian belief system, Eden is regarded as the garden where the first human beings communed with God; it was lost forever after Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Abbey’s phrasing suggests that in real life Glen Canyon was just as divine a place as Eden and was equally wasted by human disobedience (by the dam). Additionally, by invoking references to two of the world’s most famous temples (in France and India, respectively), Abbey implies that Glen Canyon was not only sacred but also a place where people could gather to worship its divinity.
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Years ago, Abbey and Ralph Newcomb took a trip to Glen Canyon to see it before it was spoiled. They spend half a day by the Colorado River bank, packing supplies and preparing their inadequate rubber rafts, having forgotten their life jackets. Though disabled in one leg, Newcomb is calm as he smokes his pipe—unshakeable as the river itself and tranquil as the sky. He’s brought fishing wire and a camera.
Readers have seen Newcomb calmly handle quicksand, and here, with similes to the river and sky, Abbey explicitly spells out Newcomb’s harmonious attitude with nature. Newcomb’s stoic harmony is an essential part of Abbey’s subsequent discoveries that humanity and nature are compatible.
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Abbey and Newcomb set off in their rafts, though Abbey finds his unstable. As they drift, they soon learn to stay latched together and to make conversation. Abbey’s anxiety is replaced by a sense of safety, as if he were back in the womb. The feel of the water on his finger transports him to a childhood desire to float down the river like Mark Twain or Major Powell.
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A man appears on the shore, yelling something at them which they can’t hear, and they pass away from him gladly. Abbey quotes couplets from Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Jeffers about hating the human race. But what Abbey feels now isn’t exactly misanthropy—it’s just a necessary separation from humanity in order to restore his affection, first for himself, and second for other human beings.
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Abbey thinks that to get lost in nature is to find independence, a primitive feeling. Out here, one could do anything—Newcomb could murder Abbey, and no one would ever know. But it’s love, not murderousness, that wells up in Abbey. Nature gives the two men this sense of moral freedom to do whatever they please. It exhilarates them and inspires them with love as they float along—simply because it removes them from technology and traffic and cities. Abbey thinks it’s no wonder that the government wants people locked away in cities: this joy makes one reject the trappings of capitalist culture.
As the current picks up, Newcomb notes it calmly while Abbey starts to worry, pulling out his useless map. They hit rapids, which slam their boats together and nearly overturn them. They survive it with a thrill, and soon the river “obliges” them with another set of rapids.
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As the water calms down, Abbey admires the birdsong—like the sound of a glockenspiel, or like lorelei. Basking in the sight of the trees and birds, Abbey asks Newcomb if he believes in God. “Who?” Newcomb asks, to which Abbey agrees.
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Eventually, Abbey and Newcomb pull off on the beach for the night. Feeling joy, Abbey quotes a line about a “beauteous evening.” They start a fire, an offering to the gods of the river and canyon, and cook corned beef. For entertainment, they listen to the river and the cicadas and watch the nighthawks. Abbey asks Newcomb sarcastically if it’s fair that they must risk their lives given the city comforts of Albuquerque, and Newcomb says yes. As it gets late, Abbey carves a spot in the sand and starts thinking “river thoughts” before “joining” the night sky.
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After breakfast, Abbey washes dishes in the Colorado River, reasoning that it has no false pride. Taking off again, as they drift deeper into Eden, Abbey wants to live like this forever. There are no concert halls or museums or cathedrals, but nature contains everything one actually needs physically and spiritually. He and Newcomb both agree that they could live here, away from civilization. The silence is the only problem—it might drive them crazy. They joke that they’re both doomed.
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Drifting peacefully toward the Gulf of California, as if in a dream, it seems foolish to exert any effort. The river takes over for Abbey and Newcomb, sending them down its current. The canyon rim overhead is as big as Hollywood Bowl, fit to house God’s orchestra. Pulling over to take their lunch, they realize they are blissfully free of human pollution, with the nearest town 100 miles away. Dwelling on the radium content of the river, Abbey quotes Thomas Jefferson on killing tyrants to water “the tree of liberty” and on the necessity of creating a new, better country from an old and useless one.
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Overwhelmed by nature, Abbey demands of Newcomb where human beings come from and where they are going. Newcomb replies with a short, “Who cares.” Words fail the two men, so Abbey pulls out a harmonica and blows a Christian hymn: “We shall gather by the river / That flows from the throne of the Lord.” Evening falls again, so they pull over for supper and camp. After dinner, Abbey wanders in the blackness.
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At breakfast, the sand in the air bonds with Abbey and Newcomb’s food and with their bodies; dealing with the grit in the air becomes as easy as breathing. Drifting down the river again, they pass tall canyons and listen to their voices echo. The beauty of these colorful canyons overwhelms Abbey, who is heartbroken that they will soon be flooded and hidden for centuries. Secretly, Abbey and Newcomb hope that the government will change its mind and preserve the area. But Abbey knows this to be untrue, disdaining humanity by quoting a line about its “damned, wicked deeds” in nature. The ravens mock Abbey and Newcomb as the men contemplate their distance from the nearest person.
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Abbey tries to define the word “wilderness,” but something more than words is required. Part of wilderness involves nostalgia, both for the womb and for the early founding of America. To love the wilderness is to be loyal to the earth, an entity that created and sustains humanity. The only original sin, therefore, is to destroy Earth’s paradise. This paradise is not the unchanging Heaven of the saints; Abbey thinks that it’s better and more complex than this, full of earthquakes and floods and disease. Aristotle and the Church Fathers believed that another world lay beyond this one, but Abbey believes that in reality, the only real and praiseworthy realm is the “dogmatically real” Earth.
Plenty of great explorers have come before Abbey and Newcomb—mainly John Wesley Powell, the Civil War veteran who first charted Glen Canyon in a three-month journey. Though the journey was dangerous and rough, Wesley described the area’s beauty, its unity of “form, color and sound.” He called it the most beautiful place aside from heaven.
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Abbey thinks that if population and industry continue to increase, humanity will create a kind of synthetic prison for themselves, cut off from this natural beauty. Once exiled from the earth and numbed of feeling, people will finally realize this tragedy. As Abbey and Newcomb pass by a 50-mile-long ridge of warped sandstone, they imagine it littered with paved roads, Coke machines, and modern bathrooms.
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Abbey and Newcomb pull over for a rest, and while Newcomb naps, Abbey explores the abandoned ruin of an old mining camp. Picking through rusty machinery, he contemplates God and human ambition. From his vantage point, the canyon could contain all of Manhattan, and yet Abbey sees not a trace of human or animal life. He thinks it’s odd that the closer one gets to a river out West, the fewer human settlements there are. The same of human life is true of plant life: vegetation thrives only on mountains and buttes. This is because the river’s gorge is too recessed below ground level to support life.
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Back in the boat, Newcomb and Abbey have abandoned all maps and wish to explore with no guidance. As the sun sets, they dock by a cave and explore it. Abbey sleeps fitfully but is comforted by the sound of a horned owl. For breakfast, they finish all their provisions and must now catch all their own food. As the Colorado River meets the larger Escalante, they drift along into it. Stopping for lunch, Newcomb casts a line into the water. When Abbey asks him for his fishing license, Newcomb thrusts a middle finger skyward, toward the Deity. Very soon, he catches a huge catfish, provided by God.
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Leaving Newcomb to fry the fish, Abbey climbs the nearby ridge, removing his boots to cross quicksand and replenishing himself in a dripping spring. Standing barefoot under a “wine-dark” sky, he watches the sunlight change colors on the twists and turns of the canyon below. He wonders if this place, big enough to contain the whole world’s cathedrals and Hindu divinities, is the locus Dei.
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Abbey notices petroglyphs of the Anasazi on a nearby mural wall, leading him to wonder about pre-Columbian life. Enough is known about their diet and crafts, but what of their emotions? Were they governed by fear? Beset by their enemy tribes, was it difficult for them to raise children? Surely any child raised in this area would have learned fear and survival at an early age. Walking down, Abbey passes a plunge pool that’s been worn down from thousands of years of dripping water. Night falls, and as he walks, the Escalante below is no longer inviting, as it was earlier—it is strange, menacing, and endless. He finally makes it down to Newcomb, and they fry up fish until dawn, as the wind blows as if through a sacred cathedral.
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In the morning, as Abbey and Newcomb float naked in the river, they debate whether they ought to return to civilization at all. Newcomb questions which civilization Abbey means, and Abbey agrees with the implications of this rhetorical question. They decide to return when they realize they’re low on bacon grease. They float on, passing rock formations like hamburgers and pies, eroded over maybe 500,000 years. Abbey praises the river for maintaining a moving life force through such ancient stone, and he quotes an Irishman’s line about loving “all things which flow.”
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Abbey and Newcomb camp for the night at Hole in the Rock, a former Mormon settlement established in 1880 that’s now abandoned. They worked exceptionally hard to forge a path through the canyon while scouting for land. Abbey retraces their path while Newcomb catches fish. Squeezing past rocks, Abbey becomes so thirsty that he sucks handfuls of sand. He reaches a lookout point so high up that the desert silence deepens to make him wonder—while he quotes Honoré de Balzac on this subject—that God must exist here. Abbey questions the existence of God: since nothing exists up here but Abbey, the stone, and the yuccas, Abbey rejects God. He is not an atheist but an “earthiest.”
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Though T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land captures some of this desert emptiness, Abbey dislikes this poem. He thinks words are a veil of ideas that gets between human beings and the world, obscuring their vision, like the Eastern concept of Maya. The river and Newcomb’s fishing is where God can really be found. When Abbey returns from his meditation, he and Newcomb communicate less in words and more in gestures. Their molecules seem to merge with the environment: their skin seems the color of the river, their eyeballs coral pink as the dunes, and their clothing muddy. They have forgotten how many days they’ve been gone.
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Taking off again, Abbey and Newcomb pass a feature that Wesley called Music Temple on his expedition, a cave that’s full of delightful resounding noises. Abbey quotes a paragraph of Wesley’s diary about the mysterious chamber, in which Powell names the vast cave after its peculiar echoes and reasons that a “storm-born architect” created the place. Continuing on, Abbey and Newcomb pass through an obscure rock tunnel, full of multi-colored lichen. Abbey realizes that the tunnel may never have been entered or named before.
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With the climactic Rainbow Bridge as their destination, Abbey and Newcomb continue on, stopping occasionally to admire the canyon. On one such stop, Abbey accidentally sets a willow thicket ablaze and barely escapes in the boat with Newcomb, who scarcely acknowledges the event and lights a match for the terrified Abbey. When they pull over for the night, the wind is howling, battering the tarps Abbey and Newcomb set up and threatening rain—a welcome prospect to the overheated men.
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After a bright red dawn, Abbey and Newcomb continue through Navajo Point and spot telltale signs of tourists: trash and discarded clothes. Having expected this, the men aren’t too disappointed. They set up camp at the bank beneath Rainbow Bridge, hopeful that the tourists don’t have the energy to make the hike to the Bridge. Newcomb stays behind to fish, while Abbey treks up a trail of hanging mosses, ferns, and wildflowers. The clouds appear to be in perfect unison with the fish in the stream below.
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Having followed human footprints down an unmarked fork in the canyon path, Abbey stops to analyze the strange fear that people tend to have of the desert. The desert is not just foreign and mysterious to people; it is indifferent to them. For this reason, many want to overcome the desert, to develop and turn it into something human.
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Rounding the next bend in the path, Abbey finally spots Rainbow Bridge. Abbey has long anticipated the formation, and it neither surpasses nor disappoints his expectations. He does feel guilty about Newcomb’s inability to come with him due to his disability; Abbey daydreams about hauling his friend up the path to the monument and leaving him to the happy fate of perishing beneath “God’s window.” Abbey signs the visitor’s register and laments that those who see the Bridge after the dam floods will regard it as a motorboat excursion—they won’t realize that half its beauty lies in its inaccessibility.
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Abbey scales a nearby ridge and views the Bridge—now diminished—from a great height. It seems timeless and unreal, so to test reality, Abbey kicks a stone over the edge, listening to its crash at the bottom. The earth will certainly outlast humanity; unlike what Plato and Hegel think, man is the dream, while rock is the only reality. As whirlwinds dance below, in the “dogmatic clarity” of sunlight, Abbey wonders what the world before him could possibly mean. It means nothing, he concludes.
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On the last day of their “dreamlike voyage,” Abbey and Newcomb take photos, light their pipes, and become lost in thought as they glide through the Escalante. They come across the first billboard erected in the region, in which the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation forbids boats in the upcoming construction zone.
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