Themes
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.
Themes
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.
Themes
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.
The manner of the men’s boat launch is symbolic: floating separately at first, they soon latch their rafts together, which enables conversation and gives Abbey a sense of comfort. This convergence represents a larger theme Abbey has been exploring about solitude and society: that being alone in the wilderness ultimately brings people together.
Themes
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.
Here, Abbey finally states the social benefit of solitude. Humanity is ugly—as these poets have attested throughout history—but by taking periodic breaks from others, one can learn to live with them. After months alone, this is an idea Abbey hopes to test out with Newcomb, his first proper companion thus far.
Themes
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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.
Abbey dissects his claim that isolation ultimately brings people together. Isolation gives two essential feelings: first is liberty, as in the wilderness, one feels free to do whatever one wants. Newcomb could even kill Abbey if he wished. But, second, because being away from technology inspires joy, people discover that they don’t want to do things like committing murder. The exhilaration of nature turns people’s moral freedom into goodwill. By examining his feelings here, Abbey adds a necessary ingredient—joy—to his wider argument that freedom fosters peaceful coexistence among people. This explains why, earlier, he imagined that frogs, horses, and owls felt joy.
Themes
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.
Of course, a river can’t really “oblige” anything. But here, as in other passages throughout the memoir, Abbey projects human feelings onto the body of water to stress his and Newcomb’s harmony with nature.
Themes
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.
Though a glockenspiel is a typical Western instrument, the lorelei are mythical sirens on the banks of the Rhine River in Germany. Like Abbey’s earlier comparison of juniper to the incense of Dante’s fictional poetry, this reference suggests that nature can only accurately be communicated imaginatively and sensorially. This feeling contributes to Abbey’s belief that nature is otherworldly or beyond ordinary human comprehension—a belief that Newcomb confirms when he pretends not to recognize the human-made idea of a monotheistic natural order.
Themes
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.
The “beauteous evening” quote comes from a William Wordsworth sonnet which argues that loving nature is the same as loving God. This substitution of nature for God is exactly what Abbey’s been arguing throughout the book. Here, in Glen Canyon, he feels it in full force. Note that Abbey thinks “river thoughts”— earlier, he gave human qualities to the water, but now he gives river qualities to human beings. This cycle suggests that he and the earth are “joining” a reciprocal relationship.
Themes
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.
By repeating “Eden” here, Abbey further stresses the idea that wilderness is the place where human beings, like Adam and Eve in the Bible, can commune with God. He takes this further with his cathedral comparison, suggesting that one doesn’t need a traditional church to worship the deity of nature; nature itself is a sufficient temple.
Themes
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.
The “dream” simile helps connect Abbey to Billy-Joe Husk, who lost track of time, entered a dreamlike state, and perceived earthly signals not far from where Abbey is now. Recalling young Billy-Joe, readers infer that Abbey is finding a similar harmony with nature. Returning to his argument about the liberating aspects of nature, Abbey’s quote from Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, connects Abbey’s private experience of freedom to the broader social need for democracy.
Themes
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.
A writer by trade, Abbey can’t help but voice his wonder in prose—an instinct that Newcomb shoots down with a curt, “Who cares,” confirming Abbey’s suspicion that language is ultimately useless. Abbey’s harmonica song, a hymn that echoes their moment “by the river,” both invokes a sense of nature’s divinity and asserts Abbey idea that music can communicate more accurately than words.
Themes
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.
Notably, both Abbey and Billy-Joe Husk endured sand in their food and understood the mockery of nearby ravens. Abbey’s constant comparisons of himself with Billy-Joe suggest that humanity’s oneness with nature can be discovered by anyone—by children as well as professional writers with environmentalist agendas. Abbey quotes Thomas Lovell Beddoes here, a suicidal Victorian dramatist who, like Abbey, promoted democracy and believed the human soul (on scientific, not religious grounds) was everlasting.
Themes
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.
Abbey’s thoughts on nature’s motherly and paradisiacal qualities further his belief that nature is divine. But rather than simply comparing Glen Canyon to the Christian heaven, Abbey argues that the paradise of Earth is much more complex, as it contains both disaster and beauty. His total embrace of these conflicting elements also leads him to embrace Earth’s “dogmatically real” appearance. By claiming that Earth is the only reality, Abbey dismisses not only a supernatural afterlife but also the philosophical objection that reality is inaccessible beyond what’s superficially visible. Abbey’s adverb “dogmatically” asserts that the superficial visible realm is a perfectly good dogma, or belief system, in itself.
Themes
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.
Abbey reasons that if Wesley—a missionary advocate who was named after the founder of Methodism, John Wesley—compared Glen Canyon to the Christian heaven, then surely Abbey is right in believing that this place is divine. Powell’s fixation on the visible and audible echoes Abbey’s ruminations on the conflict between reality and appearances in nature.
Themes
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.
Abbey returns to his political argument against paved roads, the symbolic destruction of nature and, consequently, of personal freedom. His prison imagery—echoed elsewhere by cars, his trailer, and other artificial enclosures—further develops the contrast between nature and human arrogance.
Themes
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.
The abandoned mine, like a Roman ruin, becomes a small symbol of Earth’s longevity and triumph over humanity. This illustrates Earth as an infinite and awe-inspiring place—echoed by Abbey’s thoughts here on canyon, so vast that New York City (a symbol of industrial growth) could fit inside. It’s also worth noting that the river can’t support much life: though Abbey advocates isolation, this reminds him that he also needs Newcomb to help him survive—a reflection of humanity’s need for society.
Themes
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.
The uselessness of maps—like Abbey’s watch when he first arrives at Arches—illustrates that the isolation Abbey advocates is so complete that human ideas of time and geography become irrelevant. Newcomb’s middle-finger gesture is a further rejection of society’s ideas, like government-granted permission to catch fish. That Newcomb catches one so easily illustrates both his easy harmony with nature and nature’s ability to support human life.
Themes
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.
“Wine-dark” is a classic phrase from Ancient Greek bard Homer. Abbey is inserting deliberately poetic language into his prose to capture nature. He also invokes both Western and Eastern religious language to suggest that nature’s divinity applies to everyone, not just Christians.
Themes
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.
Ancient Navajo rock drawings again lead Abbey to contemplate the infinitude and wonder of nature—essentially religious feelings. He supports this with yet more cathedral imagery. Meanwhile, after nightfall, the river changes from inviting to menacing. This illustrates the subjective, ever-changing nature of the world—a truth that makes the idea of a fixed, unchanging reality even more elusive. Abbey symbolically escapes this feeling of menace by joining Newcomb—yet another instance of Abbey’s awakening to social life.
Themes
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.”
The quoted Irishman is James Joyce, who invented a completely new language in his book Finnegans Wake, in order to capture the essence of the Liffey River. Abbey nods to him in order to highlight his own inability to use traditional language to describe the Colorado River. Abbey’s frustration with words merges here with his and Newcomb’s rejection of civilization, the entity that is responsible for artificial things like language and paved roads.
Themes
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.”
Here, Abbey gives a crucial distinction in his religious beliefs: though he often invokes God, or gods, or tradition Christian divinity, he does not believe in a monotheistic universe. Since all he can discern in reality are sensory things—visible, audible, and so on—Abbey commits his worship to exactly this realm: the earth and nothing more. His wordplay on “atheist” gives readers a handy reference for his adoration of the natural, rather than the supernatural.
Themes
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.
Abbey continues connecting his disdain for words to his disdain for anything artificial that separates him from nature. Though Eliot’s poem evokes the desert’s bleakness, the mere fact that it’s composed of words—a human invention—disqualifies it from describing the earth, a defiantly inhuman entity. By invoking the Hindi idea of Maya—the superficial visible realm that prevents humanity from seeing the world as it really is—Abbey argues that the problem of language has spiritual as well as philosophical significance.
Themes
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.
Again, Abbey enlists his hero Powell, a staunch Christian, to argue that anyone in their right mind would find this place sacred. Powell’s idea that the cave is a temple, and his suggestion that an “architect” created it, are Christian in their native context. But in Abbey’s hands, this quote serves the more modern, environmentalist argument that Earth is both a deity and a church in itself.
Themes
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.
Newcomb’s behavior, again, suggests that he’s channeling Earth’s calmness and impartiality. Fires happen, Newcomb seems to imply, echoing the indifference of nature. As with his previous entrapment in quicksand, Newcomb’s instrument is tobacco: instead of stoking Abbey’s terror at the fire, he simply lights a match. The fact that fire (on shore) can terrify Abbey while pacifying Newcomb (in his hand) suggests that Abbey’s emotions have contorted reality, yet another example of humanity’s separation from Earth.
Themes
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.
The tourists’ litter reminds readers of Abbey’s previous argument against Industrial Tourism and warns of the inevitable development of this area. The fact that the clouds harmonize with the fish—two totally unrelated entities—illustrates Abbey’s belief that animals (human beings included) are unified with their natural environment.
Themes
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.
Here, Abbey articulates an important fact about nature: despite his personification of it, Earth is basically indifferent to people. This helps explain why Newcomb’s own indifference—shown in his response to the fire Abbey just started—gives him an enviable harmony with the natural world.
Themes
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.
Abbey’s guilt about leaving Newcomb is further evidence that nature has reawakened his love for humanity. “God’s window” is a telling sign that the place is divine, as is Abbey’s insistence here that to die in such a place would be ideal. For Abbey, a death in nature is the best way to recirculate one’s energy into the earth, its native habitat.
Themes
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.
Rainbow Bridge further confirms Abbey’s belief that the physical Earth is all that exists—not the supernatural afterlife of religion or the underlying reality that idealist philosophers like Plato and Hegel claimed could not be accessed. The phrase “dogmatic clarity” suggests that people’s sensory experience of Earth is physically “clear” enough to inspire belief. Meanwhile, when Abbey kicks the stone, he reenacts a famous action of the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson, who kicked a stone to refute another idealist philosopher, Bishop Berkeley.
Themes
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.
The repetition of “dreamlike” connects Abbey to the character Billy-Joe Husk, who also bonded with the earth by forgetting time and entering a dream state. This childlike state of innocence, which highlights Abbey and Newcomb’s connection to nature, conflicts sharply with the sign’s warning of industrial development, a change that will forever remove the men’s sense of freedom from the area.
Themes
