Desert Solitaire

Labor Day brings the final tourist rush of the year in Moab. They enter the desert, trapped in their metallic shells like mollusks. Abbey badly wants to demand that they get out of their cars: take off their sunglasses, look around, and dig their toes in the sand. He wants them to take their bras and shirts off, get hurt, explore, leave their cars behind, and go for a walk in nature.

Instead, these tourists pummel Abbey with complaints about the lack of Coke machines and questions about how Abbey can live out here without a TV. Abbey answers each with sarcasm, suggesting to them that tourists are the most dangerous animal in the wild. If he tells the truth, they assume he’s joking and laugh with him—but by evening, Abbey feels guilty for mocking them. They’re largely nice people, and he does enjoy talking with them. He’s an exile from the new industrialized America of concrete and iron, and so he looks for sympathetic people to talk to.

Mormons are a major tourist group at Arches. Most of Abbey’s friends regard them as foolish political reactionaries—a view supported by the fact that Mormons deny church membership to black people. But Abbey thinks that other religions are just as ridiculous: Baptists insist on baptism for salvation, Jews demand circumcision, Catholics believe Mary was physically sent from Earth to Heaven, and Hindus regard the act of blowing one’s nose as sacred.

Though equally silly in doctrine, Abbey thinks that Mormons deserve respect for settling the untamed Western frontier with their sheer hard work. They emphasized mutual aid and cooperation in their early communities, something unknown to other parts of America. They wove this belief into all aspects of their society—from irrigation to fencing—and kept their towns small enough to make every member vital.

These early communities have been destroyed by new American industry, though some of their nice, hard-earned architecture remains. But the Mormons who remain, though old-fashioned, are self-reliant and friendly. One Mormon Abbey knows, Leslie McKee’s wife, is so hospitable to Abbey that she has ritualistically bound his soul to hers. In doing so, she believes that he will follow her to Heaven when she dies. But if she predeceases him, will he be suddenly robbed of his life? It’s not worth the worry, as Abbey, quoting a hymn, is already “marching to Zion.”

The distant mountains are nice, with their snowcaps like strawberry ice cream cones, but Abbey prefers the desert. It’s very hard to say why—it’s just more baffling than the mountains or the ocean. From Homer to Melville, many great writers have felt called to write about the ocean. The same goes for mountains, which inspired Rousseau and the Romantic writers. But few write of the desert. Mary Austin, John Van Dyke, and Joseph Wood have produced recent books on the desert, and some novelists have described it in passing. Historical studies from Wallace Stegner and Everett Reuss (who was so allured that one day, he disappeared into the desert forever) are good too. But none address the problem Abbey wishes to address: what is the exact and unique spiritual appeal of the desert?

Abbey thinks that the mountains illustrate the brute power of the earth, and the sea hides a hidden world of life under its surface. But the desert, by contrast, says nothing. It is a skeleton of “Being,” sparse and austere. On top of its simplicity, however, is a veil of mystery: it asks to be interpreted but never offers answers.

At sea, the journey from one place to another is really the whole point. Similarly, in the mountains, one climbs to the top then must climb back down. The desert, however, is wide open and just inviting enough to support habitation, while still hostile enough to discourage people. This mystery both repels artists and writers from attempt the subject, while drawing people like Everett Reuss deeper and deeper into the landscape. This mysterious search is always futile, as the desert has no treasure or heart. It is a riddle without an answer. This doesn’t stop Abbey, however: one whiff of juniper smoke, one poem like The Waste Land, and he’s dying to seek the desert’s truths.

In an argument with a park visitor one night, Abbey is accused of hating humanity. Abbey takes issue with this, and he has to articulate to the man that what he hates is not people but anthropocentricity, the belief that human beings are superior to the earth. This man brags about science and champions the medical prolongation of life.

Abbey and the man agree that culture and civilization are two different things: culture includes collective institutions like religion and economy, while civilization, a byproduct of culture, is a more intangible network of ideas created by individual thinkers. Thousands of such thinkers—from Socrates and Jesus, to Jefferson and Paine, to Twain and Nietzsche—give human life its sense of adventure. Civilization is superior to culture but depends upon culture for its existence, as a brain to a body. Civilization is the vital force; culture the inert mass of institutions. Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is law and order. Civilization is rebellion; culture is state-sponsored war. Civilization is the angry youth; culture is the cop who guns him down.

After a long debate stretching into the morning, the Abbey and the man go to sleep. Abbey is alone when he wakes. He checks the park’s registration book and finds the man’s fake name: J. Prometheus Birdsong. Like Christ before him, Birdsong has failed to convert Abbey.

Abbey urges the reader to imagine a new scheme to develop the national parks: pave all the roads and flatlands in the name of democratic parking, charge huge admission fees, advertise everywhere, replace rangers with pretty girls in costume, drench the desert in electric light, install gas grills everywhere, remove campgrounds to keep people from overstaying. He thinks this is only a slight exaggeration. But once Labor Day is over, as Abbey cleans up the tourists’ trash, the former stillness returns, and he can focus on the blooming asters. Their purple flowers are undoubtedly an existential statement. Abbey refutes Heidegger’s idea that only human beings truly exist.

In late summer, even the night sky is different. Stoking a campfire for “liturgical requirements,” Abbey spots constellations, including Cassiopeia, a big “W.” In 1572, Christians interpreted this constellation as a punishment for their persecution of church reformers. Seventeen years before, they’d executed two Bishops at Oxford. Two years later, some 277 more were killed, followed by more over the years until the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in 1572. The cause of all this killing was a small disagreement about transubstantiation (the belief that bread can be transformed into Christ’s body and wine into Christ’s blood). Abbey admires Cassiopeia and other constellations, and he wonders whether intelligent life exists on Earth. Today, a letter from Abbey’s friend Bob Waterman arrived, confirming their upcoming trip into The Maze.