Desert Solitaire

by

Edward Abbey

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Desert Solitaire: Havasu Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
One summer 15 years ago, on the way to Los Angeles, Abbey abandoned his travel companions to explore Havasu, a remote branch of the Grand Canyon. It’s difficult to reach, and on the 14-mile hike, one passes through the Havasupai Indian village. After stocking up on supplies there and renting a horse, Abbey rides past cornfields and pastures to an old abandoned mine where he decides to stay for the next 35 days. He craves solitude, and although there’s nothing wrong with the neighboring Native Americans, Abbey doesn’t want to be interrogated about his language or religion.
By stressing a removal from other human beings and especially by stressing the unpaved nature of his hike (in contrast to the book’s symbolically corrosive paved highways), Abbey indicates that Havasu is the prime example of the isolation he’s been advocating throughout the book.
Themes
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty  Theme Icon
Once alone, Abbey strips naked and smacks the horse, sending it back to the village. He swims in the waterfall and, after sunset, watches bats hunt fireflies. The next five weeks in “Eden” pass by without Abbey doing a thing. He catches fish, receives occasional food deliveries, and meets a few friendly locals. In the village, he races horses with them (even though he’s cheated out of a victory) and joins their annual Friendship Dance, where musicians and a medicine man preside. To Abbey’s great admiration, the Natives have denied a lucrative offer from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to blast a highway into their village.
As in the previous chapter, Abbey’s comparison to Eden establishes this part of nature as a divine place. Havasu’s removal from society makes it especially similar to Eden, where, before Eve arrived, a naked Adam communed with God. (Abbey’s nudity is a further a parallel to Adam in the Bible.) Readers get the sense that this extreme isolation is what leads to Abbey’s harmony with the Natives, despite the fact that they cheat him out of a victory.
Themes
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty  Theme Icon
Language and Reality Theme Icon
Abbey explores the abandoned silver mine and listens to the “astonishingly human” voices of Havasu Creek. He dreams away his days there, stark naked as Adam, wondering about butterflies’ dreams. He slowly loses the difference between himself and nature: Abbey befriends a snake, and soon his own hand seems to be a trembling leaf on a branch.
Abbey cements the religious comparison to Eden by invoking Adam’s name. His observations here—the “human” voices of the creek and the butterflies’ subconscious—suggest his deep attention to the ways in which human and nonhuman beings share certain qualities.
Themes
Nature, Wonder, and Religion Theme Icon
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Quotes
Abbey does most of his wandering alone, and this can sometimes be dangerous. Once, while traversing Havasu Canyon, Abbey becomes stranded in a deeply recessed pool. Trying to find a way out, he only descends deeper down the rock face until he realizes there is no way back up a sheer 80-foot drop. In panic, he imagines his bones rotting in this location for the amusement of future travelers.
For once, Abbey finds himself in a potentially fatal situation. Readers recall Billy-Joe Husk, whose retreat into nature cost him his life. Because Billy-Joe’s predicament, however tragic, led him into a brief and perfect harmony with nature, readers get the feeling the same might happen for Abbey (though, of course, Abbey survived to write this memoir).
Themes
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
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Abbey collects himself and tries to find a way out. He could tear his clothing—a T-shirt, some jeans, and an old straw hat—but the strips would never make a long enough escape rope. There is no way to make a signal fire and no one around to see the smoke anyway, so he sits down and cries in desperation. But he soon wonders if he could put some weight on his walking stick while nudging up the rock wall. Like a slug, he oozes his way up the slick sandstone. Halfway up, he makes it to a ledge and gives up. Once more, however, after noticing an angled rock that might support his weight, he continues inching his way up until he can swing himself back onto ground level. On solid earth, he bursts into tears of joy, and the clouds thunder in response.
Again, Abbey continues to compare himself to Billy-Joe Husk, who wore a straw hat like Abbey and who tore his shirt, as Abbey considers doing here. The comparison to a “slug” also brings the child to mind, who was symbolically “leeched” to a cottonwood trunk during a flood—suggesting the kind of primal, animalistic relation to the earth that Abbey craves. Not just insects but the inanimate landscape, too, connect mystically to Abbey in this moment—notably, he perceives the clouds responding to his joy, as human beings might.
Themes
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Hiking back to his hut in Havasu, Abbey bellows “Ode to Joy.” When the rain starts to pour, he ducks out of the storm under an overhang and strikes a fire with twigs and coyote droppings. He spends a cold, wet, hungry night in this coyote den—one of the happiest nights of his life.
Reminding readers of his preference for music over prose, Abbey cites Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the famously jubilant “Ode to Joy,” rather than spending endless words on an indescribable sense of relief.
Themes
Language and Reality Theme Icon