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
Abbey catalogs some of the rocks of his area, delighting in their strange scientific names. He thinks that Chalcedony and quartzite are especially beautiful. Native American arrowheads lie around too—evidence of ancient civilization. Every rock in a national park is protected by law; tourists can’t remove them. Abbey thinks this is fair, since rocks were placed both by “God himself” and by “the economy of Nature.” Petrified wood, also beautiful, fills the nearby reserves and the Petrified Forest National Park. Essentially “desert jewelry,” the wood in the park has been pressurized into rainbow-colored rock. This pressurization takes such a long time that one is reminded that the earth will outlast human beings.
Specific mineralogical names in this section fascinate Abbey, who’s always concerned with accurate language. These minerals also help illustrate the desert’s divinity. Two phrases reveal this: “God himself” clearly suggests that a supreme being has planned the desert to its liking. But “the economy of nature” helps specify exactly what kind of supreme being this might be. “Economy,” in this case, connotates careful management rather than a financial market. So the idea that the earth (an inanimate force) can arrange itself autonomously (almost as a sentient being) illustrates Abbey’s opinion of nature as a supreme, perfect, and self-governing entity. As with Benjamin Franklin’s “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence—a political work that Abbey greatly admires—this crafty phrasing suggests that the natural order of the universe is more complete, awe-inspiring, and morally worthy than the Christian belief system. Abbey echoes this expression of divinity when he gawks at the delightful wood “jewelry”—a symbol of the earth’s god-like longevity and unfathomable power.
Themes
The most important rock deposit is uranium: in the 1940s, after America’s nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Atomic Energy Commission began offering rewards for the discovery of uranium deposits. Some people became rich this way. For example, Charles Steen made one such fortune with a mine in Colorado after great effort. And Vernon Pick, after nearly dying in the attempt, made his fortune too. But the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a powerful group, made the largest discoveries by itself, often outpacing independent prospectors.
In stark contrast to the awe-inspiring minerals above, uranium—while inherently interesting—has a sad, capitalistic fate thanks to the military-industrial complex . Though Abbey never comes down firm on a moral judgment of the horrific nuclear bombings of Japan (a technology made possible by Utah’s uranium) readers are aware that he despises state sponsored war. Thus, the implication here is that both the 1945 bombings and the desire to mine uranium stem from the same basic human arrogance.
Themes
The Atomic Energy Commission did not deter everyone, however, as they upped their reward to $10,000, prompting wild and dangerous explorations for uranium. Once, two prospectors nearly drowned in the uncharted Cataract Canyon and nearly died trying to return to civilization from their botched mission. A page from the explorer John Wesley Powell’s diary illustrates how dangerous Cataract is: in 1869, Powell describes enormous whirlpools and rapids from a viewpoint in the neighboring canyon. Even at night, the white rapids are so high—15 feet—as to create their own source of light. The unfortunate uranium prospectors after Powell begged that the area be closed to human access.
Abbey introduces his hero John Wesley Powell here, a historical figure who will reappear throughout the book as a guardian angel of Abbey’s desert explorations. Many of the Powell excerpts Abbey includes focus on humanity’s weakness in the face of nature—a theme that helps drive Abbey’s arguments that nature inspires a religious awe and that it commands human beings to be humbler. The humbling aspects of Earth’s power and danger are also on full display here; Powell’s description serves as a retrospective warning against the greed of uranium prospectors.
Themes
However, the most infamous prospector in Moab was Alfred T. Husk of Texas—though he may be a myth. Years ago, Husk allegedly uprooted his family and mortgaged his farm to try his luck with AEC’s uranium scheme in Utah. Setting up his trailer home in Moab, he immediately goes into town and meets Charles Graham, a businessman who impresses him with his pilot’s license.
Here, Abbey inserts a strange and likely fictional account in the middle of his factual memoir. Husk will serve a simple cautionary role against humanity’s desire to pillage and develop the earth for financial gain. The reader already sees the corrosive effects of development here, with the villain Graham, who flashes a symbol of technology in order to lure Husk into trusting him. Like road-builders and car-drivers, in Abbey’s opinion, Graham’s license is a red flag of greed and arrogance.
Themes
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After a talk about Husk’s ambitions, Graham sells him a share of some promising territory he owns in the distant canyons surrounding the San Rafael River. Excited by their partnership, Husk brings Graham home, introducing him to his young wife and his children. After the two men survey the land from the air, Husk, eager to make his fortune, immediately takes his 11-year-old son Billy-Joe out for his first exploratory expedition of the territory in question.
It’s important that Abbey includes Billy-Joe here: he doesn’t have a speaking role, but the details that surround him are significant. He will become a counterbalance to his father’s greed, arriving at his own, contrasting conclusions about the power of nature.
Themes
In Husk’s absence, Graham visits his trailer, spies on the half-dressed Mrs. Husk, and waits to meet her. Meanwhile, Husk and Billy-Joe spend the whole summer probing the San Rafael Swell for uranium. Finding shade under junipers as they toil along beneath the boiling summer sun, they collect rock specimens to be tested back in Moab. Every two weeks, they return to Moab for supplies and for encouragement from Graham. Though the rock samples mostly test negative, Graham promises Husk that he’ll soon be driving a Cadillac. As Husk’s uranium obsession takes over his life, his wife grows distant from him during his visits home.
Husk’s extended absences in the Canyonlands invite several misfortunes—each, in Abbey’s eyes, the just consequence of greed. Here, Abbey shows readers the first result: the loss of his wife’s love. He implies that Graham swoops in to steal the young Mrs. Husk while her husband frantically searches for the lucrative ore. The basic lesson from Graham’s predation is that mistreating the earth will alienate people from one another. In Husk’s case, his extended absence is what separates him from his wife. Unlike Abbey, who escapes into the wilderness temporarily, in order to learn how to better orient himself in society, Husk enters nature for the exact opposite reasons—for pure greed—and is paying for it.
Themes
One afternoon, after examining his pistol in his office, Graham pockets the gun and takes a helicopter into the wilds to find Husk. He chances upon Husk and Billy-Joe huddled around a juniper fire on a ridge. As the helicopter lands, the wind it generates coats their dinner in sand and blows off Billy-Joe’s straw hat. After stepping off the helicopter, Graham offers Husk a flask of whiskey as they engage in a conversation that begins peacefully but soon escalates. Billy-Joe doesn’t understand the details, but he hears Graham say something about Mrs. Husk. Husk becomes enraged and attacks him, jumping through the flames of the juniper fire. Graham draws his pistol and shoots Husk in the stomach.
The villainous Graham, who once brandished a pilot’s license, now handles a gun. For Abbey, the difference between the two objects—symbolically, between technology and violence—is not vast. Readers have seen this equation earlier, when Abbey compared paved roads to governmental tyranny. Billy-Joe’s straw hat is also significant—Abbey will echo the garment later to draw character parallels to himself. The way in which Abbey tells the story of this altercation, through the naïve eyes of the young boy, is also noteworthy: suddenly, Billy-Joe is the subject of the story. The fact that the men’s fight is told from his perspective—with a child’s weak grasp on the concept of infidelity—is a hint that his story will become the important one.
Themes
Terrified, Billy-Joe flees down into the canyon, pursued by Graham until the boy trips and rolls out of sight, breaking a shoulder. Having lost Billy-Joe, Graham returns to Husk at the top of the cliff and kills him. In an attempt to hide the evidence, Graham opens the door to Husk’s truck and loads Husk’s corpse inside. Graham starts to push it off the canyon cliff, but as speed picks up, he gets himself locked in the cab of the truck. Unable to brake and trapped inside, Graham sails off the cliff along with the dead Husk. As the truck spins through the air, Graham sees the stars and “tranquil moon” come into view.
Abbey’s moral about greed—at first applying only to the overzealous Husk—now comes full-circle for Graham, who was equally greedy. Capitalist exploitation of the earth, Abbey concludes, is arrogant and harmful to everyone involved. Imbedded in this moral is a note about the undeniable wonder of nature and the universe. Even as the villain plunges to his death, the moon’s tranquility is unavoidable. This suggests Abbey’s view that the universe, an infinite and awe-inspiring presence, will outlast humanity.
Themes
In the morning, ravaged and ill, Billy-Joe rouses and attempts the long descent back to civilization. He fashions a shred of shirt into a sling. When a willow snags him, he removes the rest of shirt to “free” himself. Following deer prints, he finds a patch of mud, wades through it on his belly, and drinks. Stopping to eat berries and white flowers, he becomes dizzy and begins to hallucinate. The sand suddenly seems alive, and the rock walls surrounding him begin to breathe and glow. A nearby bush seems to catch fire. Though afraid at first, Billy-Joe feels the pain leave his body instantly. Suddenly it’s night, and when the stars come out they seem to be “struggling to escape.” He passes the destroyed truck at the foot of the cliff, with his father and Graham’s charred corpses, but he doesn’t notice them. The ravens watch him with satisfaction.
Here, readers leave the morality tale of humanity’s greed versus Earth’s power, entering a more nuanced one about wilderness and personal discovery. The burning bush is the most important image here, as it references Moses’s revelation in the Old Testament. By suggesting this miraculous phenomenon is actually a naturally occurring hallucination, Abbey argues controversially that Christians mistake the environment for evidence of a false supernatural being. Second, the fact that Billy-Joe removes his shirt and craves “free[dom]” echoes the behavior of Abbey, who writes passionately of liberty and likes to be naked in nature. Third, when the boy sees the stars “struggling to escape,” readers recall Abbey’s earlier suggestion that his favorite juniper yearns for freedom. With these small parallels, Abbey suggests that anyone, even an uneducated and unspeaking child, can arrive at his own discoveries in the book: the liberating, divine, and sentient qualities of Earth.
Themes
After another night in the wilderness, Billy-Joe continues on toward a canyon stream. He crawls into the pleasant cavity of a cottonwood tree trunk. Its roots are exposed, and Billy-Joe lets his feet dangle among them in the cooling water. But a dramatic and colorful flash flood suddenly uproots the tree—with a half-conscious Billy-Joe inside—and sends it afloat down the canyon. He clings, “leeched,” to the tree.
By mingling his feet with the tree’s roots—reviving himself as a plant does—Billy-Joe illustrates a perfect harmony of humanity with plant life. That the boy is “leeched” to the tree—more like a bug than a human—suggests a similar kinship between human beings and insects. This all contributes to Abbey’s argument that human beings are one with the earth, equal—not superior—to plants or animals. The boy’s refuge in a tree trunk, and the insect language, will reappear with Abbey later, cementing the two characters as parallel.
Themes
Since the barely-conscious Billy-Joe can’t account for time, the days in the tree trunk begin to pass as if in a dream. The tree becomes the only thing he knows: he lies cradled in it, bobbing in the widening stream, gradually starving and slipping in and out of consciousness. Finally, the sun bakes almost to death, and a ferryman discovers his body, too far gone to be resuscitated at the hospital.
Just as Abbey’s watch became useless when he arrived at Arches, so too does Billy-Joe lose the human conception of time. Further, the tree occupies the boy’s every thought, suggesting an intense and complete mental or spiritual bond. These details suggest a total absorption into the natural world, the kind of “brutal mysticism” that Abbey has been desperately trying to achieve.
Themes
Mrs. Husk, deprived of her husband, her son, and her lover, moves back to Texas. A year later, a lawyer tracks her down to buy Husk’s share of the land he was surveying, a land ownership that has now fallen to Mrs. Husk. The land has been found to be rich in uranium. He is reluctant to negotiate, offering only $4,500, and reveals that he works for the United States Air Force. Obstinate and cynical, however, Mrs. Husk only increases her demands, eventually settling at $100,000.
Mrs. Husk’s sudden fortune suggests an ironic, real-life truth about money: that its rewards can be bestowed randomly, unpredictably, and without equitable reward for hard work. In short, devoting one’s life for financial gain, as Alfred Husk did, can totally backfire. By contrasts, Billy-Joe’s spiritual rewards (though short-lived and tragic), were spiritual and nonmaterial, and so entirely his own. The difference here—between material and spiritual rewards—reflects Abbey’s fierce preference for personal growth and freedom over wealth or status.
Themes
