Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbey’s memoir of a summer spent in 1956, 10 years prior to writing the book, as a park ranger in Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah. Since the U.S. government has begun developing Abbey’s beloved park beyond recognition, he’s now publishing his experiences in that area in hopes of accurately reflecting the beauty of the wilderness and calling out the National Park Service for not sufficiently protecting it.
In the summer of 1956, Abbey makes the long drive from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Moab, Utah. Arriving at his trailer in Arches National Monument, where he’ll live and work for the summer, Abbey notes the surrounding wildlife and accepts the fact that he’ll be sharing his space with the animals who inhabit the area. The next morning, after watching his first, breathtaking sunrise, Abbey wonders whether appearances equal reality. He vows not to apply human-centric language to nature, hoping to bring himself closer to it and to understand its mysteries more clearly.
Soon, park superintendent Merle McRae and chief ranger Floyd Bence bring Abbey some supplies. After sharing a meal together, the men leave, and Abbey is struck by how isolated he feels in his solitary lifestyle as a park ranger. But soon, he discovers the rich animal life around his trailer, even domesticating a friendly gopher snake. Listing different nearby species, Abbey can’t help but personify the animals as he marvels at their beauty and complexity. He explores plants, too: by May, a nearby juniper has particularly obsessed him, as the 300-year-old tree seems tied to another realm. As Abbey begins his ranger duties, he makes his rounds to various landmarks, awestruck by the enormous rock arches and lamenting how carelessly humanity tends to treats the environment.
Abbey soon feels he could live here forever—but one day, some government engineers stop by his trailer and inform him of the enormous highway they’re plotting into Arches. Abbey realizes that the isolation and rarity of the desert he’s come to love will disappear. Jumping ahead in time to 1967, he notes that this highway was realized and how Arches—along with many other parks—has flooded with tourists and industry. Abbey calls this development Industrial Tourism, and he rails against it. Stemming largely from a disagreement about the 1964 Wilderness Preservation Act, “Developers” claim that roads increase access to the parks, while “Preservers” argue that pavement defeats the point of nature. Abbey sides with the Preservers, as parking lots and paved roads spoil the point of nature, which ought to liberate people from technology and refresh their lives in society. Abbey outlines several steps that would solve the problem of Industrial Tourism—namely, to confine parking areas to the outskirts of parks, to stop all new paved roads in the parks, and to employ more rangers in the field to help with increased foot traffic.
Moab’s uranium deposits induce another kind of greed: after the nuclear bombings of Japan, the Atomic Energy Commission encouraged a wild scramble for uranium in Utah and Colorado. Many amateur prospectors risked their lives trying to strike it rich, or died. One especially sad (though likely mythical) case was Alfred T. Husk, who uprooted his family from Texas to try his luck finding uranium in the Canyonlands of Moab. In his frequent absences from home, his wife began an affair with his business partner, Charles Graham. This turned fatal when Graham killed Husk in a fit of rage and accidentally got himself killed too. Though the murder leaves Husk’s son Billy-Joe for dead, the young boy spends several telling days in the wilderness, much like Abbey himself, bonding spiritually with nature in a way that his greedy father never could.
Abbey’s occasional work for the paranoid local cattle rancher Roy Scobie prompts his thoughts on death: to die in nature would be a natural dispersal of human energy back into the landscape to which it rightly belongs. Scobie’s irrational phobias blind him to this basic truth. His stinginess—aside from depriving his embittered assistant Viviano Jacquez of adequate payment—prompts Abbey to lament how commercial industry, overpopulation, and rampant tourism have imperiled honest ways of life in the American West. The perfect example of this are the local Navajo, ravaged by population growth and robbed by capitalism of their native freedom and communalism. Cowboys like Scobie and Leslie McKee, now poor thanks to mechanized cattle farming, are also hurt—their image reduced to Hollywood caricatures and tourist attractions.
Returning from political observations, Abbey notes the many forms water can take in the desert. He provides readers with a useful manual on hydrating in emergencies. Storms and flash floods are the most noteworthy phenomena. Their indescribable strangeness forces Abbey to describe them with creative language and, in one case, a poem.
As summer rages on through July, the heat becomes unbearable. The mere sight of cold mountains on the horizon refreshes Abbey, leading him to believe that all of nature, by simply existing, plays a similar role in refreshing urban city dwellers. Nature must be preserved because it inspires hope—and because it would be the perfect venue for a populist uprising against a tyrannical government, which Abbey believes is a real danger in America.
While out on a cattle mission one day, Abbey learns of Moon-Eye, a legendary wild horse who’s been missing for 10 years. Abbey obsessively tracks him down one day, and when he finds him, he and the horse enter a standoff that lasts hours. Though he fails to bring Moon-Eye home, Abbey talks more to the emaciated horse—using human logic, persuasion, and kindness—than to any other character in the book.
By June, Abbey and his friend Ralph Newcomb trace John Wesley Powell’s historic path down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, an area that has since been flooded beyond recognition. As they plumb potentially unexplored caves, grottos, cliff paths, and shorelines, as well as the great Rainbow Bridge, Abbey comes to believe that it’s a divine area. The loss of this holy place is incalculable—like the great Chartres Cathedral being covered in mud. Aside from discovering nature’s spiritual qualities, Abbey’s extended time with Ralph Newcomb renews his affection for humanity, and he ruminates on how feeling liberated in nature makes individual people capable of love.
Abbey puts these ideas about solitude to the test during another trip: in Havasupai Canyon, near the Grand Canyon, Abbey spends six solo weeks in perfect communion with nature, occasionally celebrating with nearby Native Americans and, once, nearly dying in a recessed rock pool. Naked as Adam in the Bible, Abbey enters a dreamlike existence, almost forgetting that he is distinct from the surrounding trees.
Back at Arches, in the miserable heat of high summer, Abbey is enlisted into a manhunt for a missing tourist. Abbey and his search party find the dead photographer at Grandview Point, leading Abbey to envy the man his natural death out in the open, away from hospitals and priests. He imagines that the man’s energy has been recirculated into the bodies of buzzards who eat him. To escape the oppressive August heat, Abbey explores nearby Tukuhnivats mountain. It’s snowy and beautiful at the summit, and he admires the birdsong, the aspen trees, and the landscape far below, which he jokingly renames from his perch, drawing attention to the possessive and arbitrary nature of language. But he becomes convinced that the desert—unlike mountains or the sea—is the most alluring ecosystem on Earth.
By Labor Day, Abbey discovers that the tourists he hates so much are not so bad. The local Mormons—despite their ridiculous beliefs—are especially worthy, among the first people to forge a compassionate, efficient community in this unforgiving climate. Their achievement leads Abbey to further mediation on the desert’s unique allure: it’s a totally alien place, neither hospitable like the mountains nor forbidding like the sea. Furthermore, the desert’s perfect clarity conceals nothing. It exists exactly as it appears, driving people mad in the quest to understand it more deeply and inviting an almost religious obsession that only a few writers have tried—and largely failed—to describe.
Despite Abbey’s bitterness toward society, he admits that it’s humanity’s false superiority—not individuals themselves—that he hates. He learns this about himself in a debate one night with a mysterious tourist, J. Prometheus Birdsong, who praises humanity’s technological and medicinal achievements, to Abbey’s great frustration. In Abbey’s mind, Earth is so much greater than humanity; he meditates on this, and on humanity’s religious follies, as he watches the night sky.
Abbey’s last retreat, with his student friend Bob Waterman, is to a complex of dangerous canyons known as The Maze. As the men traverse a nearly unpassable rock path in their jeep, Waterman confides in Abbey that he’s considering a permanent retreat here, in order to escape the military draft. After reaching the canyon rim, they rappel into the canyons below, where they explore the untouched rock formations and debate the usefulness of language. At first, Abbey thinks that language helps people understand and remember their environment, but Waterman calls this a greedy impulse—which Abbey then agrees with. When rain arrives, threatening their ability to exit via the rock path, Waterman gives up his hope for asylum, and they leave in a hurry.
When it’s time to leave the desert, Abbey both dreads his return to Manhattan and becomes eager to see people again—to see cab drivers and train conductors, anyone at all. Though he’s been mostly alone, he now feels so renewed by the desert that he’s shockingly polite—despite his violent hatred—when an outspoken Nazi comes to the park. Overcome by emotion on his final day, Abbey suddenly leaves at once, not even stopping to say goodbye to his favorite juniper tree. As a new ranger, Bob Ferris, speeds him to the Denver airport, Abbey contends with another wild urge: to turn back at once. Ferris refuses, however, pressing on the gas into the sunset, and Abbey reconciles himself to his return to society.
