Juniper trees represent Edward Abbey’s attempt, as a human being, to grasp the mysteries of the desert, a nonhuman entity. The juniper plays a symbolic role in three of Abbey’s central quests: to access the reality beneath visible appearances, to pay adequate tribute to nature’s divinity, and to bond his body mystically with the landscape. Each of these projects boils down to Abbey’s single, overarching wish to understand the landscape. In each experiment, Abbey uses juniper trees as a go-between, a symbolic portal between his humanity and the earth. First, in his wish to access the reality beneath visible things, Abbey immediately turns to the juniper by his trailer. He stares hard at it, meditating and trying to “make a connection through it” to the “essence” that lies beyond. He fails at first but returns to this particular juniper over and over, finally realizing, that the appearance of the tree is enough for him. The tree thus symbolizes humanity’s inability to fully comprehend nature’s mysterious “music.”
Second, as Abbey discovers the holiness of nature, he starts burning juniper symbolically. Because juniper’s pleasing odor is like Catholic incense, in Abbey’s many juniper campfires throughout the book, he notes the smoke’s “ritual,” “propitiatory” (god-pleasing), or “ceremonial” aspect. In worshipping a deity (nature) by using a constituent element (the juniper) of that same deity, Abbey illustrates his important argument that nature is at the same time both God and church. Third, in Abbey’s impossible desire to merge his body into the landscape, he calls the ancient juniper near his trailer a “grandmother” and imagines that it craves liberty. Later, reasoning verbally with Moon-Eye, a horse, Abbey does so from the shelter of a hollowed-out juniper trunk. And when a dead photographer is found under a juniper tree in the desert, Abbey envies the man’s final connection to the physical landscape. In these cases, Abbey imagines that being physically near the juniper is a symbolic way of bringing oneself closer to the earth in each of its animal, vegetable, and mineral manifestations.
Juniper Tree Quotes in Desert Solitaire
Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. […] I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.
The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West.
Juniper Tree Symbol Timeline in Desert Solitaire
