Desert Solitaire: The Dead Man at Grandview Point Summary & Analysis

Presently, with a great heaviness in the air, the tourists creep wearily through Arches National Park. One would have to be crazy to come to the desert in this heat—both the tourists and Abbey himself. Clouds form by noon, bringing some rain in a gravelly consistency like tomato soup or blood. After this, thunderstorms kick up tumbleweeds.

Evening brings nighthawks, who circle the air and dive to earth suddenly. The noise of their wings is a distant roar. Sleeping outside, Abbey is kept up by their screeches, and he watches the peculiar horizon lighting between dusk and dawn. Coyotes sing strange, unearthly songs, too. They sound like an electronic instrument, like a cithara or Onde  Martinote.

In the morning, Abbey is called on a manhunt for a missing tourist across Dead Horse Mesa. He meets his brother Johnny (also spending the summer as a ranger), Merle McRae, Floyd Bence, and some policemen, to search for the man: a photographer who left his car on the road three days ago. Though the man’s nephew describes him with hope, everyone else is sure he’s dead by now, as an airplane search has proved useless.

For four hours, the party trudges, checking the usual places of shade: trees, cliffs, and gullies. Staring down one such cliff, with its alluring beauty and power, Abbey quotes a warning against gazing into the abyss, “lest the abyss gaze into you.” He spots far-off features, including a rock maze.

Coming upon a sickened-looking Johnny, Abbey realizes that his brother has found the corpse. A mile from the road, under the cover of a juniper on a ridge, the dead photographer is bloated like a balloon. When the others arrive, the two brothers try to trace the man’s path to the tree, discovering by his tracks where he grew confused and doubled back.

Abbey admires the steep drop-off and the land below, noting the seldom traversed labyrinth of canyons known as The Maze. Abbey wants to congratulate the dead photographer on his noble death—it was good luck to die out in the open, alone, instead of under the “leech and priest.” Though Abbey can’t speak for the man, it’s easy to imagine how his fear soon abated as his life waned, leaving him to dream of soaring out into space.

The party loads the corpse into the body bag and onto the stretcher, and begins the walk back. They all joke the whole way back about how heavy and leaky the corpse is, and how hungry and tired they are. If they’d known the photographer, maybe they could be reverent—but they didn’t, so they don’t care. It’s not that Abbey wants others dead; it’s just that the departure of a middle-aged man makes room for the young and will keep the circle of life going. It’s a ruthless cycle, but a clean and beautiful one.

Some days later—how many Abbey can’t say, as calendars have become meaningless—Abbey stands one evening watching Venus low on the horizon. He sees hawks in the sky and imagines the dead photographer from that perspective: he sees himself through the birds’ cruel eyes. While fantasizing from the bird’s perspective, Abbey feels himself sink into the desert’s infinitely large landscape. His perspective zooms out from himself, to the surrounding canyons, out to Utah and Colorado, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the Pacific Ocean, to the edges of the Earth and outer space—a realm that human beings can’t discover.