Desert Solitaire

By late August, the urge to explore the distant mountains—with its water and copious trees—takes over. Abbey packs his truck, tells the juniper goodbye, and asks the buzzard to watch over his trailer. He takes the rough and unpaved wagon road—loved by him, hated by tourists—out to the highway. The road requires skill and attention, as many rocks and animals lie in Abbey’s path.

Once at the road, Abbey speeds past a favorite hiding spot of the highway patrolman. A billboard once stood there, welcoming tourists to Moab, until Abbey sawed it down. As far as Abbey is concerned, tourists should be left to gas themselves to death in their cars en route to big cities—so long as they avoid his precious Moab.

As the roadside cafés and shops grow sparser, Abbey passes familiar roads and turnoffs into dense woods by the foot of the mountain. In the dusk, the light looks pink, and Abbey watches the “alpenglow” in the mountainous distance. By nightfall, he’s made it up the mountain, and he pulls off to set up camp. As Abbey’s ears and nerves recover from the drive, he hears leaves falling and water running in the cold mountainside. Laying out his desert-warmed sleeping bag, he rejoices in his wine, dinner, and cigar before sleep.

A squirrel’s screech, like a hatchet, wakes Abbey in the morning. He washes in the cold stream and makes bacon and eggs. He considers the aspen trees around him, the lack of birds or animals, and the profusion of toxic larkspur flowers. He ascends the “Hudsonian” mountain of Tukuhnikivats, the trees behind him growing smaller as he climbs. The climb becomes daunting, as there is no clear path to the summit. One doesn’t climb here, in fact; one must scramble. But this distinction don’t matter—the spiders, pikas (hare-like mammals) and buttercups Abbey passes are more interesting. Buttercups are said to foretell one’s love of butter, but all alone, Abbey can’t try the experiment.

Exhausted, but hesitant to stop, Abbey arrives at a snowfield and drinks from a delicious chilly spring. As the snowy climb becomes more vertical, Abbey considers why he’s doing this: simply because someone must, he concludes. If he doesn’t, someone else will. After a brief sleet storm, the terrain evens out, and Abbey eats lunch under a brilliant sky. He surveys the desert landscape far below him, inventing the names of geographical features to amuse himself, such as “Mollie’s Nipple, The Bishop’s Prick, [and] Queen Anne’s Bottom.” The town of Moab is named from the Bible’s Book of Kings.

When the wind dies down, Abbey strips naked and sunbathes, leaving nothing between him and the universe but his thoughts. He tries to open his consciousness into unity with the cosmos, but he ends up “earthbound.” Then, he starts his descent back to the bottom. The mountain took two hours to climb, but it seems he can make it back down the snow in much less. He kicks down a slab of rock, watching it crash, and figures that by using his boot heel as a brake, he can sled down the mountain with the same method. He climbs aboard a slab and launches down, gathering speed until he and the rock separate. He rolls out of the way to avoid granite at the bottom of the hill, skidding to a stop in time to catch his walking stick.

Continuing on foot, Abbey’s boots flap apart and expose his frostbitten toes. He’ll have to replace them as soon as possible. Abbey carves a memorial to a girl he knows in a nearby aspen. Fifty years from now, the carving in the bark will have enlarged as the tree grows. Abbey’s love for the girl, the aspen, the mountain, and the sky will never die.

Back at camp, nature is silent except for aspen leaves, running water, and one bird whose lentissimo song Abbey charts out in a bar of musical notation. The bird is a Townsend Solitaire. Few wild animals are around, because the mountain summer—too beautiful to last long—is too short to support them. Abbey walks to a nearby cow pasture to watch the sunset. Tomorrow, he’ll walk to another summit, and afterward, head back to Moab for his final month.