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
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.
Two symbols, the juniper tree and the road, come into play here. When Abbey speaks to the juniper, he appears to be able to communicate to Earth—if only in his mind. And the unpaved desert road, by engaging his full attention, confirms that he’s in perfect touch with Earth’s every contour and obstacle. The takeaway for the reader is that, months into his stay, Abbey has achieved perfect unity with his environment.
Themes
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.
By contrast to the unpaved desert path that puts him in touch with the earth, when Abbey turns onto the paved highway, he’s immediately reminded of tourists in their cars—an image that illustrates society’s arrogant and industrial alienation from nature.
Themes
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.
The word “alpenglow” (the pinkish light on a mountain at sunset) is both poetically evocative and scientifically accurate—a perfect compromise between Abbey’s hatred for inaccurate description and his quest for creative expression. It’s also noteworthy that his audible environment—things as quiet as leaves and water—awakens him from the buzz of his engine on the highway. This gives a sense of how Abbey’s perceptive mind can merge with nature.
Themes
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.
Again, Abbey stretches language to its poetic limit. “Hatchet” is the unlikeliest word for a squirrel, and yet it captures their particular call. “Hudsonian,” while technically a geographical term for the mountain range in Canada, also invokes the highly Romantic Hudson River School of painters. These turns of phrase—along with Abbey’s dismissal of the distinction between the verbs “climb” and “scramble”—illustrate the irrelevance of language to Abbey’s mountain experience.
Themes
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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.
Abbey ruminates further on the uselessness of language, a frustration that takes a comic turn in his long list of imaginary names for the terrain below. By giving rock features sexual names, Abbey point to the arbitrary nature of how geographical features are named. This clashes comically with the Biblical name “Moab,” even further heightening the artificial nature of language.
Themes
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.
This scene is the height of Abbey’s extended comparison to Adam and the biblical Garden of Eden. By stripping nude (not for the first time), Abbey imitates Adam’s nudity before he and Eve lost their paradise. And by trying to contact the cosmos, Abbey nods to Adam’s communication with God in Eden. These correspondences to the Bible suggest that the mountainous Tukuhnikivats—just like the desert Arches or the wooded Havasu—are places where human beings can contact the divine. All that’s needed in these places, as Abbey shows readers here, is isolation and meditation.
Themes
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.
By committing his love to the tree bark, Abbey is essentially saying that his body and Earth’s vegetation are so unified that his feelings might as well be felt by a tree. Just as immaterial thoughts populate material, human brains, Abbey suggests that his immaterial emotions belong to the aspen’s bark as much as to his own neurological equipment.
Themes
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.
Frustrated with language, Abbey has been using music throughout the book as a more accurate desert expression. Here, by printing a bar of notated music, Abbey goes one step further, using music itself (not just a verbal description of music) as a substitute for prose.
Themes
