The pinyon jays are whirling in garrulous, gregarious flocks from one stunted tree to the next and back again, erratic exuberant games without any apparent practical function. Although I hesitate to deprive quicksand of its sinister glamour I must confess that I have not yet heard of a case where a machine, an animal or a man has actually sunk. I drove down, across, up the other side and on into the night. A few bats flicker through the air near the ramada making tiny clicking noises sonar. In order to land, Mr. Graham had to make three passes over the unpaved airstrip before some browsing cattle would get out of the runway. I put on my clothes, shoulder the rucksack and work down over the rock to the couloir and the upper end of the slide. (1) No more cars in national parks. Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock (not surprisingly there have been some, even in the Park Service, who advocate spraying Delicate Arch with a fixative of some sort Elmers Glue perhaps or Lady Clairol Spray-Net). Like most other cowboys I have known Leslie was getting on in years. We drink the last of the spring water in our canteens and, still thirsty, look to the river, that sombre flow the color of burnt sienna, raw umber. We each have another day to spare but no more; I have to return to the Arches, he has to register for the fall term at Colorado University, far over on the eastern slope. The sound of nothingness? For a moment nothing seemed to be happening. provided a guaranteed market at a guaranteed price for a period of ten years beginning in 1949 for all of the uranium ore at or above a specified grade which the miners could produce. Better yet, build a paved road to every corner of the park; better yet, pave the whole damned place so any damn fool can drive anything anywhere is this a democracy or aint it? If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if not, this particular colony of. Later the children showed him the pool up in the canyon below the spring. The wind blows, unrelenting, and flights of little gray birds whirl up and away like handfuls of confetti tossed in the air. In other words the journey is the central thing, the expectation of what is to come; the ocean itself is merely a medium of travel. Neither a souvenir collector nor an archeologist, I have no desire to stir the ancient dust for the sake of removing from their setting a few potsherds, a few corncobs, a childs straw sandal, an arrow point, perhaps a broken skull. Although the buzzards for some reason have not discovered him two other scavengers, ravens, rise heavily and awkwardly from the corpse as we approach. At the first turn he halted. Cousin buzzard, keep an eye peeled for trouble. Let it be determined by the communitys mode of travel: if by foot, four miles; if by horseback, eight miles; if by motorcar, twenty-four miles; if by airplane, ninety-six miles. Approaching the spring you notice a sulfurous stink in the air though the water itself, neither warm nor cold, looks clear and drinkable. Imagine the effort required to inscribe, say, the figure of a dancer, with no tool but a flint chisel and in such a way as to make it last five hundred years. Under a wine-dark sky I walk through light reflected and re-reflected from the walls and floor of the canyon, a radiant golden light that glows on rock and stream, sand and leaf in varied hues of amber, honey, whiskey the light that never was is here, now, in the storm-sculptured gorge of the Escalante. The ravens and magpies stay in the shade, the former up on the rimrock, the latter in the trees. In this position he sometimes sticks his head out between shirt buttons for a survey of the weather, astonishing and delighting any tourists who may happen to be with me at the time. How can we speak of natural enemies in such a well organized system of operations and procedures? It has philosophy. Happy now, greatly relieved, I recall for Watermans edification a few appropriate lines from Burns: Now weve got a siphon, two feet long. Afterwards I rinsed my mouth with water from my canteen. Rock is softer than sand, he explains. I offer it to the thirsty Waterman, he sticks it in the hole and drinks heartily. The experiment was a complete success; it will never be necessary to perform it again. We shake hands and the tourist from Ohio goes away pleased, as I am pleased, each of us thinking he has taught the other something new. The people of Supai or at least a majority of them voted to reject the proposal.) More storms coming. For the rest of the afternoon, keeping to the shady side, we drift down the splendid river, deeper and deeper and deeper into the fantastic. But this is nonsense. The cattle plodded before us, slowing down as the heat rose, reluctant to keep moving. He describes the area as "a sea of desert" (5) and "the most beautiful place on Earth" (1). I heard later. I am, he said. Above the talus I find the dugway, broad and shallow steps chipped out of the canyon wall by the first and only road-builders here, and the remains of fill and foundation slabs and blocks of sandstone laid in place, one by one, over eighty years before. After a week of close association I turn him loose on the warm sandstone at my doorstep and leave for a patrol of the park. I have come to the midpoint of my season in the desert. Nothing to it. Farther still into the visionary world of Glen Canyon, talking somewhat less than before for what is there to say? I got up and stepped outside and saw Roy walking by in his long underwear and boots, a revolver in his hand, talking to himself. It would be like Ohio, wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. The canyon world becomes each hour more beautiful, the closer we come to its end. Words, words the problem makes me thirsty. I look in the gullies and fissures and in the enormous potholes drilled by wind and sand in the solid rock holes like wells, with perpendicular sides mantraps. It is so far away, that merged point of light, that unless you watch it steadily you will not perceive that it is in motion; relative to the distance the light moves as the stars move or about as fast as the sun fades from the sky or the fire consumes the log. Nothing so extensive or spectacular as the deposits in Petrified Forest National Park, to be sure, but interesting and beautiful just the same. When in doubt about drinking from an unknown spring look for life. He was still leeched to the tree, part drowned but alive, when it caromed off a jutting outcrop at the canyons mouth and glided majestically out onto the flow of a wide and gleaming, deep and golden river. boots, socks, a pair of old and ragged blue jeans, a flimsy T-shirt, an ancient and rotten sombrero of straw. But now their problems were only beginning. The flow dwindled to a trickle over bars of quicksand. Not that he never bitches and grumbles. He saw the tree lodged against his landing dock and what resembled a shriveled human figure attached to the trunk of it. To me the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting; I feel no temptation to sleep or to relax into occult dreams but rather an opposite effect which sharpens and heightens vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. The climb up from timberline had taken about two hours. Plans for new roads can be discarded and in their place a program of trail-building begun, badly needed in some of the parks and in many of the national monuments. Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. We take a side track toward them and discover the remains of an ancient corral, old firepits, and a dozen tiny rivulets of water issuing from a thicket of tamarisk and willow on the canyon wall. Watching the sky I see shooting stars, blue-green and vivid, course across the narrow band of sky between the canyon walls. We were only about ten miles from the stockpens near Moab, but would have to check out all the side canyons along the way. If this resource is not available and water cannot be found in the rocks or under the sand and you find yourself too tired and discouraged to go on, crawl into the shade and wait for help to find you. Mr. Graham showed him his pilots license and that helped a little. One little white cloud of dubious substantiality hovers above in the strip of blue between the canyon walls. Husk found a vacant spot in the mouth of Courthouse Wash where, under a splendid cottonwood tree, he set up his base camp. Thats a fact. His words trail off into the vague mumble, Slept on rock all my life, goddamnit The empty stare follows: a foolish thrift is driving him to ruin and all he cares about is his heart; he is thinking about falling off his horse again like Ernie Faye fell off the ladder picking peaches. No, not quite that smooth. I tramp on through the winding gorge, through the harsh brittle silence. The sun reigns, I am drowned in light. Fortunately the parks, by the mere elimination of motor traffic, will come to seem far bigger than they are now there will be more room for more persons, an astonishing expansion of space. Around noon the heat waves begin flowing upward from the expanses of sand and bare rock. I dont know how many but apparently only a few, perhaps a single family. Once in the shade we can rest, expand, unsquint our eyes, and see. Some of them in translucent obsidian volcanic glass, Apache tears., Lying within the bounds of a national monument, these rocks and artifacts are protected by law. We make the coffee with river water, dipping a canful from among the rocks and letting it set for a time until the silt settles to the bottom. If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. We saddled our horses and got on. Desert Solitaire depicts Abbey's preoccupation with the deserts of the American Southwest. The cattle complained but we were merciless. And its a wide river this time of the year. On the crest of the dune is a curving cornice from which flies a constant spray of fine sand. In this awful place He watched me and listened. He is the 14,467th and I the next to enter our names in this book since the first white men came to Rainbow Bridge in 1909. Without flowers as yet but bright and fresh, with leaves of a startling, living green in contrast to the usual desert olive drab, is a shrub known as singleleaf ash, one of the few true deciduous plants in the pinyon-juniper community. The snake is passive, apparently contented, and makes no resistance when I pick him up with my hands and drape him over an arm or around my neck. Now, after the recent rains, which were also responsible for the amazing growth of grass and flowers we have seen, we find the trail marvelously eroded, stripped of all vestiges of soil, trenched and gullied down to bare rock, in places more like a stairway than a road. The last I knew was the shaking of the trailer in the wind and the sound, from inside, of hungry mice scampering around with the good news that their long lean lonesome winter was over their friend and provider had finally arrived. The doctors there believed that Billy-Joe was still alive. Often far from any spring, these temporary pools attract doves, ravens and other birds, and deer and coyotes; you, too, if you know where to look or find one by luck, can slake your thirst and fill your water gourd. They roll up incredible mileages on their odometers, rack up state after state in two-week transcontinental motor marathons, knock off one national park after another, take millions of square yards of photographs, and endure patiently the most prolonged discomforts: the tedious traffic jams, the awful food of park cafeterias and roadside eateries, the nocturnal search for a place to sleep or camp, the dreary routine of One-Stop Service, the endless lines of creeping traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes, the ever-proliferating Rules & Regulations, the fees and the bills and the service charges, the boiling radiator and the flat tire and the vapor lock, the surly retorts of room clerks and traffic cops, the incessant jostling of the anxious crowds, the irritation and restlessness of their children, the worry of their wives, and the long drive home at night in a stream of racing cars against the lights of another stream racing in the opposite direction, passing now and then the obscure tangle, the shattered glass, the patrolmans lurid blinker light, of one more wreck. Like putting on chain mail. July. Hed shrug his shoulders, sigh, and take another pull from his Tokay bottle. It has its share of nerve-tingling adventuresset down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty.". Kind of lonesome? Floyd asks. But after a number of years I returned anyway, traveling full circle, and stayed for a third season. He looked down at the sand between his legs. Up through the notch. Down the river. I find no spring within a reasonable distance and return to camp with empty canteens; there is water in the creek, of course, but wed rather drink from the river than downstream from a Hereford cow. The Friendship Dance, which continued day and night to the rhythm of drums made of old inner tube stretched over #10 tomato cans while ancient medicine men chanted in the background, was perhaps marred but definitely not interrupted when a drunken free-for-all exploded between Spoonhead and friends and a group of visiting Hualapai Indians down from the rim. (Bring your own water.) We climb the ridge, scale the bluffs, and traverse without difficulty the sloping red bench for a mile to the east, where we find the notch that leads to the top through the white rimrock. But here as elsewhere in the canyonlands they left a record of their passage. It looks too steep. But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see. I wait. The pay is generous; I might even say munificent: $1.95 per hour, earned or not, backed solidly by the worlds most powerful Air Force, biggest national debt, and grossest national product. Except for myself no one lives within thirty miles of Turnbow Cabin. All dangers seem equally remote. We see a second beaver, again like the first swimming upstream. It was a traditional part of the ceremony, sanctified by custom. I take it anyway, climbing a talus slope and then traversing a long inclined bench that pinches out in thin air at the base of a higher cliff. A dried-up tumbleweed comes over the rise from the north, dances past and sails into space above The Maze. On my feet again, I explored the abandoned silver mines in the canyon walls, found a few sticks of dynamite but no caps or fuses. I was thirsty though and looked around for the canteen before remembering where Id left it; I could see it down in the wash, near the horse. The old people have left no record of disaster on the mural walls of the canyons; we can do no more than make educated guesses based on what is known about climatic changes, tribal warfare and Indian village life in the Southwest. We climb higher, the land begins to break away: we head a fork of Happy Canyon, pass close to the box head of Millard Canyon. Desert Solitaire Why? Around us the Green River Desert rolls away to the north, south and east, an absolutely treeless plain, not even a juniper in sight, nothing but sand, blackbrush, prickly pear, a few sunflowers. Less than a century later his discovery will be buried under the mud of the reservoir, rendered inaccessible by those who claim they are not only developing but also opening up the canyon country. To all accusations of excessive development the administrators can reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are giving the public what it wants, that their primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the wilds. He soars around and around in expanding spirals, lingering at a thousand feet above the landscape, bleak eyes missing nothing that moves below. If the first rapids are a surprise to us it is simply because we had never inquired if there were any on this stretch of the river. Perhaps this track leads to the mine; there are no diggings of any kind in the vicinity of the camp. He cannot be held responsible for any of the opinions expressed herein, but he is responsible for much of what understanding I have of a country we both love. Did you bring any lunch, Roy?. Instant access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts and more. In each there is the sense of something ultimate, with mountains exemplifying the brute force of natural processes, the sea concealing the richness, complexity and fecundity of life beneath a surface of huge monotony, and the desert what does the desert say? The holiday is over and a strange sweet stillness, better than any music, soars above the Arches. Theyd be there if I ever needed them again. The rapids that worried my dreams turn out in daylight to be little more than a stretch of choppy waves and a few eroded boulders past which our boats slip without difficulty. Mount Ellsworth, one of the lower peaks, is the one we see, rising sharp and craggy against the sky, a laccolithic dome of varicolored sedimentary and igneous rock (part of the intrusion now exposed by erosion) furred over with a growth of pinyon pine, juniper and jackpine at the highest elevations. I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguish between what was and what was not myself: looking at my hand I would see a leaf trembling on a branch. Long before I come again to the second of the dripping springs night has covered the desert world. Persistent as a mosquito, it will keep attacking until either it samples your blood or you succeed in killing it, or both. Impartial and neutralist, taking no chances, I wish good fortune to both sides, good swill for all. The sun rises higher, fierce on our faces; the western wall blazes like hot iron. Desert solitaire : a season in the wilderness / An account of the author's experiences, observations, and reflections as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. Husk allowed that the odds were against him but declared fervently, over the second pitcher of beer, that he wasnt about to go all the way back to East Texas without even giving his luck a try. 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