Desert Cabal. Amy Irvine
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that’s why I am here today. To talk to you about solitude. Both the lack of it and the need. You see, it’s getting pretty crowded, even in Utah, where public lands once felt infinite. I wonder if we know anymore what your definition of the word even means—the feeling that is not loneliness but “loveliness and a quiet exaltation.”
So I hope you’ll come up and sit with me. For we must chew on this notion of what solitude was, and now is. I’d suggest a walk—knowing we’d both love to roam under this honeycomb of sky that drips early morning gold onto spindly arms of ocotillo, through the pale pink translucence of jackrabbit ears. But I’m guessing that’s a lot to ask at this point, given your twenty-nine-year repose. Why don’t we just sit, dig our heels into these still-cool volcanic ball bearings that masquerade as soil. I promise to seek some semblance of restraint. It won’t be easy. The questions, the concerns—they threaten to rush from my body like a river freed from a blown-up dam.
Tell you what. Let’s start with what is panoramic, and political. How about I rant for a bit, before working down to what is personal. And then we keep going. By nightfall, let’s hope we hit bedrock—that naked, common ground.
By the way, I covered my tracks. If word got out, the GPS plot points would be posted on the Internet (long story, that) and you’d never know another moment of posthumous peace. Rest assured I got here by stealth, and now I’m sweaty, squatted, and waiting on the parched, prickly kind of land we both love. The shadows of vultures cut across my skin. They think I’m dead but never have I been so alive! Because despite what seems like increasingly dark times for the planet, these wild places persist. Places that exfoliate our neuroses. That refuse to coddle our compulsions. That remind us, in these times of profound greed, what we really need.
About Moab: you can probably imagine the jacked-up monster trucks, maybe even the Razors—these golf carts on steroids, the least sexy form of transportation known to man. But I bet you can’t fathom the BASE jumpers—that’s right, people now don shiny, baggy disco suits and leap off the tallest red cliffs like flying squirrels. There are also beefed-up all-terrain bikes that can circle the White Rim in a day, if you’ve got the quads for the job. And those delicious, hidden swimming holes in Millcreek Canyon? Some days the Bureau of Land Management has to close off access—because several hundred people are already writhing in them amid a thick scrim of sunscreen, Jaeger, and Red Bull. The entire city—plus the surrounding valley, Behind the Rocks, and beyond—emits an ever-present belch of engines. They shine Lycra and sweat caffeine. As for Arches—no matter where you stand in the park, you can hear the steady roar of it all. Everywhere you look there are these hyped-up, tricked-out, uber-fit, machine-like humans that pump, grind, climb, soar, and scramble through the desert so fast they’re just a muscled blur. The land’s not the thing, it’s the buzz.
So there’s work to be done. Our public lands—the West’s de facto wilderness, its national parks and monuments—they are endangered in ways we never conceived of. Utah is in the worst shape—so many of its incomparable wildlands were protected within two of the nation’s newest national monuments but our so-called Commander-in-Chief has filleted each one, leaving only the stark bones in custody. This dismemberment of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two places you knew and loved, represents the largest maiming of public lands’ protection in the nation’s history.
This means the green light is brighter than ever for the usual suspects of industry and motorized yahoo-ism, but the land is threatened by our ilk, the muscle-powered outdoor wanderers, too. Which is to say you, Mr. Abbey, may have developed whole fleets—generations’ worth—of desert defenders, but now they’re out there en masse, bumping into one another on the very ground on which you taught them to go lightly and alone. They are as much the problem as they are the solution, and it’s hard to know how we don’t divvy that down the middle, into us and them, right and wrong.
Your headstone says, “No Comment,” but I’m hoping to discuss what we do next. You should know up front that I’m admiring, but not starstruck. You got some things right, but you got other things wrong. Like calling the desert “Abbey’s country.” Can you imagine, in my own book about Utah, if I had called it “Amy’s country”? I could have justified it; my family has been there for seven generations and counting. Yet even with such credentials the clan of my surname doesn’t get to call it ours—because it’s all stolen property: whatever the forefathers didn’t snatch from the region’s Native Americans on one occasion, they took from Mexico on another. But that’s what the white man does. He comes in after the fact and lifts his leg on someone else’s turf. You, sir, were no different.
Another thing: there’ll be no chumminess today. I won’t be calling you Ed, or Cactus Ed—although your fans do. They have good reason for assuming familiarities. When Desert Solitaire was published in 1968, you crowbarred open the American consciousness and the red raw desert strode right in. Like a cocklebur caught in a coyote’s tail, you went with it—indistinguishable from all the convoluted canyons, scoured-out washes, mesas tiered like wedding cakes, mercurial creeks, rasping whiskers of bunchgrass, and the obsidian objections of ravens. There were also those geologic, gymnastic backbends—your beloved arches.
The New Yorker called your book an “American masterpiece.” And sure enough, by the time the ragweed, dust, and scree of those essays settled, all of what you had to say took up some serious psychic real estate. You, Mr. Abbey, still lurk there. Like Hitchcock shuffling through his own film, one might not even notice you. But you’re present all right, even as you bask in the director’s chair. Desert Solitaire framed the American West through your lens, and so we see through the glass brightly: the Utah desert is not just a place to explore, not just a resource to exploit. It is a body—both politic and erotic. In every way it’s scandalous.
Your claiming of Utah’s desert outback taught an entire nation what it means to be in collective possession of a place. At the same time you taught us that one’s interest in national lands is not a given—although the idea of it certainly is. It is only truly ours after we have gotten out of the car and wandered far enough off the trail to get lost and use up our last drop of water. Only after we’ve been out enough times—to draw blood, fry skin, write eulogies, pull stakes, see ghosts, and duct tape a flapping sole—should we feel in possession of them. But those of us who have done our time out there know this is the mirage, the trick of light on water that is actually scoured sand. It’s the rough country, after all, that’s in possession of us and not the other way around.
Look, it’s early. But I’ve primed the old Coleman and the coffee is on.
SOLITAIRE
I’m caffeinated now, and pacing around the mound of grit heaped over what’s left of you. The sky is a primrose, blooming far beyond the margins of this place, this state, this nation. A sky that shows us how not to crouch too tightly over what we claim as ours. That reminds us how to reach for, and touch, what is Other.
Circling back to the notion of informalities: I just can’t. Hence the Mister. I’d like to keep some boundaries between us and a bit of decorum is good for that. Precautions must be taken because, as I packed for this journey, our mutual friend and iconic bookseller Ken Sanders reminded me that it wasn’t just that women hurled themselves at you—you did plenty of your own hurling, too. Sure enough, a few months before you passed away, my mother drove to Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City, where she stood in line for you to sign a copy of The Fool’s Progress, which she gave to me for Christmas that year. You were nearly dead, but you hit on her. This was despite the fact that she’d read nothing you’d written. Nor was she one to wander through the desert outback. Apparently, you knew how to travel between topographies.
Another mutual friend, Charles Bowden—god rest his seared, singular soul—was a known womanizer, too. And for both of you, much has been made of this, and perhaps unfairly. Meaning you weren’t exceptional—in this way, anyway. Men juggling multiple women is a common and longstanding tradition in the West, if not the world. Some of my ancestors were polygamists, as was John Singer, the man who fixed our television before dying in a shoot-out over homeschooling his kids. And a girl from a similar