Desert Solitaire (1967) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Mr. Bates Wilson: ranger who might justly be considered the founder of Canyonlands National Park
• Merle McRae: Superintendent of Arches National Park while Edward Abbey was a ranger there. A slender, graceful man of about fifty years, with a fine, grave expressive face toughened though not hardened by a life spent mostly out-of-doors. Born and raised on a small ranch in New Mexico. Graduated from University of Virginia. former cattle rancher, dude rancher, CCC supervisor, ranger in National Park Service since 1940. Married with three children.
• Floyd Bence: Chief Ranger at Arches National Park while Edward Abbey was a ranger there. Tall powerful man around thirty years old, an archeologist by training, married, with two children.
• Leslie McKee: cowboy and cattleman
• Ralph Newcomb: Edward Abbey's companion down the Colorado river in Glen Canyon before the dam was built creating Powell Lake.
• Robert Waterman: Explores The Maze with Edward Abbey

Quotes edit see section history

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• “Or could it have been finally, simply their own fears which poisoned their lives beyond hope of recovery and drove them into exile and extinction?”

  Edward Abbey

• “Those were good times ... the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... there is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Love flows best in openness and freedom.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... I believe that there is a kind of poetry ... in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world ... Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe.”

  Edward Abbey

• “This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Every man, every woman, carried in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.”

• “... like many other mechanical gadgets <a flashlight> tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light which it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.”

  Edward Abbey

• “I prefer not to kill animals. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.”

  Edward Abbey

• “The gopher snake and I get along nicely. ... When I take him outside into the wind and sunshine his favorite place seems to be inside my shirt, where he wraps himself around my waist and rests on my belt. In this position he sometimes sticks his head out between shirt buttons fo a survey of the weather, astonishing and delighting any tourists who may happen to be with me at the time.”

  Edward Abbey

• “For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cut-worm to the potted plant!)”

  Edward Abbey

• “Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

  Edward Abbey

• “We need more predators. The sheepmen complain, it is true, that the coyotes eat some of their lambs. This is true but do they eat enough? i mean, enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. ... the sheepmen, who run their hooved locusts on the public lands and are heavily subsidized, most of them as hog-rich as they are pigheaded, can easily afford these trifling losses.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. ... If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies ... in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful--that which is full of wonder.”

  Edward Abbey

• “"Parks are for people" is the public-relations slogan, which decoded means that the parks are for people-in-automobiles.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of those urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while. How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? ... The automotive combine has almost succeeded in strangling our cities; we need not let it also destroy our national parks.”

  Edward Abbey

• “<Yosemite Valley> could be returned to relative beauty and order by the simple expedient of requiring all visitors, at the park entrance, to lock up their automobiles and continue their tour on the seats of good workable bicycles supplied free of charge by the United States Government. Let our people travel light and free on their bicycles ... Their bedrolls, their backpacks, their tents, their food and cooking kits will be trucked in for them, free of charge ... The same thing could be done at Grand Canyon or at Yellowstone or at any of our other shrines to the out-of-doors. ... we'll stretch a point for those too old or too sickly to mount a bicycle and let them ride the shuttle buses.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... i now feel entitled to make some constructive, practical, sensible proposals for the salvation of both parks and people. (1) No more cars in national parks. ... (2) No more new roads in national parks. .. (3) Put the park rangers to work. ... Once we outlaw the motors and stop the road-building and force the multitudes back on their feet, the people will need leaders.”

  Edward Abbey

• “At what distance should good neighbors build their houses? Let it be determined by the community's 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.”

• “The refrigerator, too, is a useful machine. Not indispensable but useful. It is in fact one of the few positive contributions of scientific technology to civilization and I am grateful for it. Raised in the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains, I remember clearly how we used to chop blocks of ice out of Crooked Creek, haul them with team and wagon about a mile up the hill to the farmhouse and store them away in sawdust for use int he summer. Every time I drop a couple of ice cubes into a glass I think with favor of all the iron and coal miners, bargemen, railroaders, steelworkers, technicians, designers, factory assemblers, wholesalers, truckdrivers and retailers who have combined their labors (often quite taxing) to provide me with this simple but pleasant convenience, without which the highball or the Cuba libre would be poor things indeed.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well-known sypmtoms: squalor, unemployment ... broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, ... and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.”

  Edward Abbey

• “Coming from a tradition which honors sharing and mutual aid above private interest, the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without.”

  Edward Abbey

• “I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.”

  Edward Abbey

• “There is no shortage of water in teh desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of watr here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

  Edward Abbey

• “A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. ... We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the live of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”

  Edward Abbey

• “"I didn't know we'd hit rapids so soon," I say to Ralph ... "if we had life jackets with us it might be a good idea to put them on now." Actually our ignorance and carelessness are more deliberate than accidental; we are entering Glen Canyon without having learned much about it beforehand because w wish to see it as Powell and his party had seen it, not knowing what to expect, making anew the discoveries of others. 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.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... when a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's rivers and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.”

  Edward Abbey

• “All of our furred and feathered and hairy-hided cousins who depend for their existence upon the river and the lower canyons ... will soon be compelled to find new homes. If they can. For there is no land in the canyon country not already fully occupied, to the limit of the range, by their own kind. There are no vacant lots in nature.”

  Edward Abbey

• “No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

  Edward Abbey

• “I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”

  Edward Abbey

• “... half the beauty of Rainbow Bridge lay in its remoteness, its relative difficulty of access, and in the wilderness surrounding it, of which it was an integral part. When these things are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, said a wise man. If so, what happens to excellence when we eliminate the difficulty and the rarity?”

  Edward Abbey

• “Most of my wandering in the desert I've done alone. Not so much from choice as from necessity--I generally p refer to go into places where no one else wants to go. I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time. However, there are special hazards in traveling alone.”

  Edward Abbey

• “We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we have already an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling.”

  Edward Abbey

• “What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger s opener. Look here, I want to say, for god-sake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those idiotic cameras! For crissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for awhile, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood!.. roll that window down! you can't see the desert if you can't smell it.”

  Edward Abbey

• “The restless sea, the towering mountains, the silent desert ... Grandeur, color, spaciousness, the power of the ancient and elemental, that which lies beyond the ability of man to wholly grasp or utilize, these qualities all three share. 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 desert says nothing.”

  Edward Gorey

• “... I was not opposed to mankind but only to mancenteredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, ad to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture.”

  Edward Abbey

• “What shall we name those four unnamed formations standing erect above this end of The Maze? ... the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone--they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us.”

  Edward Abbey

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.

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• We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.

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• Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

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• Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us—if only we were worthy of it.

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• If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful—that which is full of wonder.

  Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers

• I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

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• when a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country’s rivers and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

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• We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

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• Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman.

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• There’s another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him.

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First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• l.g.b.'s: little gray birds

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Edward Abbey (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 917.9259

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( A ) › Abbey, Edward
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Environment › Conservation
• Books › Science › Nature & Ecology › Natural Resources
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Environment › Ecology
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Nature Writing
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Reference
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Natural Resources
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Conservation

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

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