Romancing the Tome -- My Season with Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

“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? Words, words--the problem makes me thirsty.” --Edward Abbey

When I was about twelve years old, in the dead of summer, my father and I made a trek to one of the farthest reaches of Big Bend National Park in West Texas. It was there I was introduced to Ed Abbey, but it took nineteen years for me to truly discover him. Following a read of Desert Solitaire, I find myself grappling with Abbey’s fearless exploration of and symbiosis with nature. In searching for deeper meaning, I find myself negotiating the true problem(s) of fact and the illusion(s) of philosophy.

My dad is an avid ham radio operator. His call sign is W5OZI, and radio has been his hobby for seventy years, since his childhood. Amateur radio authorities have divided the world into tiny grids that he and his cohorts collect by talking to one another and exchanging QSL cards (a postcard confirming the contact). Some of the more adventurous hams go on DXpeditions to remote grid squares in order to open up that part of the map to ham radio operators around the world. It is an extant form of frontier colonialism that is temporary to all but those who participate and theoretically harmless to land and local. Radio operators visit a location, set up camp and a temporary radio antenna, make contacts for a week, pack up and leave. To highlight the frontier feel of DXpeditions, Yemen is the only country that does not open its borders to amateur radio operators for DXpeditions.

In June 1991, I joined my father on a DXpedition to a grid square that barely exists in the United States in the southernmost tip of Big Bend, just south of 29º N. latitude, approximately eleven square miles of land. When we entered the park to pay our vehicle fees and map the route in, the Ranger looked at us as if we were half mad. Three men and two boys -- well, really five boys -- in a 1980s Chevy S10 and a 1970s El Camino (described by my dad’s friend as “a truck”). We assured the Ranger that we had plenty of water and food, warm clothes if needed, tarps, ropes, stakes, gasoline, a generator, radios, antennas, and excellent communication skills. The latter was punctuated by our exclamations that there would be no stopping us. The Ranger highlighted some of the trouble spots on the road and informed us that there would be no one checking up on us in that remote area of the park. By the time we drove away, the Ranger must have known that we were completely mad.

That week was adventurous and fun. The best chance we had at reaching the grid square and operating was at Pettits, a site just a hundred yards from the Rio Grande. On the way there, we encountered a washout in the road that left the El Camino stranded. At Pettits, during the days, temperatures broke 110 degrees, and one day I got sick from heat stroke. At one point, I was so physically exhausted that I slept through a rain storm. Nothing stayed wet long. Like our DXpedition, the rain came and went, and the desert remained; heat, wind, and time eliminated any sign that we had arrived there at all. When we made it back to the park headquarters, the Park Ranger welcomed us back and entertained all the stories of our trip. My Dad bought me a book on poisonous desert dwellers and, on the suggestion of the Ranger, Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey.

As a fourteen year old, I thumbed through the book and quickly decided that I was not interested. Abbey’s book sat on a bookshelf at my parents’ house until about a year ago, when I retrieved it and added it to my short list of books to read. In finally reading Desert Solitaire, I did not want to simply understand why Edward Abbey is so inspirational to environmentalists and anarchists, since I act as a choir for most if not all of the issues Abbey preaches on. Instead, I sought (and continue to seek) connections for my personal life. My hope was that Abbey’s “elegy” to Arches National Monument would help me understand deeper philosophical concerns. At the least, I wanted to gain some insight into my own spiritual connection with the earth and with the desert.

Any recent upsurge in spiritual self-questioning is not really new for me, but part of a natural ebb and flow. I push the natural world away for society’s bonds, nature replies with a harsh sort of acceptance, like true love, allowing me to go until my life has become wholly unbalanced. Then, I return to some welcoming streams and hills of Central Texas, an earth that envelops me with warmth and only potential danger. Most nature I visit reflects me--somewhat wild, somewhat clean, somewhat honest, somewhat hostile, but surrounded by creeping progress that is constantly permeating my subtle bodies. This is not Abbey’s land.

“I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.
This at least is what I tell myself when I fix my attention on what is rational, sensible and realistic, believing that I have overcome at last that gallant infirmity of the soul called romance--that illness, that disease, the insidious malignancy which must be chopped out of the heart once and for all, ground up, cooked, burnt to ashes...consumed. And for so long as I stay away from the desert, keep to the mountains or the sea or the city, it is possible to think myself cured: Not easy: one whiff of juniper smoke, a few careless words, one reckless and foolish poem--The Wasteland, for instance--and I become as restive, irritable, brooding and dangerous as a wolf in a cage.
In answer to the original question, then, I find myself in the end returning to the beginning, and can only say, as I said in the first place: There is something about the desert....There is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.”

I have visited and revisited the Southwest since that first trip to Big Bend in 1991, and each time I experience a dramatic emotional appeal. Visits to Marfa and Alpine, Texas, invoke, as do hikes through Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire, a grand and expansive clarity that is impossible to fully explain. Bits and pieces are exposed in my poems and songs, but nothing of the sort of grand philosophical treatise that will explain life and earth or nature and man. Abbey was clear on the problems that the desert faced, as I am on the Marfa land grab and the Vegas lights. It is apparent, too, that Ed Abbey grappled with more ethereal concerns.

“The magpies and jays squawk among the pinyon pines, which are heavy-laden with clusters of light-green, rosin-sticky, fresh, fat cones--we’ll have a good crop of pine nuts this year. A variety of asters are blooming along the road and among the dunes; with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible. Heidegger was wrong, as usual; man is not the only living thing that exists. He might well have taken a tip from a fellow countryman: 'Wovon man nicht spraechen
Kann, darueber muss man schweigen.'
Also the chamisa, bright and stinking as rancid butter; and the mule-eared sunflowers, enjoying a great autumnal renascence; and the wild buckwheat, the matchweed, the yellow borage, and on the mountain slopes a league away, the preliminary golden dying of the aspens. Like a fire ignited in the spring, smoldering through the terrible summer, my desert world flares up briefly and brilliantly before the coming of cold and snow, the ashy winter, for the last time this season.”

Abbey’s refutation of Heidegger appears sophomoric on a first read, a claim of preference for one philosopher over another. The quote within the quote is from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and has been translated as “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” So, it can be easily assumed that Abbey is simply using Wittgenstein’s words to discredit Heidegger without disproving anything. However, if we consider Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as a whole, it becomes more apparent that Abbey’s descriptions and inquiries promote Wittgenstein’s proposals.

Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus while a soldier and prisoner of war during World War II. It outlined a “picture theory” of meaning that basically states that facts necessitate language, and language allows thought to “picture” these facts. One of the most influential passages was:
Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
This quote from Wittgenstein's proposition 4.003 seems to directly address Abbey’s deeper philosophical concerns. Whenever Abbey becomes wrapped into questions of God or nature or spirituality, he begins with and returns to his reality. Each of these instances of philosophical or spiritual inquiry is bracketed by brilliant descriptions of the desert, the facts of his surroundings.

“Off in the east an isolated storm is boiling over the desert, a mass of lavender clouds bombarding the earth with lightning and trailing curtains of rain. the distance is so great that I cannot hear the thunder. Between here and there and me and the mountains is the canyon wilderness, the hoodoo land of spire and pillar and pinnacle where no man lives, and where the river flows, unseen, through the blue-black trenches in the rock.
Light. Space. Light and space without time, I think, for this is a country with only the slightest traces of human history. In the doctrine of the geologists with their scheme of ages, eons and epochs all is flux, as Heraclitus taught, but from the mortally human point of view the landscape of the Colorado is like a section of eternity--timeless. In all my years in the canyon country I have yet to see a rock fall, of its own volition, so to speak, aside from floods. To convince myself of the reality of change and therefore time I will sometimes push a stone over the edge of a cliff and watch it descend and wait--lighting my pipe--for the report of its impact and disintegration to return. Doing my bit to help, of course, aiding natural processes and verifying the hypotheses of geological morphology. But am not entirely convinced.
Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear--the earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break. Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore sublime.”

As Wittgenstein proposed, and I think Ed Abbey would agree, our “deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.” A primary conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractacus is that any language that does not illustrate fact is, in a word, nonsense. Ed Abbey takes this a step further in claiming that man is merely an illusion on the stage of time, that all our names and claims, our semasiology and onomasiology, are all merely futile. In the expanse of desert, a nature that quickly eliminates the unprepared, human existence is wispy. However, Abbey points to a pervasive human culture that, in 1958, was worrisome and increasingly threatening. Indeed, Abbey addresses the true problems -- material culture, paved roads, vehicles, dependence on modern technologies, the inability of people to slow down and enjoy their lives and their surroundings. He does so quite eloquently, and thus we remember him neither as a romantic nature writer or grand philosopher, but as a persistent defender of our environment.

My first trip to the desert was a success in more ways than one. It is remembered among ham operators as one of, if not the only productive DXpeditions to that grid square. During the trip, I made contact with Fred Fish (W5FF), and we helped him become the only ham radio operator to collect all the grid squares in the contiguous United States. My father collected the grid square on the trip and currently requires just one more grid square to match Fred Fish and earn the Fred Fish Memorial Award (FFMA). I hope that he does it, not for status, but because it would serve as a fitting tribute to our trip to Big Bend. It was there that my father reviewed the “not a trace” theory of wilderness excursions. This was the most important success. We left nothing for the desert to remember us by, just some buried toilet paper, tracks in the dirt, and a piece of my soul that invites me back now and again. For what? I do not, nor do I want to, know. I choose not to name that which I cannot define. I choose not to speak of that which I do not understand.