Late that afternoon during the hottest part of the day Mr. Graham left his office and strolled down the street to the Club 66. I hurry on, south from Moab, off the highway on the gravel road past the new airport, past the turnoff to old Roys place and up into the foothills. Eating flowers. We go back to the pool and the base of the ridge. Farther on a pair of mule deer started from the brush and bounded obliquely through the beams of my lights, raising puffs of dust which the wind, moving faster than my pickup truck, caught and carried ahead of me out of sight into the dark. We go on, past the old cabin at French Spring and through the woods and past the flowery meadows now gray beneath a mist of snow and rain. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. In his sluggish condition hes not likely to strike unless I rouse him by some careless move of my own. Reaching no conclusions. There are lonely hours. With relief I turn my back on this melancholy ruin and take the golden trail up the long ledge of Navajo sandstone which leads to Delicate Arch. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. On each side rose the canyon walls, roughly perpendicular. Infected and victimized. I cut two stalks, a fat one and a thin one, and punch the pith out of the joints of the bigger one by using the smaller as a ramrod. Permanent springs or waterholes are likewise few and far between though not so rare as the streams. Followed inevitably by the night with its razzle-dazzle of stars in silver, emerald and sapphire blue, the same old routine. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. Moon-Eye is very shy. Should I give the rabbit a sporting chance, that is, jump it again, try to hit it on the run? Their sharp hooves clatter on the rock. You know. Overcome by emotion on his final day, Abbey suddenly leaves at once, not even stopping to say goodbye to his favorite juniper tree. Listing different nearby species, Abbey cant help but personify the animals as he marvels at their beauty and complexity. The rock follows hard upon me, almost at my neck. The orange juice is frozen, the milk slushy with ice. He is tempted but then remembers his girl. Because they need us. Not satisfied with the enormous silt trap and evaporation tank called Lake Mead (back of Boulder Dam) they have created another even bigger, even more destructive, in Glen Canyon. For the flash flood of the desert poorly resembles water. You didnt hear? Of these only a rare few are too hot or too briny or too poisonous to support life the great majority of them swarm with living things. When morning came he got up and tried to go on but could not walk very far. The horned owl may be the natural enemy of the rabbit but surely the rabbit is the natural friend of the horned owl. There he discovered that his partner was still alive, crawling inch by inch away from the now fading campfire toward the jeep truck. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. You old brute, I murmured, you hideous old gargoyle. Ill not unroll the sleeping bag until Im ready to sleep; I want to save that desert warmth stored up inside it. The Supai are a charming cheerful completely relaxed and easygoing bunch, all one hundred or so of them. 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. Regrettably I have found it unavoidable to write some harsh words about my seasonal employer the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, United States Government. Many amateur prospectors risked their lives trying to strike it rich, or died. The sun is touching the fretted tablelands on the west. Free at last, frolicking like colts, they galloped after one another in circles, lay down and rolled in the dust, got up and galloped some more. He heard the gun go off but felt nothing. I used to wonder. Ranger, where is Arches National Monument? Into September, the final month. I cant believe it. The mosquitoes stayed close but in lessening numbers, it seemed, as I climbed over humps of travertine toward the head of the waterfall. I could see the tracks of its wheels quite plainly in the sand and the route was well marked, not only by the tracks but by the survey stakes planted in the ground at regular fifty-foot intervals and by streamers of plastic ribbon tied to the brush and trees. Apaches? 4. (Because of erosion.) ), Where you keep these here Arches anyway?, What arches? He offered Mrs. Husk a cigarette and lit it for her with his slim butane lighter. The trailerhouse is cleaned out, locked up, water lines drained, gas disconnected, windows shut tight, power plant under canvas. Thought-provoking and mystical. Scobies irrational phobias blind him to this basic truth. has got another war going somewhere, I forget exactly where, on another continent as usual, and they want Waterman to go over there and fight for them. Late afternoon, the canyon filling with shadows I should not try it. Here was a treasure. web pages True, there are no women here (a blessing in disguise? Abbey realizes that the isolation and rarity of the desert hes come to love will disappear. What was all the bellowing about? When I return will it be the same? Instinctively we expect a miracle: the dam will never be completed, theyll run out of cement or slide rules, the engineers will all be shipped to Upper Volta. I may also, if I am lucky, find one or two or three with whom I can share a little more those rumors from the underground where whatever hope we still have must be found. In his youth long before asphalt he had driven the first motor stage between Monticello and Moab, a unique bus line which, according to Les, carried three classes of passengers: first class rode, second class walked, third class pushed. He brought with him his young and pleasant-looking (if somewhat thin and anxious) second wife, his eleven-year-old son Billy-Joe, and two little girls younger than the boy. A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness that. I heard later. Shakily I tamp my pipe and fumble through the pockets of my shirt. This being the case, why is the Park Service generally so anxious to accommodate that other crowd, the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and corner of the national parks? In compound low, engine overheating, radiator at boiling point, I keep going, looking for a certain dim trail off to the right into the aspens; it comes, I turn off the road and drive through an opening in a derelict rail fence, brush beneath leafy boughs and emerge in a small grassy glade surrounded on all sides but one by solid ranks of aspens. A big car rolls up a Buick Behemoth I believe it was, or it may have been a Cadillac Crocodile, a Dodge Dinosaur or a Mercury Mastodon, Im not sure which and this. Or the small-town atheist for that matter, with his Little Blue Books and sneering jokes against ancient and venerable institutions. The walls have a morbid greenish hue that matches the coloration of the nearby hills; this is dust from the Morrison formation, a loose friable shale containing copper oxides, agate, chert, and traces of vanadium and uranium. The next morning I bought a slab of bacon and six cans of beans at the village post office, rented a large comfortable horse and proceeded farther down the canyon past miniature cornfields, green pastures, swimming pools and waterfalls to the ruins of an old mining camp five miles below the village. And the peach wine flowed freely, like the water of the river of life. Slowly, his old yellow hands shaking, he shovels two little Grade C eggs onto your plate. He shuffled past them without glancing back, neither slowing nor increasing his pace. Such pools may be found in what seem like the most improbable places: out on the desolate White Rim below Grandview Point, for example, or on top of the elephant-back dome above the Double Arch. We paddle hard to port and beach our craft on a steep and slippery mud bank, tethering it to a stout willow tree. Standing there watching the horse I could smell the odor of cedarwood, the fragrance of the tree. We saddled our horses and got on. We are close to the end of our journey. But the kicking of niches becomes tiring; an ice axe would be handy now. Climbing the rise behind the housetrailer I watch them go, the truck visible for a mile or so before the road winds deeper into the complex of sand dunes, corraded monoliths and hogback ridges to the west. The choice became apparent to me this morning EDWARD DESERT SOLITAIRE A celebration of the beauty of living THE FIRST MORNING Give me silence, water, bope Give me struule, iron, volcanoes Neruda s IS the most beautiful place on earth. We drive the dirt roads and walk out some of the trails. Prime time: the sun very low in the west, the birds coming back to life, the shadows rolling for miles over rock and sand to the very base of the brilliant mountains. Here too a stream is flowing, much smaller than the other, through smoothly sculptured grooves, scoops and potholes in the rock. Like most other cowboys I have known Leslie was getting on in years. It seems to me possible, even probable, that many of the nonhuman undomesticated animals experience emotions unknown to us. You wait here, I said, while I go back to Albuquerque and get the book. Abbey makes statements that connect humanity to nature as a whole. Time for breakfast. Their departure from the high plateau country may have been gradual, an emigration spread out over many years, or it may in some places have been a sudden, panicky flight. Wildcard Searching Instant access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts and more. As he watched the bush became larger, more active, brighter and brighter. But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind. The badge gives me the authority to arrest malefactors and evildoers, Floyd explains. 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. We stop for the night only three fourths of a mile below the last camp Darkness is coming on; but the waves are rolling with crests of foam so white they almost give a light of their own. Finally, in this discussion of water in the desert, I should make note of a distinctive human contribution, one which has become a part of the Southwestern landscape no less typical than the giant cactus, the juniper growing out of solid rock or the red walls of a Navajo canyon. They followed no road or trail but simply what would have seemed, on a map, to be the shortest line between the two points. Next I unloaded the horse, smacked her on the rump and sent her back to the village. Speculation was the big thing; and the money poured in from all over the United States from those persons, always numerous in our society, eager to profit from the labor of others, anxious to harvest what they had not sown. For an instant I am paralyzed by wonder; then, stung by a fear too ancient and powerful to overcome I scramble back, rising to my knees. To conserve bodily moisture and energy the rodents remain in their burrows during the day. At the side of the road is a locked and empty automobile, first noted two days earlier. Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. We've updated our privacy policy. Heeyah! he shouted, lez go man, Jesus Christ! The cow stumbled toward the herd, Viviano pressing it hard. I reach the end of the road and walk the deserted trail to Landscape Arch and Double-O Arch, picking up a few candy wrappers left from the weekend, straightening a trail sign which somebody had tried to remove, noting another girdled and bleeding pinyon pine, obliterating from a sandstone wall the pathetic scratchings of some imbeciles who had attempted to write their names across the face of the Mesozoic. A fine morning a sweet cool stark sunlit silent desert morning before the heat moved in and the deerflies, the sweat, the dust and the thirst came down on us. No rapids here; only a subtle roiling of the water, ripples corresponding to the ripples on the rivers sandy bed. Are you crazy, maybe? It was even hotter inside the trailer than outside but I opened the refrigerator and left it open and took out a pitcher filled with ice cubes and water. In the shade of the big trees, whose leaves tinkle musically, like gold foil, above our heads, we eat lunch and fill our bellies with the cool sweet water, and lie on our backs and sleep and dream. What shall we name those four unnamed formations standing erect above this end of The Maze? Better fill your water cans there; might be your last chance. All of this is now under change, of course, and in the accelerating process of urbanization the Mormons of Utah are already discovering their interdependence with the rest of the nation and with the world. Based on Abbey's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in the late 1950s, the book is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. If industrialism per se seems an unlikely answer to the problems of the Navajo (and most of the other tribes) there still remains industrial tourism to be considered. Quicksand is more of a menace to cattle and horses, with their greater weight and smaller feet, than it is to men, and the four-legged beasts generally avoid it when they can. I mean, enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. What happened to Arches Natural Money-mint is, of course, an old story in the Park Service. Frogs and toads will be croaking here, fireflies winking, when I return. I didnt know wed hit rapids so soon, I say to Ralph. (2) No more new roads in national parks. Leading away from me the narrow dirt road, an alluring and primitive track into nowhere, meanders down the slope and toward the heart of the labyrinth of naked stone. I stopped talking. If we can climb the ridge to the maroon bench above the Cutler, we might be able to traverse laterally to the opening in the white rim through which we had originally descended. His spoor will not be seen much beyond the campground. Perhaps I never will. And Waterman doesnt want to go, hes afraid he might get killed. Thats for a fact., It happens. There I find the other members of the search party holding a consultation: Merle and Floyd from park headquarters, the county sheriff and one of his deputies, a relative of the missing man, and my brother Johnny who is also working for the Park Service this summer. Somewhere not far beyond this confluence, if I recall my Powell rightly, is the opening to what he named Music Temple. I find a trail but its a poor one, little more than a deer path, which peters out completely a mile up-canyon. We are compelled to make three portages in succession, the distance being less than three fourths of a mile, with a fall of 75 feet. 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. (In what or for how long not being clearly specified.) For instance, consider an unfortunate accident which took place only a week ago here in the Arches country. 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. Thought-provoking and mystical. Johnny and I wait in the shade of the truck. Though hes been mostly alone, he now feels so renewed by the desert that hes shockingly politedespite his violent hatredwhen an outspoken Nazi comes to the park. I pick up one that fits well in the hand, that seems to have the optimum feel and heft. We are ready to go. I also happen to know that the natural bridge itself is still six miles up the canyon by foot trail, a distance regarded as semiastronomical by the standard breed of mechanized tourist. Additionally, he expresses his deep and abiding respect for all forms of life in his philosophy, but describes unflinchingly his contempt for the cattle he herds in the canyons, and in another scene he remorselessly stones a rabbit, angry about rabbits' overabundance in the desert. Boats loaded, we launch them into the river, still roped together side by side for the sake of comfort, conversation and safety. Mr. Graham was sweating badly, his hands shaking, his chest painfully constricted. Softly Easy, easy, dont be scared . I come to where I had turned back the night before, a deep pool that fills the canyon from wall to wall. We adjourned the field for a pitcher of beer in Moab. Like certain aspects of this music, the desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time another paradox both agonized and deeply still. Abbey and his search party find the dead photographer at Grandview Point, leading Abbey to envy the man his natural death out in the open, away from hospitals and priests. I push the boats off and roll in; we paddle away as hard as we can from the fiery shore, the final wild flare of heat. Later the children showed him the pool up in the canyon below the spring. When the ball was over I went home to my bunk on the verge of the waterfall and rested for two days. Finally the moon came up, a golden globe behind the rocky fretwork of the horizon, a full and delicate moon that floated lightly as a leaf upon the dark slow current of the night. The deerslayers come by the thousands every autumn out of Salt Lake and California to harvest, as they like to say, the surplus deer. Free access to premium services like Tuneln, Mubi and more. The uranium miner down deep in his burrow was not only inhaling rock dust every minute and working daily with dynamite, his body was absorbing far more than the usual dosage of alpha, beta and gamma rays. Browse the world's largest eBookstore and start reading today on the web, tablet, phone, or ereader. 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. Roy moved his horse stolidly against them, implacable. Sand sage or old man sage, a lustrous windblown blend of silver and blue and aquamarine, gleams in the distance, the feathery stems flowing like hair. All afternoon we glide onward, running a few slight rapids (slight compared to those of Cataract Canyon and Grand Canyon), smoking our tobacco, drinking the river, talking of anything and everything which comes to our heads, enjoying the delirium of bliss. 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