“Abbey had that nice resonant voice, and that turned a lot of people on,” he added. “He had no use for small talk. In conversation he always wanted to dig a little deeper. To get the answer. And he’d listen when you talked. You had to watch it too. A lot of times what you said could end up in a book.”
Ken spoke for a while more and then quietly stared off at the far wall. I decided I had taken up enough of his time and stood up to shake his hand. He asked me about my project, and when I gave him a brief description he surprised me.
“You know Wallace Stegner stayed here once too,” he said.
“Here?”
“Yup, right here in Pack Creek. I always regret I didn’t get a chance to really talk to him. Or really to just listen. I would have liked to just sit there and listen to the man.”
He walked me over to my car and I thanked him and we shook hands. I drove down the mountain, out of the La Sals, and back north toward Moab. My goal was to get to the town of Vernal in northern Utah, a town that was booming on oil and gas, not recreation. On the way north I pulled off the highway and into Arches to say a last good-bye, but I didn’t stay long since I wanted to reach Vernal by dark. So I bid a hasty good-bye to paradise, climbed into the car, and stepped on the gas, driving northward toward something else altogether.
WRITERS, LIKE OTHER human beings, have plans. Goals, destinations. But what happens often enough is that it is the misdirections and sidetracks on the way to those goals—the getting lost—that prove most fruitful. This is not a soft, groovy concept but one as tough and real as evolution. David Quammen, in a brilliant appreciation of Abbey in Outside magazine shortly after his death, retells a story that Abbey himself liked to tell about how Desert Solitaire came to be. After a New York editor had rejected his fiction and suggested he “write something he knew,” Ed went back to his “condemned tenement in Hoboken” and “typed up, out of nostalgia, an account of a couple of summers I had frittered away, playing the flute and reading Dreiser, in the Utah desert.”
Quammen writes: “Swallow that intact at your own risk. But do note Abbey’s persuasive insistence on a central point: the creation of the book was somehow unpremeditated, offhanded, uncalculated. In writing it he surprised himself, I believe, with the lovely discovery that his powers of observation, his unadorned passions and convictions, most of all his singular voice, could be shaped into an act of literature just as potent—just as artful, even—as an assemblage of invented characters and plot.”
David Quammen would know about the way that writers evolve in unexpected ways. In his twenties he had moved to Montana and become a fishing guide while setting out to be a novelist in the style of his hero, William Faulkner. But when two of his clients turned out to be the editors of a fledgling magazine, Outside, he was invited to write a column for that magazine, and in this way learned that he was actually a nonfiction writer. Abbey, too, would become something other than what he set out to be. He would later make a point of disparaging his nonfiction as “just journalism.” It wasn’t. It was something special, unique, and it remains so. He had unintentionally trained during all those years wandering the desert and writing in his journals, and in Desert Solitaire that journal voice would have a chance to get directly at the things he had until then just circled around.
Without Desert Solitaire, I would never have heard of Abbey, nor would millions of others. So what is this book that Wendell Berry and others claim will last?
The story is simple enough: a man living alone in the desert apart from the values, and other denizens, of the modern world, speaking about what has gone wrong in American life and how what is still right is often found in nature. “No, wilderness was not a luxury,” Abbey wrote, “but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” The plot was not really a plot: in one chapter someone gets lost in the desert, in another Abbey sees some snakes, in another he has breakfast, in yet another he throws out scene and setting altogether and rants against the use of cars in national parks in the manner of a cranky letter to the editor. If a traditional plot can be at all ascribed, it might be that the protagonist has found paradise here, alone in the desert, and that the forces of progress are marching forward to make sure that paradise is lost.
Abbey rolled his eyes at the way that every writer who mentions a twig or bug is called “the next Thoreau.” And yet with Desert Solitaire the comparison with Walden seems unavoidable. It starts with the similarities between the two books, both of which celebrated years in the wild. Here was Thoreau at Walden but a Thoreau for the modern world, a Thoreau with a more outrageous sense of humor and a fuck-it spirit, a Thoreau with a gun and pickup truck, a Thoreau with a beer in hand and a trailer instead of a cabin.
“I love a broad margin to my life,” writes Thoreau, and what is Abbey’s life at Arches—lounging with a hot cup of coffee on the trailer steps, wandering among his rocks—if not one with a broad margin? Both men suggest an alternative way of living, a less harried, fretful way, and also suggest that their contemporaries have made a seriously wrong turn in their choices of life.
What people don’t remember who have not read Thoreau since high school, or who have never read him at all but just use his name as cultural shorthand, is how wild and confident his voice can be. The two men, a century apart in time and a world apart in temperament, had obviously distinct voices, but they shared this: those voices were complex, unpredictable, and confident. In his biography of Thoreau, Joseph Wood Krutch speaks of the “magisterial confidence” of the writer’s voice. Krutch describes how the “sense of being right” despite the world thinking him wrong pervades Thoreau’s book, and how purely joyous the book often is. “Joy is a symptom by means of which right conduct may be recognized,” Krutch writes.
We feel that joy in the pages of Desert Solitaire, too, with Abbey’s voice ringing out in all its varied tones. And what Krutch says of Thoreau is true of Abbey: he makes “no sense of distinction between the serious and the comic, the temporal and the eternal.” Puns and meditations, ontology and fart jokes, it all gets thrown in. In the fiction the jokes sometimes fall flat, forced, but here they work because they are part of something larger, and that something larger is one man’s complex character and complex voice. It is a voice always ready to contradict itself, like a stream rushing one way while eddying another, so much so that, even though it is definitely one man talking, the voice sometimes seems more dialogue than monologue. One line might be so Whitmanesque and sensual that it would make other modern writers, and readers, cringe. But in the next line he could be as blunt as a truck driver. And in the next he would throw in a joke, or a bit of philosophizing, or a stunning description of a juniper or flowering yucca.
There is a famous passage early on in Desert Solitaire in which Abbey, walking through Arches, picks up a rock, throws it at a rabbit, and, to his surprise, kills the animal. Abbey, being Abbey, does not shrink with guilt over this act. Instead he characteristically runs through a gamut of emotions and thoughts, ending with a kind of exaltation:
For a moment I am shocked by my deed; I stare at the quiet rabbit, his glazed eyes, his blood drying in the dust. Something vital is lacking. But shock is succeeded by a mild elation. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate him more than I could—the flesh is probably infected with tularemia—I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but unmistakable. What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul. I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live t
he earth!
Above all else this voice tells the truth. Throughout his work Abbey was honest about his own faults, admitting the way lust preyed on him, admitting his grumpiness and impatience, admitting his anger at the ways of the modern world, admitting his own intolerance. Those faults, freely admitted, gain the trust of readers, and join a concert that includes an active intellectual curiosity, a ready sense of humor, and a deep appreciation and love of the land. So while all we are really reading are just marks on the page, what we get is the illusion of a person talking to us. Abbey is more than any writer I know, this side of Montaigne, alive on the page. Cut his sentences, as Emerson said of our first essayist, and they bleed. Our modern curator of the essay, Phillip Lopate, once compared being in a Max Beerbohm essay to being in a video game of the writer’s mind. Well, there’s no video game quite like Abbey’s. Read other essayists after him, E. B. White for instance, and they seem too tame, too civilized, too controlled. You appreciate their subtlety and craft but you get none of the raw joy, none of the silliness, none of the fun of Abbey. Next to his, theirs is prose with a pole up its ass. Abbey let loose, if not in person where he was known to be shy, then on the page, where it counted.
The miracle is that his work does not more often come off as mere ranting. Any fool with a pen can go on a tirade, write a letter to the editor, and there were times that Abbey can sound like that too. But rarely. “Our moods do not believe in each other,” said Emerson. All of Abbey’s statements, no matter how boldly put, are open to second thoughts, or at least second jokes. Not that he changes his mind, but that he can come to the same material with a different part of his mind.
TWO VERSIONS OF ABBEY AT ARCHES: SOLITAIRE AND WITH FAMILY, SECOND WIFE, RITA, AND SON JOSH.
Obviously this sort of writing had been done before, in fact had been done in the sixteenth century by Montaigne himself, the first writer to let us see his mind at work. But there is an important difference. Though we saw a man behind Montaigne’s thoughts, up there in his study with his Latin quotes tacked to the beams, the essays themselves proceed solely in the realm of thought—in his head. Like Montaigne, Abbey follows his own voice where it leads, twisting and turning, and not overly concerned with following where it first set out to go. Like Montaigne, we can see him thinking, and contradicting himself, and there is pleasure in that. But Abbey also dramatizes thought. That is, he turns thought into a kind of action. He works out his thinking on the page, but just as important is the artifice of making readers feel they too are working out those thoughts. It doesn’t hurt that the narrator who is thinking these contradictory thoughts is also walking in the desert, interacting with plants, animals, and other people. In this way he becomes the show, his own main character, both watcher and watched.
In doing this, Abbey revitalized—and more than revitalized, made thrilling—a new/old type of literary nonfiction. Never one to be fenced-in by genre, he combined autobiography, the personal essay, nature observation, and a smattering of editorializing. He casually made this form his own, taking it and shaking it out, making it new. He also made it funny, and for that I at least am eternally grateful.
Abbey knew how to take a naturally funny scene and build it up through a kind of Marx Brothers piling-on. One of the best of these occurs in Desert Solitaire when Abbey, sitting around a juniper fire and awaiting the full moon, has his solitude broken by the whining of a jeep and the approach of a survey crew. The crew is there to map out a new road into the park, and when Abbey asks why a road is needed in a place no one comes to, they give him incredulous looks.
The head of the crew is “a pleasant-mannered, soft-spoken engineer with an unquestioning dedication to his work,” and therefore “a very dangerous man.” He explains patiently that if a new road is built, then many more tourists could visit the park. Then he stares at Abbey, “waiting to see what possible answer I could have to that.”
Abbey concludes: “I had an answer all right but I was saving it for later. I knew I was dealing with a madman.”
TO SOME IT may make a difference that Abbey’s years in Arches were not exactly the nature idyll they seem in the book. After all, the modern biographical impulse is to tear down: there are those who love to mention that Thoreau brought his laundry home to his mother’s house, as if this somehow undermines Walden, and that same type likes to point out that Abbey was a moody SOB who spent half his desert year in New Jersey, going through a divorce while paying little attention to his wife and son.
But the proof of how much more there was to the year is in the book itself. Joseph Wood Krutch says that in real life no one could be as “sustainedly incandescent” as the Thoreau portrayed at Walden, and of course no one was: the sentences “had been written down as fragments” and then Thoreau had done the work of “arranging brilliants that had been hoarded over the years.”
Abbey, too, was hoarding brilliant fragments while at Arches, sentences that he greedily returned to when constructing Desert Solitaire. That there was no real sustained golden age at Arches hardly seems to matter, any more than does the fact that Thoreau did not spend all his days at Walden skipping around the pond in fits of ecstasy. What we do know is that both men had golden moments, and it was out of those moments, and more specifically out of the sentences they created from them, that their books were built.
Which leads to the most amazing thing of all, something that to me at least seems not far short of miraculous. That through the simple act of reading, those moments can be resurrected. That we can suddenly be back in the desert or at the pond. That those moments, long dead to the authors, are still fully alive and available to us.
5
OIL AND WATER
If you have never seen a fracking boomtown, it can be hard to picture. You drive into a town that at first seems like any town, until you slowly notice that on this particular Main Street there are far too many hotels. Then you start to see the oversized white trucks, the hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silveradaos that prowl the crowded streets, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates (even when you are nowhere near these places). You also note that the drivers of the trucks are twentysomething men, who, like their trucks, are almost all white. When you try to get a room, you quickly learn two more facts: the prices are double those in the other rural towns you have traveled through and it is likely you may not be able to get a room at all. Once the hotels here might have been a haven for tourists, a place for families and kids to come and stay the night before a rafting trip. Now they are unofficial camps, camps filled with the men who drive the white trucks.
If you are one of the lucky few to get a nonsmoking room, do not rejoice too quickly. When you walk into that room, the smell of smoke will likely ooze from every fiber of polyester bedspread and carpet. The previous room-dweller may or may not have been fined for this infraction, but if he was it was not a great worry, not to him. Money is not a problem in these impromptu hotel camps. This is a culture unto itself, a culture that in some ways feels a whole lot like what cowboy camps must have been like a hundred and fifty years ago, only with trucks instead of horses. While you try to sleep, the men will congregate outside your door, talking loudly and smoking relentlessly and, quite frankly, scaring you a little. If you are like me, you might chain lock the door and crank up the TV.
So it was on my first night in Vernal, Utah, in July of 2012. After saying good-bye to Ken Sleight in early afternoon, I made the four-hour trip north. On the way into town, driving through the mountains and the red-rock canyons, I played a little game, tallying up two points for each tanker I saw, one for each white truck. It was close for a while, nip and tuck, but by the time I hit the neighboring town of Gusher and the landmark Chug-a-Lug Café, the white trucks had prevailed.
On the drive north I’d been listening to CDs of Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’d read the book years before, during my class with Reg Saner, and had returned to it as I wandered the West. Stegner often said that his father had a “stic
ky memory,” and the son’s was every bit as sticky. The Big Rock Candy Mountain was nothing less than a massive, almost encyclopedic, re-creation—and exorcism—of his early years
Back in North Carolina I’d spent a couple of months reading Stegner’s earliest books, those that preceded Big Rock. I thought that the first prizewinning novel, Remembering Laughter, was a tight drum of a book, sharp but lyric. The other early novels were weaker, but I knew the novels were not the point, and that later in life Stegner thought of all that early writing as simply “blowing out my pipes.” The real work consisted of the autobiographical short stories of the frontier, and the big novel they were leading up to, a novel in which he would sometimes use those stories, almost whole-cloth, as chapters. Like many writers before and since, Stegner saw the writing of a large novel as the big prize, “the heavyweight title” as Norman Mailer later called it, and though Thomas Wolfe and Wallace Stegner are about as unlike as two human beings can be, there are Wolfian rhythms near the end of Big Rock, particularly in the travel scenes, as Stegner tried to invest grandeur into his bildungsroman. In the end, The Big Rock Candy Mountain was, quite frankly, the story of Wally Stegner and his family—so much so that later the author said he was almost “as uncertain as any outsider would be what in my story is fictional and what is historical.”
The ideas embedded in the book, those same ideas that first came to the young Bruce Mason as he drove back from Iowa, are the seeds of Stegner’s later thinking, notions of aridity, community, and landscape that he would continue to develop over the next fifty years. This is a novel, however, not a tract, and at the novel’s heart is not an idea but characters. Those characters include young Bruce himself and his saintly mother, Elsa. But at the core of the book is the violent and mercurial Bo Mason, the fictional father, an often unpredictable and scary man who comes alive on the page, bristling with joy, wildness, and fury. His own father didn’t give him much, the young Wally often griped. But he gave him the gift of hard work, and perhaps more important, he gave him his main character.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 11