SE Utah, Spring 2021 ~ Read
Edward Abbey’s non-fiction book describes his thoughts and experiences while serving as a park ranger at Arches National Park for two summers in the early 60s. Abbey’s book was viewed as both a revolutionary, angry, mocking account of car-bound civilization and industry, and a loving, poetic, personal record of a man’s conversation with the desert.
I read the book while traveling through Moab, Arches, Monument Valley and Canyonlands. Some of the book’s chapters matched quite well with our itinerary, which brought Abbey’s work even closer to my heart and mind. I got a better understanding and appreciation of this land’s geology and uniqueness, and reflected quite a bit on human progress vs. human need for wilderness, open spaces and solitude.
My past readings to illuminate our travel itineraries have been solely in the fiction realm, but Desert Solitaire has convinced me that travel writing adds a deeper, lived and felt experience, and sometimes may even magically align in timing, season and direction of one’s own journeys.
Abbey’s work, so saturated with heat and thirst, deserts and mesas, animal tracks and human stories, inspired me to do some philosophical writing of my own.
