desert solitaire the first morning
More surprises. Seven miles past Big Water Spring you come to The Maze overlook and thats the end of the trail. Be reassured, it is not so. The ascent of Tukuhnikivats has taken me half the day, the descent from summit to timberline less than half an hour. Patterns in the sand, tracks of tiger lizards, birds, kangaroo rats, beetles. of our dreamlike voyage. This cow didnt want to fight anything anymore. THE FIRST MORNING This is the most beautiful place on earth. Our mounts had raised their heads from the water and shifting restlessly under our weight, they seemed anxious to move on. Disease? How they could have made such a discovery without poisoning themselves to death nobody knows; but then nobody knows how so-called primitive man made his many other discoveries. As we went on I looked back and saw the holes the cow had made fill up and brim over with water, like suppurating sores. If hed meant anything to us maybe we could mourn. Often far from any spring, these temporary pools attract doves, ravens and other birds, and deer and coyotes; you, too, if you know where to look or find one by luck, can slake your thirst and fill your water gourd. Something strange in the air. There was a spring nearby, with a pool below it large as a bathtub where his new wife could bathe and wash her flaxen hair. Floyd Bence is a tall powerful man around thirty years old, an archeologist by training, married, with two children. In a far-fetched way they resemble tombstones, or altars, or chimney stacks, or stone tablets set on end. I manage to recapture it and climb partway back on but before I can get comfortable again I see an outcrop of immovable granite, which I hadnt noticed before, rising in our path. We were here, say the hunters. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation. Behind the slogan is the assumption that the majority of Americans, exactly like the managers of the tourist industry, expect and demand to see their national parks from the comfort, security, and convenience of their automobiles. The limbs spreading out on either side, like outriggers, kept the tree from rolling as it sailed toward its destiny. I crawl along a narrow shelf to one side and watch him free himself from the rope and disappear below among the crevices and boulders. He was standing on a chair at the time. For two weeks Viviano and Roy tracked that horse, not because they wanted the horse but because Roy wanted his saddle back. Or, Who wants to live forever? Through a screen of willows he looked at the two little girls splashing in the water, and at Mrs. Husk, half undressed, sitting at the edge of the pool. Not a silence so much as a great stillness for there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. Wed find good water farther up the canyon at Cigarette Spring. Maybe. What has happened in these particular areas, which I chance to know a little and love too much, has happened, is happening, or will soon happen to the majority of our national parks and national forests, despite the illusory protection of the Wilderness Preservation Act, unless a great many citizens rear up on their hind legs and make vigorous political gestures demanding implementation of the Act. I discovered that I could move upward, inch by inch, through adhesion and with the help of the leveling tendency of the curve. Here at least is shade though no water. Already I was having visions of iced drinks, waterfalls, shade trees, clear deep emerald pools. We faced each other across some fifty feet of sand and rock. Download to read offline. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal. I place both Floyd and Merle under arrest at once, urging them to stay and have supper with me. No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. We examine the rapids below. The majority of the worlds great spirits, from Homer to Melville and Conrad, have felt the call of the sea and responded to its power and mystery, its rhythm, antiquity and apparent changelessness. Arches National Monument has been developed. I had one hand on the rope. The dry wash, dry gulch. Down at the beginning of the new road, at park headquarters, is the new entrance station and visitor center, where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts answering the same three basic questions five hundred times a day: (1) Wheres the john? There is a burlap sack in the cab of the truck which I carry when plucking Kleenex flowers from the brush and cactus along the road; I grab that and my stick, run after the snake and corner it beneath the exposed roots of a bush. I am not sure that the Navajos can learn these things. Theres another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. Who fired again. Will come to all of us, as it must (they say) to all men. Useless to try and reassure him that he has more to lose than gain by such assimilation; somewhere, in a way we all know, his pride was damaged and his confidence shaken. The information thus obtained was made available to the public but usually too late. Near at hand are a few of the plants responsible for that coloration the tumbleweed or Russian thistle, hairy and prickly, unpleasant both to touch and eye. Whos going to carry it?, Ill carry it, he says cheerfully, through a magnificent, sandy beard; you can carry the water.. Once there was a man named Turnbow who lived in the grimy wastelands of an eastern city which we will not mention here the name, though familiar to all the world, is not important. Yes, they do that. Moving closer. There are a couple of tricky pitches with rotten rock and fingerholds of exquisite delicacy but most of the way is easy. Beyond the grass the pale trunks of the aspens stand in serried formation, thick as corn, blue-white and ghostly, their leafy crowns in perpetual motion. We know with certainty that we are now only a few hours by motorboat from the Glen Canyon dam site. They rise somewhat heavily from their chairs and barstools and tramp, with frequency and a squelchy, sodden noise, toward the pissoirs at the back of the room, more waterlogged than intoxicated. he is fast asleep up there, dreaming of a previous incarnation when wings were only a dream. Everything is lovely and wild, with a virginal sweetness. The descent is four miles long, in vertical distance about two thousand feet. The mountains are covered with forest; the plateaus are also forested, at the higher elevations with aspen and yellowpine and farther down with pinyon and juniper; but as you descend through the lateral canyons toward the great river the pinyon and juniper yield to sagebrush and other shrubs; from that to yucca, prickly pear and ephedra; and from that, nearing the river, to almost nothing but scattered clumps of saltbush and blackbrush and the fragile annuals snakeweed, mule-ear sunflowers, and other widely dispersed rain-dependent growths, separated from each other by open spaces of nothing but sand and rock. I, for one, suspect that millions of our citizens, especially the young, are yearning for adventure, difficulty, challenge they will respond with enthusiasm. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again. There may, of course, be obstacles; we dont know. Only the branches of the juniper tree separated us. The boy certainly appeared to be quite dead. He looked at me. This is true. The jeep came in sight from beyond some bluffs, turned onto the dirt road, and came up the hill toward the entrance station. The Colorado has no false pride. The Developers, of course the politicians, businessmen, bankers, administrators, engineers they see it somewhat otherwise and complain most bitterly and interminably of a desperate water shortage, especially in the Southwest. [15] In Episodes and Visions, Abbey meditates on religion, philosophy, and literature and their intersections with desert life, as well as collects various thoughts on the tension between culture and civilization, espousing many tenets in support of environmentalism. Are you sure this rope is strong enough?. 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. A new and formidable canyon opens on the left, with a broad delta of pebbled beach, mud banks, rocks and boulders and driftwood issuing fanwise from its mouth. He learns this about himself in a debate one night with a mysterious tourist, J. Prometheus Birdsong, who praises humanitys technological and medicinal achievements, to Abbeys great frustration. Hire a crew of pretty girls, call them rangerettes, let them sell the tickets and give the campfire talks. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to cecate a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. He dont belong to anybody. From there its a long but easy scramble to the rim of the canyon. He loses patience first, as I felt sure he would, gets into a sling, hooks up his carabiners, runs the doubled rope around a brake bar, backs over the edge and slides out of sight. Stemming largely from a disagreement about the 1964 Wilderness Preservation Act, Developers claim that roads increase access to the parks, while Preservers argue that pavement defeats the point of nature. Husk was willing, even eager, and inquired as to the terms. Mostly I live out of it., You must get awfully lonesome way out here., No, myself. (They laugh; they all think Im kidding. The only sound is the whisper of the running water, the touch of my bare feet on the sand, and once or twice, out of the stillness, the clear song of a canyon wren. I get out, stretch, relieve myself. I open my eyes and see first a tall stem of grass bending over my face, weighed down by a drop of dew that glistens like a pearl on its tip. Into the green lagoon for a bath and a swim and then Ralph baits a hook with the reliable rotten salami, I build a campfire in the shade and fill the skillet with grease, and once again we dine on channel cat delicious fish! Eventually Abbey revisited the Arches notes and diaries in 1967, and after some editing and revising had them published as a book in 1968. Nobody answered but he thought he heard the sound of laughing children in the distance. Seven more miles rough as a cob around the crumbling base of Elaterite Butte, some hesitation and backtracking among alternate jeep trails, all of them dead ends, and we finally come out near sundown on the brink of things, nothing beyond but nothingness a veil, blue with remoteness and below the edge the northerly portion of The Maze. With the coffee we each have a pipeful of Newcombs Mixture half Bull Durham and half Prince Albert, the first for flavor and the second for bulk. 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