Desert Solitaire

by Edward Abbey

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”

My husband spent weeks hunting down a rare edition of this book and gave it to me for our anniversary. It sits in my office, where I see it every day. It’s the sweetest gift I’ve ever gotten.

Abbey spent two seasons as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s, and what he wrote from that experience is not quite a memoir, not quite nature writing, not quite philosophy, it is something wilder. It is angry and tender and hilarious and devastating. It is a love letter to the American desert that also reads as a furious warning about what we are doing to it. That warning is, if anything, more urgent now than when he wrote it, before Arches was covered in blacktop and paved.

Abbey is not a comfortable writer. He will offend you and make you laugh in the same paragraph. He will describe the silence of a canyon with such precision that you will feel it in your chest, and then turn around and say something outrageous just to watch you flinch. That tension, between beauty and fury, between reverence and irreverence, is wild Utah.

Five cups: essential. I say that as a Utahn, but if you love the desert, or the natural landscape, this book will feel like coming home.