Desert Cabal: a compelling invitation

 
In his introduction to Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey described his book as "not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hand." Fifty years later, Amy Irvine wrapped herself around that tombstone and started talking back; the result is her penetrating and elegant little book Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness. 

Abbey concluded his introduction to Desert Solitaire by encouraging readers not to drop his book on their feet but to "throw it at something big and glossy." In the years since his death, Abbey's myth has grown into a big, glossy monolith promoting a particular vision of wilderness, but Irvine throws the book right back at him to examine the flaws in that myth and formulate a new vision.

The difference is evident in the two books' titles: Solitaire versus Cabal. Abbey portrayed himself as a solitary explorer eager to protect and preserve wilderness--but also to possess it. In "First Morning," the chapter describing the start of his tenure as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, Abbey looks over the surrounding scene and muses, "I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not--at least there's nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me."

Irvine points out that Abbey was not alone but instead chose to erase his companions in the desert, including his wife and child, and reminds him that this urge for possession takes many forms. In Utah's mountains "the footwork of dinosaurs can still be fingered, a kind of earth braille by which to read the poetry of prehistory," but today the area is ravaged by "the thumper trucks, the earthmovers, the drill rigs" feeding our addiction to fossil fuels. "Like all good addicts," she writes, "we are choosing to die rather than to withdraw. and with us we are taking down every other living thing--the hoary bat, the pike minnow, the purple sage."

Irvine also schools Abbey on the added dangers women face in the wilderness and the continued attempts by outsiders to appropriate Native American culture. "So don't be that creepy white dude who's trying to siphon a sense of meaning and belonging off the desert's Native peoples, Mr. Abbey," she writes, "And for godssakes. Leave the women be--or you might get punched, kicked, maced, or worse. We're a little on edge these days."

While she admits that Abbey's "claiming of Utah's desert outback taught an entire nation what it means to be in collective possession of a place," Irvine asserts that "[i]t's the rough country, after all, that's in possession of us and not the other way around." Abbey insisted that "[w]e need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it," and Irvine agrees that we need wild places "that exfoliate our neuroses. That refuse to coddle our compulsions. That remind us, in these times of profound greed, what we really need." However, she also points out that Abbey's exalting the virtues of solitude in the desert drew hordes who wanted to follow in his footsteps, making solitude ever more rare. 

"Everywhere you look," she writes, "there are these hyped-up, tricked-out, uber-fit, machine-like humans that pump, grind, climb, soar, and scramble through the desert so fast they're just a muscled blur. The land's not the thing, it's the buzz." We need people to love wilderness enough to stay away from it:

Because if people came to care about the way the air shimmers when the rabbitbrush shrugs off the heat and sends it rolling across the slickrock, the way the antelope bolt like lightning unleashed from a squalid sky--maybe we'd stand a prayer of a chance to save the places we  treasure from those who would take some quick and dirty form of amusement over poetry, beauty, and wonder.

And to accomplish this, she insists, we need each other. "To survive without turning into heartless monsters, or soul-sucked automatons," she writes, "we'll need intimacy with people every bit as much as with place." In the end she extends an invitation to Abbey: "join me in asking your followers to do away with their rugged individualism" and join "a cabal. A group gathered around a panoramic vision."

Irvine's compelling vision fits into a dense but lyrical 98 pages (available from Torrey House Press--click here). She echoes Abbey's chapter titles, untangling the knots in his paradoxes in order to empower a new generation of wilderness advocates. She envisions her cabal becoming "a thunderous, galloping gathering, a passionate, peopled storm, nearly indistinguishable from the ground on which it rains, on which it sprinkles seeds. This," she writes, "is how hope takes root."

Edward Abbey remains rooted in the desert, resting in an undisclosed location where his friends buried him after his 1989 death. Abbey did not want his grave to become a shrine attracting disciples, but it was already too late: his earlier tombstone, Desert Solitaire, attracted a small army of zealots eager to follow his footsteps into the wilderness. In Desert Cabal, Amy Irvine reaches out to everyone gathered around that tombstone and invites them to pursue a powerful new vision together. She does not disdain solitude, urging readers to "go solo, into the desert. Yes, do this and love every minute." But instead of staying there alone, she says, they should come back--and join the desert cabal.