Response 3: Desert Solitaire

When I read these essays, I feel as though Ed Abbey has me by the throat.  I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing, only realize the fact of it, like he's got me sitting in the middle of the desert, telling me stories, and there's nowhere I can go to get away from it, because there's only more desert, more danger, more visuals--and the fact of his storytelling makes me as uncomfortable as the stories themselves.  What I'm saying is, I hate the desert, and I hate that he's so good at writing about it, because it forces me to stay there.

It's hard for me to choose my favorite essay from this book, because, disliking the desert and all, each one had its own special way of making me uncomfortable.  On the whole, though, I have to say that I most appreciate "Cliffrose and Bayonets," because it works (if it does; I'm unsure) on an almost wholly sensory level--very much the surface level, as he warned in the introduction.  Abbey is a bold yet lyrical writer; his prose is serious and factual but too philosophical and artful to be strictly academic.  There are times I get bogged down in the detail, which seems to become background noise after a while, part of the scenery, which is maybe the point--it's trance-like, hearing him talk about the intricacies of the cliffrose and the yucca, the natural glitz of the landscape, until I forget why I'm being told these things and they keep coming, and then there is only the landscape, and no one talking about it.  I felt like I was being hypnotized into seeing the desert, being the desert--I got the distinct impression at times that Abbey does not distinguish nature and civilization the way we've been conditioned to, that he feels the presence of the landscape as much as he feels his own, as if he's not merely within or beholding the landscape but a part of it, and it a part of him without separation.  He loses himself in his prose as much as he loses me--and when he snaps back to reality it is shocking, like waking up from a dream, and he's careful to remind us that it was a dream, basically--that his descriptions of desert plant life and flowers are in some ways romanticized, and by no means the most prominent scenery.  The whole thing seems cruel, actually, in the same way the desert seems cruel.  But I appreciate his stream-of-consciousness style, and his ability to shift from deep lyricism to philosophical reflection and back to scene, back to reality.  I think that's a technique worth stealing.

One thing I found intriguing were the contradictions present in Abbey's writing.  At times he seemed to understand and, in some ways, feel in command of the desert, while at others he was a student of the land, or a servant.  I was also intrigued, yet disturbed, by Abbey's respect for, yet willingness to disrupt, nature.  For example, on page 41, where he kills the rabbit as an experiment: "Suppose, I say to myself, you were out here hungry, starving, no weapon but your bare hands.  What would you do?  What could you do?"  He then throws a stone at the rabbit and, surprisingly, kills it, which shocks him at first but then fills him with a feeling of contentment.  This situation disturbs me because it challenges my beliefs about respect for the wild--that we must take care of nature so that it may take care of us, and that if we must disrupt it we do it with purpose--not simply for the sake of entertainment.  But this situation is interesting, as it illustrates Abbey's vulnerability, his need to feel less small in a vast and unkind landscape: "What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added . . . to my own soul. . . . No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world."  Abbey's respect for the land is only heightened by his ability to live with it, rather than suffer by it, regardless of the fact that he must set courtesy aside in order to achieve peace of mind.

Here's my go at channeling Edward Abbey.  I'm actually kind of skeptical that I can, or did.  But I meant to.  And I wrote something, I guess.

My childhood backyard is all that any child's yard should be: fun yet unglamorous, like a teenage girl in rollerskates with the sun in her hair, a smudge on her knee and her makeup off.  If the lawn is her hair it is messy and long, perfect for pulling into ponytails, twisting into braids so tight that you might just tug it out.  It's the kind of grass you love to kneel in, the kind that's soft on the soles and there's so much that you know it won't mind if you do tug some out, at the root, as deep as you can, where it's thicker and the green fades to white at the bottom of the blade.  You'll sit there and split the sealed end with your thumbnail and get the grass scent onto your fingers, then bite off the end, chew through the sweetness.  It's the taste of something you don't yet know, youth, maybe--this same grass you sweep through to find colored eggs every spring, and every year you get older, every year you find more you didn't know were there: under the porch with its red peeling paint that is rough to the touch, that your parents will paint brown and try to forget, but you won't; inside the white tin shelter of the rain gutter spout, under the lilacs, next to the crumbling concrete steps leading up to the back door, where you've seen earwigs squirming their way out of daylight.  And you always find one or two eggs by the swing set, where the ground's uneven and everything wobbles, but the metal is heavy and the sun heats it just warm enough to be comforting when you have your hands on the frame, the chains, the blue rubber seat that's too low to the ground and your feet drag--but you don't care because it's the cradling of it, the closeness to earth, the dust clouds your sneakers stir up, that elates you.  The different textures of dirt, the kind that's rough and pebbled and the stuff that's soft enough to drive in nails you find in the shed.  And then there's the garden, a wasteland of chickweed and dirt clumps, sometimes unexpected potatoes, or when mom's really trying, maybe carrots or peas.  But the garden's best growth is its winter frost, when it's just cold enough for dad to fill it with water, transform the sprouts and dirt into wonderland, into ice that's colder and smoother and slicker than any you've known, where skating is as new as holding onto a chair, like the training wheels on your bike.  It's winter's training ground for a new year--when you'll let go of the chair and the white sheets will lift from the world, and you'll jump out of bed--and the backyard will be what it was before, but everything else will be different.