![A Few Days in the Wilderness]()
This winter my family gathered at a rental compound in Yucca Valley, beside the immensity of Joshua Tree National Park, which none of us had ever seen. We were just an American family, trying to enjoy the outdoors, or something like that. On Christmas Eve, amid the clinking of wine glasses and crinkle of wrapping paper and the roar of a fireplace—longing in my case to spend some time outside, a place I'd spent more time when I was younger and not married or a father and lived in the desert, rather than in Los Angeles, where I made a home now—I found myself perusing the rental's bookshelves when I found a title that had once meant a lot to me.
Edward Abbey, who died a quarter of a century ago this spring, in 1968 published the memoir Desert Solitaire, written about the seasons he spent as a park ranger at then-undeveloped Arches National Monument, outside Moab, Utah. The book is, together with his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, a kind of founding text for a complicated love of the desert—a love that I now see advances what is actually a rather dark idea: that wilderness "needs no defense, it only needs defenders."
As a young man, I spent my first two years of college on a desert campus, cottoning quite easily to Abbey's romantic brio and the manic, mad-cap deliriousness of The Monkey Wrench Gang, which called in some measure for solo-camping, hitchhiking, pints of whiskey, and the argument, perhaps, that "defense" might require one to set fire to bulldozers. But I never lit a match. I grew up. I moved East and lost my hiking boots, misplaced my sleeping bag, and ceased thinking altogether about what happens when you're alone in a canyon. Flipping through Abbey's writing twenty years later, I was beginning to remember.
"Near the first group of arches," he writes early in Desert Solitaire, "looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre."
Abbey rises often to this kind of imagery, at least in the first riveting chapters of the memoir, and I found it alarming how easily I found some former version of myself in his character: Months alone, only a snake for companionship, boiling a pot of beans to eat all day, hours and hours spent admiring the color of the sky or the cut of a broken branch or the path through sand of a spring rain.
On a family holiday night, both so close and yet so far from such things, I read and read—semi-ignoring my family, sipping more wine—and I felt nostalgia both for a time surrounded by rock and an era when I could more easily define what I thought mattered (and perhaps who.) My wife poured me another glass. It was time for our daughter to go to bed. "You're loving that book, huh?"
In the next chapter, disheveled men in helmets and khakis drive up to Abbey's remote trailer, desperate for water. "As they passed the pitcher back and forth, I got the full and terrible story, confirming the worst of my fears," he writes. They were a survey crew, laying out a new road into Arches, and what follows is a whole chapter's postulation about industrial tourism and its evils:
"You can't see anything from a car," Abbey writes. "You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not."
At this point, I regarded my family, none of them candidates to blow up any dams or hike until they bled. I thought again of an earlier time in my life, when I might have taken this book and some gear and disappeared long enough to do some purifying self-damage. (When I was 18, for example, I thought it normal to set off with an hour's notice for a 15-mile hike. At 19, I hitched to Alaska and worked on fishing boats. When I was 27, in a final gasp of something, I set out on foot from New York City to New Orleans, a walk that took me nearly two-thousand miles.)
Mid-way through a nostalgic re-reading of both a book and an idea of how to live—both of which I'd more or less forsaken—I put down Desert Solitaire and tried to imagine how it might have worked if Abbey (or the character he creates for his books) tried to gather with family for a nice, relaxing Christmas. It was time for bed for me, too.
The next morning, in a very large minivan, still reeling from what I'd read, I joined the family as we set out to see Joshua Tree National Park. It was a long drive. My daughter was restless and my in-laws were being good sports and my brother-in-law had, perhaps wisely, decided to stay at the rental where he was reading his own good book.
At 800,000 acres, Joshua Tree is among our largest national parks, of which there are nearly five dozen. It's rather beautiful, in a bleak sort of way. (There are no waterfalls or jungle or buffalo or dramatic carvings of presidents.) When we passed a turnout where you could admire the view, we parked the car and did some view admiring. After a while, we stopped at a second turnout, this one offering some informational signage. My father-in-law declined the chance to get out of the car a second time. He hollered out, mocking what I admit now sort of looked like the moon.
"Does the sign say there are more rocks and small trees?" he said.
Later, in the parking lot of a trail called Hidden Valley, my mother-in-law, who recently had surgery on a toe, stood stiffly beside her husband, both of them squinting in the sun. For a moment, I regretted not renting us a house closer to a more inviting national park. On the other side of Abbey's spectrum of people who were not as badass as Abbey was my daughter, L, five years old and ready to run to the moon and back, until she got tired or scared.
It was decided: The in-laws would stay with the car, but my mother, wife, daughter, and I would attempt to hike over the boulders and through sandy washes, encountering at last and up close a density of the local cactus: Joshua Trees, also known as Yuccas. They were gorgeous, spiny and wizened things, but I suppose I could be honest and say I was suppressing a feeling of despair at how slowly we had been moving and at the crush of other tourists who were also pausing to admire this tree. Hidden Valley was a mile-long trail.
I thought about a line of Abbey's: "Despite its fierce defenses, or perhaps because of them, the yucca," he writes in Desert Solitaire, "is as beautiful as it is strange, perfect in its place wherever that may be."
What's a perfect place? Once, I found it alone on the side of the road. Another time I thought I saw it far out on an Alaskan sea. For a long time, in part because of Abbey, I sought out a place in the world that was harsh and lonely.
Fifteen years after I'd last read Desert Solitaire, my daughter became obsessed with the idea of being the leader of our modest hike and sprinted ahead. My mom's knee was acting up and she was hungry. I felt torn. But nearing the end of the trail, there was a moment when we all stopped to marvel at the colors of a cliff: a young daughter, a man, his wife, a grandmother, all enjoying the outdoors in different ways. The wind tousled our hair. I admit I was touched by this short trail.
Back in L.A. I did some research: A set of decisions had been made to preserve certain rugged and pristine parts of our country, including places like Joshua Tree or the more famous Yosemite, where two tough loners recently spent nineteen days climbing a big rock. For much of the 20th century—securing land that otherwise might have been turned into parking lots, bombing ranges, or cattle ranches—our country set aside vast acreage that would become synonymous with the idea of what America was and could be. Young men enjoyed these wild places, but so did families. For several generations, a tour of the national parks with a station wagon full of tents and sleeping bags was synonymous with the idea of vacation, and how we could enjoy our surroundings.
In the last twenty years, however, our flagship parks—even majestic Yosemite—have attracted fewer and fewer visitors. Attendance totals for many facilities peaked in the 1990s. The country is changing. (I, too, have changed.)
One of the reasons for the larger change was that America was becoming less white and more urban, and it wasn't necessarily guys like Abbey or climbers in Yosemite or suburban families with a station wagon who were helping articulate the future of America's parks—or even what was worth "defending."
In California, for instance, President Obama recently declared 350,000 acres of the city-adjacent and relatively unlovely San Gabriel Mountains a national monument—and park rangers for this non-Yosemite-ish piece of land told reporters they'd use the new money to fight graffiti and take care of problems with trash.
I myself don't get these days to many mountains, canyons, or arches. I live in Venice and commute by car to a job in Westwood, where my young daughter goes to elementary school. My wife is often traveling. In my carefully planned urban existence, I have found a good and safe enough bike route, up the Pacific Coast Highway, to a steep hill bisecting Pacific Palisades from Santa Monica. Maybe once a week, I pedal the 12 miles, up San Vicente, through the old Veterans Affairs complex, under the 405, and up to UCLA. Other weeks, I might carve out a few hours to paddle from a dirty harbor out into a less dirty ocean. There's trash and the scream of jets from LAX. But a few weeks ago, there were also two grey whales and a sense that life wasn't so bad.
"Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful," Abbey writes in Desert Solitaire. It had been twenty-five years since the writer's death. If he were still alive, character be damned, he'd be an old man. Maybe he'd enjoy a walk in the San Gabriel? Some of the trails probably even have handrails.
Nathan Deuel is the author of Friday Was the Bomb, an Amazon "Best Book of the Month." He lives in Los Angeles.
[Illustration by Jim Cooke]
