Desert Solitaire is one of the greatest books about living out in nature and “roughing it” that there is. I place it next to things like Walden and Sand County Almanac for the sheer obsessive passion and detailed storytelling that only comes along once in a while. Essentially it is a first-person narrative of Abbey working a summer in Arches National Park. As he says, “Why I went there no longer matters; what I found there is the subject of this book.”

Indeed. What follows is Abbey’s own life-changing encounter with the desert and all of the things that go along with a life-changing encounter. It’s beautiful and rough, charming and offensive, lyrical and boring. It’s solitude out loud and you owe it to yourself to read it. If you’ve seen pictures of Edward Abbey you probably know him as a bearded half-lunatic and this is how he got that way. At the end of the book he goes back to the city, wondering if he will ever be the same again. In that sense, the book speaks to anyone who has had the experience of falling in love with a wild place and returning to their former space, only to wonder if it will be the same, if they will be the same, and if anything will stick. For me, the book legitimized a lot of the struggle I went through moving from the Midwest and college to the American West.

And it gifted me, long ago when I was figuring out what and how to love, with one of the great quotes that has guided my life:

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

Toil, yes, and toil hard. But save enough of yourself and your time to be outside, to remember what it is that you are working for, to remember, constantly, the reason that you are doing the work you are doing at all. The environment and its preservation is not a cause, a platform issue, a reason to go to work. It is the reality of where we live and the root of who we are- it is the air we breathe, to be both dramatic and to the point.

Abbey’s Desert  Solitaire is full of irreverent truths like this one- he is over the top, does not care what anyone thinks, and has an awful lot to say about how he thinks the world should be run. People have loved him for it for decades, and if you consider yourself in any way in love with the outdoors, this is the kind of book you need to read when you’re feeling passionate. That’s what Abbey was all about- passionate love for the desert or passionate distaste for the government or construction companies that thought it was better to build anything on top of or inside of his beloved areas than to leave it as is.

Take the journey and see how and why he fell in love; you will too.

Photo Credit: crapaganda