Progymnasmata

Question: What do you get when you cross a left-wing tree-huggin' environmentalist nut-job with right-wing pistol-toting government-conspiracy theorist nut-job with an educated, articulate, classical music enthusiast with a blue-color work ethic and a cutting sense of humor?

Answer: Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire.

For those familiar with nature writing (aka environmental non-fiction) Abbey hardly needs an introduction. And his work, Desert Solitaire, which describes his experience as a ranger in Arches National Monument near Moab,Utah in the late 1950s is canonical.

Desert Solitaire is in many ways fascinatingly schizophrenic, but unified in both theme (that a natural experience is both mystical and scientific, touching and brutal) and style (Abbey's prose fluctuates between terse and florid). Like all good nature writing, Abbey will offer the reader an extended natural history of the area, complete with stories of man, woman, flower, tree, and rock. NOTE: I always like to be near a computer with Google images available so that I can see the wide variety of flora and fauna described.

But what makes Desert Solitaire great is Abbey's gruff, romantic passion for the desert and his equally gruff and passionate prose. And by passionate, I do not mean purple:

From his introduction

This [book, Desert Solitaire] is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. A bloody rock. Don't drop it on your foot -- throw it at something big and glassy. What have you got to lose?

Sometimes, Desert Solitaire is unsettling. Abbey ponders whether he could kill a rabbit with a rock. So he tries it and "brains the little bastard" where it stood. Later, he declares his soul "clean as snow."

There's a story of a love-triangle gone wrong during the uranium mining days. There's the story of Abbey's voyage down Glen Canyon, whose fate is to be dammed and turned into Lake Powell. And, of course, there's Abbey's humor -- In arguing for eliminating all motorized transport in natural parks he states,

we have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms,and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our natural parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places

In summary, Desert Solitaire is one of those rare books that is poetic and barbaric, irreverent and sanctimoniousness, scientific and mystical. But overall, captivating.

My rating: 10 freshly cut-down billboards out of a possible 10.