Once in the shade we can rest, expand, unsquint our eyes, and see. There are no vacant lots in nature. I hadnt forgotten the moon-eyed horse. There are mysteries enough right here in America, in Utah, in the canyons. A new and formidable canyon opens on the left, with a broad delta of pebbled beach, mud banks, rocks and boulders and driftwood issuing fanwise from its mouth. Hire a crew of pretty girls, call them rangerettes, let them sell the tickets and give the campfire talks. There are a number of springs similar to this one in the American desert. I cannot attempt to deal with it here.[29]. The flowers we cannot see but easily imagine will also be blooming up there in the cool larkspur, lupine, Indian paintbrush, the Sego lily, perhaps a few columbines. Life has come to a standstill, at least for the hour. Viviano ordered a second pitcher of beer, got up suddenly from his chair, tripped over my outstretched legs and fell flat on the floor. I cant believe it. My brother is waiting for me and by the lost expression on his face I understand at once that he has found our man. I come out on the surface of a rolling plain of cross-bedded sandstone, the petrified dunes of the Navajo formation, and win the view Id been hoping for. A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. In the evening the wind stops. Even the red ants keep to the inside of their evil nests at noon, though they will come spilling out eager to fight if riled with a stick Ive tried it, naturally. We have seen millions march without a whimper of protest into an inferno. From there its a long but easy scramble to the rim of the canyon. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. All alone, I didnt have to be brave. His doctors gave him six months. When I was there I looked at the water and smelled it and ran my hands through it and after a while, since the sampling of desert water is in my line, I tasted it, carefully, and spat it out. How about a signal fire? Back of the cabin are the lonesome Morrison hills, utterly lifeless piles of clay and shale and broken rock, a dismal scene. Our sleeping bags are up on the rim in the Land Rover and we have nothing to eat but nuts and raisins. Even if I had it in my hands Id hesitate to blast a fellow creature at such close range, shooting between my own legs at a living target flat on solid rock thirty inches away. Cowboys like Scobie and Leslie McKee, now poor thanks to mechanized cattle farming, are also hurttheir image reduced to Hollywood caricatures and tourist attractions. Slowly and painfully, leaning as much of my weight as I could against the sandstone slide, I applied more and more pressure to the stick, pushing my body upward until I was again stretched out full length above it. The air is still and cool and I am glad that the heat of the day is finally gone. In his youth long before asphalt he had driven the first motor stage between Monticello and Moab, a unique bus line which, according to Les, carried three classes of passengers: first class rode, second class walked, third class pushed. Should I attempt to feed him? For the flash flood of the desert poorly resembles water. I come to a second dripping spring, water seeping from a fissure far above, falling in spray upon a massive slab of rock at the foot of the wall. Insofar as I follow a schedule it goes about like this: For me the work week begins on Thursday, which I usually spend in patrolling the roads and walking out the trails. We are not far from Grandview Point and the view from near the juniper is equally spectacular. Through most of the afternoon he lay there. Now, after the recent rains, which were also responsible for the amazing growth of grass and flowers we have seen, we find the trail marvelously eroded, stripped of all vestiges of soil, trenched and gullied down to bare rock, in places more like a stairway than a road. (Only a trip by air or space is more abstract, more synthetic, from the passengers point of view. Light. I pull off my mud-caked boots, twice their original weight, sit close to the fire and eat a tremendous supper, while Newcomb fills the air with huge clouds of fragrant, philosophical pipe smoke. Mondays are very nice. Time for breakfast. Which is also for that matter a little bit higher, according to the surveyors. Keeping their mounts clear of the quicksand, they each tossed a loop over the cows head, drew the knot firm around her neck, taking in the slack, and dallied each rope to the horns of their respective saddles. I may also, if I am lucky, find one or two or three with whom I can share a little more those rumors from the underground where whatever hope we still have must be found. When he finally departed my best wishes went with him: may his fan belt snap, his tires develop blisters, his fuel pump succumb to chronic vapor lock may he never come back. Next your campgrounds, you gotta do something about your campgrounds, theyre a mess. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. The desert storm is over and through the pure sweet pellucid air the cliff swallows and the nighthawks plunge and swerve, making cries of hunger and warning and who knows? But that problem can be deferred for a while. Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? In deep stillness, in a somber solemn light, these beings stand, these fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary. I think of the second movement from Beethovens Eroica. Sheer carelessness a gust of wind carries a flaming piece of paper into the dried-out tangle of a willow thicket; the flames spread explosively; in a minute the mouth of the canyon is choked with smoke and fire and there is nothing I can do but get out of there, quick, as the flames rush down through the jungle toward Ralph, waiting for me in the tethered boats. And they should. Drank it all, except a few drops which I poured on my fingers and dabbed on my aching forehead. Chapter 1 Summary: "The First Morning" In the late 1950s, author Edward Abbey takes a position as a seasonal park ranger in Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah. We even supply the firewood, in the form of pinyon pine logs and old fence posts of cedar, which it will be my task to find and haul to the campgrounds. Moabs uranium deposits induce another kind of greed: after the nuclear bombings of Japan, the Atomic Energy Commission encouraged a wild scramble for uranium in Utah and Colorado. My second sensation is the feeling of guilt. I am content, however, to view the remains from below. Theres a girl back in Denver. The next step was to stake a claim and have it filed with the county recorder. The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. This canyon, like all the others, forks again and again; I keep to the right-hand branch each time and finally arrive at a dead end, a box, with unscalable walls rising three, four, five hundred feet straight up toward the hot blue sky. The silence settled in again. Print Word PDF This section contains 617 words (approx. The mice are silent, watching me from their hiding places, but the wind is still blowing and outside the ground is covered with snow. Glad to get out of the Land Rover and away from the gasoline fumes, I lead the way on foot down the Flint Trail, moving what rocks I can out of the path. Mountain people tend to become inbred and degenerate, get goiters, and no one for a long time has lived in the sea. We can breathe. I could see the blue of the sky between his ribs, through the eyesockets of his skull. I will ask and the people will say to me: Viviano Jacquez? The northwestern part of this park, known as the Kolob area, has until recently been saved as almost virgin wilderness. I come to where I had turned back the night before, a deep pool that fills the canyon from wall to wall. Impartial and neutralist, taking no chances, I wish good fortune to both sides, good swill for all. The new moon finally comes, edging above the rimrock, bright as a silver shield. A fresh golden light breaks through and now in the east, over the turrets and domes, stands the rainbow sign, a double rainbow with one foot in the canyon of the Colorado and the other far north in Salt Wash. Possibly a spearhead. The badge gives me the authority to arrest malefactors and evildoers, Floyd explains. The choice became apparent to me this morning when I stepped out of a Park Service housetrailer my caravan to watch for the first time in my life the sun come up over the hoodoo stone of Arches National Monument. Through moonlight and darkness, as the moon is revealed, then concealed, by the turning of the canyon walls, I continue the march toward camp. And the bush was alive, each of its many branches writhing in a sort of dance and all clothed in a luminous aura of smoky green, fiery blue, flame-like yellow. We may not have brought enough food but at least weve got plenty of Bull Durham. Roys no Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife. Still more hundreds and thousands float or paddle each year down the currents of the Salmon, the Snake, the Allagash, the Yampa, the Green, the Rio Grande, the Ozark, the St. Croix and those portions of the Colorado which have not yet been destroyed by the dam builders. The canyon filled with heat and stillness. Like that of the cottonwood, the foliage of the aspen responds to the slightest movement of air even a blow on the trunk with my stick makes the leafy assembly vibrate like bangles. Hes dead now. I take a drink from the canvas water-bag dangling near my head, the water cooled by evaporation. Ralph takes a photograph, puts the camera back into the waterproof pouch which he hangs across his chest, and climbs into his boat. Linked to Pegasus by one star is Andromeda, the chained lady, low in the eastern sky. But this is nonsense. It is the southern end of the Waterpocket Fold, a fifty-mile-long monocline or ridge of warped sandstone, eroded along its base into triangular studs of naked rock that look, from here, like the teeth of a mowing machine. He would wait now for whatever had to happen. Of the genus. Venus. This turned fatal when Graham killed Husk in a fit of rage and accidentally got himself killed too. But now they are gone, some six or seven hundred years later, though not as a race extinguished: their descendants survive in the Hopi, Zui and other Pueblo tribes of Arizona and New Mexico. Thus we meditate upon the strangers death. And his reaction is the typical one; he responds to prejudice by cultivating a prejudice of his own against those whom he feels are even lower in the American hierarchy than he is: against the Indians, the Mexicans, the Negroes. For myself I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. Farther down the canyon he stepped over parts of a human body an arm encased in the sleeve of a jacket, the shoulder gnawed down to the bone and a head, the head of a man, separated from its trunk by a blow of some incredible violence. I know, for I was one of the lucky few (there could have been thousands more) who saw Glen Canyon before it was drowned. Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Biography. In sailing the ocean we reach the other shore and find, as we should have expected, everything much the same on either side. He comments on the decline of the large desert predators, particularly bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, and wildcats, and criticizes the roles ranchers and the policies of the Department of Agriculture have had in the elimination of these animals, which in turn has fostered unchecked growth in deer and rabbit populations, thereby damaging the delicate balance of the desert ecosystem.[7]. During the voyage we see only the unvarying expanse of heaving green or gray, and an empty sky, and not very much of either the horizon at sea is only twelve miles away. Raised in the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains, I remember clearly how we used to chop blocks of ice out of Crooked Creek, haul them with team and wagon about a mile up the hill to the farmhouse and store them away in sawdust for use in the summer. First things first. I dont know. I happen to glance out the little window near the refrigerator and see two gopher snakes on my verandah engaged in what seems to be a kind of ritual dance. Was he real or only a bad dream? That made him think. The royalties from the sale of oil, uranium, coal and natural gas, while hardly enough to relieve the Indians general poverty, have enabled them to develop a tribal timber business, to provide a few college scholarships for the brainiest (not necessarily the best) of their young people, to build community centers and finance an annual tribal fair (a source of much enjoyment to The People), and to drill a useful number of water wells for the benefit of the old sheep and goat raising families still hanging on in the backlands. With good reason; they had much to be fearful of, the swine. My cherrywood walking stick leans against the trailerhouse wall only a few feet away but Im afraid that in leaning over for it I might stir up the rattler or spill some hot coffee on his scales. Ive got a big pot of pinto beans simmering on the stove. After thawing out my boots over the gas flame I pull them on and come back to the doorway. Better fill your water cans there; might be your last chance. 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