A little over a mile up the hill from Wolf Ranch on the cairn-strewn slickrock trail to Delicate Arch, the hike became a trudge, the once-comfortably-warm afternoon turned torrid, and my normally somewhat reliable internal thermostat went on the fritz. So it goes. You can’t say Abbey didn’t try to warn me!
What is now Arches National Park was once wilderness at least more so than it is now and, according to Cactus Ed Abbey, an environment most inhospitable. As a seasonal ranger at what was known as Arches National Monument in the mid-’50s, he loved nothing better than conspiring with his dark side to keep the tourists at bay.
There being only one dirt road into Arches in those days, and with only Ed and his boss, the head ranger, on the payroll, the desert, indeed, featured solitude on a grand scale. Abbey’s digs were a decrepit trailer on a snake- and bug-infested plot up near Balanced Rock where he held forth, when the mood struck him, interacting with the complaining and curious among his species who wandered every so often into his field of vision.
His now-venerated gruff-yet-eloquent prose style would serve him well in telling the tale of those days in his classic “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness,” which would finally be published in 1968. His essay, The Great American Desert, which appeared nearly a decade later in “The Journey Home,” suffered from similar excellence.
And it would be from the latter that Ranger Jon would draw upon for last Wednesday evening’s “Ranger Talk” up at the Devil’s Garden Campground Amphitheater. The fact that it took place almost exactly 56 years after Ol’ Ed’s first journal entry from Arches added a bit of cachet to the evening.
Utilizing the theme of how some of us desert rats can truly love such an unforgiving physical landscape, the young ranger’s audiovisual presentation introduced the faithful to some of the more threatening critters from Abbey’s scare-the-tourist arsenal
Notable were the conenose kissing bug, the rattlesnake, “plus,” in Abbey’s words, “centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, Gila monsters, and giant hairy desert scorpions.” Not to mention the “immense variety and near infinite number of ants, ticks, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”
“Stay out! Don’t go!” he continues. “Stay home and read a good book! The Great American Desert is an awful place! People get hurt, get sick, get lost! Even if you survive, which is not certain, you will have a miserable time.” Then, of course, there is too much sunshine and too little water.
Under the heading of “the cantankerous and ornery need love, too,” (not to mention the “indolent and melancholy”) you gotta give Ol’ Ed credit. He always gave his all in the service of reducing the collective footprint of humankind in the more pristine locales of his beloved Colorado Plateau.
Other entries from Abbey’s journal, which he began keeping in 1946 while a 19-year-old Army motorcycle cop in postwar Italy, led my fellow desert rats and myself, following a circumnavigation of the “Windows” section, to yet another gathering of the faithful, this time at the Moab Information Center Auditorium the following evening.
During late October-early November 1985, it seems, Ed headed back to Arches from his home in Tucson to meet up with an NBC documentary crew. “Out There in the Rocks” followed a whimsical Abbey as he drove around the old roads of Arches in a vintage red convertible, stopping when the muse struck to point out the lay of the land from back in his ranger days.
When Eric Temple began assembling his own documentary following Abbey’s death in 1989 (released as “Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness” in 1993) he incorporated some of the NBC footage into his own film, mostly interviews with close friends, family, and favorite haunts.
Last Thursday, the Canyonlands Natural History Association presented an edited-down 30-minute version of Temple’s film along with the entire NBC documentary as part of its MIC lecture series. Eric Temple was also in attendance to read from a quite revealing batch of letters about Abbey from past girlfriends and such, and also to participate in a post-film Q&A.
As with most Abbey conclaves, the demographic was all over the map. From teenage hikers, climbers, and canyoneers just off the trail to a quorum of longtime red-rock devotees, the auditorium quickly became standing-and-sitting-room-only.
Returning to the scene of previous red-rock raptures most always proves enlightening and last week’s jaunt to Moab and Arches was no different. The rest of you, however, should just stay out! Stay home and read a good book!
Maybe “Desert Solitaire” or “The Monkey Wrench Gang” or “The Brave Cowboy.”
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.