I read the desert books in a pack of three, finishing two before reaching Zion.
“Red Rock Stories,” “An Unspoken Hunger” and “Desert Solitaire,” the one I hadn’t finished and so kept reading for the fourth or fifth time. One definition of a classic: How often we read through our ages.
I once carried Edward Abbey’s “Solitaire” in my pack on wildfires, the book slim enough among the headlamp, fusees, rations, aluminum foil fire shelter we called shake-n-bakes, Gore-Tex coat, gallon of water for the crew to go with the five quarts for me, around 40 pounds in all. A sooty paperback was well worth the extra ounces.
We all have these kind of memories: The moment of learning President Kennedy had been shot, young enough for my father to carry me on his shoulders at the vigil in Honolulu. The 1971 LA earthquake. Where you were that night in 2016 when Donald Trump was declared the victor. I was in a darkened restaurant bar with one other patron in the room in downtown Grass Valley, California, a TV on, John King explaining. She was pleased. I was only stunned. America even dumber than I had thought, and I might still have been a Republican then.
And sometime in the ’80s reading “Desert Solitaire” during breaks on the fire line and in camp, ultimately inspired to try my hand, submitting to Outside, my first rejection.
Now, decades later, I’m informed by “Desert Cabal” and “All the West that Remains,” which pulled the curtains back, revealed the writer as a man, flawed, despoiled through journalism, an irony for me.
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“Red Rock Stories” began as a chapbook for Congress and a president in a political act of persuasion.
Whether it worked or President Obama would have birthed the Bears Ears National Monument with his signature anyway, well, the essays remain all that, preserved in a book I bought for Christmas and kept for myself.
I had chatted up an older guy near the Torrey House Press sales table at Church and State in Salt Lake City as I do, as I embarrassed my kids well into adolescence, as my wife mostly tolerates with a smile, by now only partly amazed at my gall.
I had never heard of Stephen Trimble before I met him, just as I had never heard of Beat poet Gary Snyder until I moved to Grass Valley/Nevada City, California, where he lives. Even though Snyder was the model for the main character in “The Dharma Bums,” which I dubbed the On the Trail companion I preferred to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
Trimble, named among Utah’s top 15 artists for his writing and his photography, I later learned, led the effort to gather the Red Rock Stories essays from Utah writers with Terry Tempest Williams. He recommended this one, perfect in the pairing.
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I had heard of Terry Tempest Williams. Often and everywhere. I just hadn’t read any of her books. Never related to essays by her or excerpts of her longer works, in my dimness wondering what the fuss was about.
I don’t know, like her writing struck me as music, sure, but more chimes in an earnest breeze. Maybe I’d been ruined by grittier work, like Abbey’s. I felt the fault was mine.
“An Unspoken Hunger” cured me. At least a few of the chapters connected — one about bears, her hike with Abbey, finding the wild in a New York City sump land for a marsh. A batting average, and the appropriate metaphor here is home runs. But they felt more like a needle to the arm, quick like that. Relief at last is what I mean.
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I read because I write. And I write because I read, starting well before I knew my letters. I blame my parents reading to me each night in bed, when I believed stuffed animals had names and souls and I babbled up stories about them.
I read this trinity, indeed holy in its way, because I had signed up for a Torrey House writing workshop, Voices for the West, which like reading with my parents is more about listening than anything.
Listening to Pam Houston, our teacher for the long weekend. Listening to classmates, some of their writing exercise results these instant poignant pearls, intimidating. I too often voiced mine, growing my courage to do so myself and maybe to model that shapeless throwings of clay are OK for now, mindful of another instructor, Craig Childs’ assessment that writing for him is really rewriting. Over and over again. Ah, as water sculpted Zion these eons.
Maybe I viewed the books as homework or I hoped to channel something going in. The hikes were probably better for the purpose. The first morning we walked at the edge and through an old fire scar on a mesa serving as best seat above Springdale of the canyon walls around us. The second morning we went into the park along the Virgin River, running high and tan. I lost myself in an assignment sitting in a soft silt spot on the beach, in the hush of the flow just past my feet.
I learned fresh lessons, like collecting what Houston calls glimmers — objects, moments — her base paint, basically. I relearned about dialogue, how seldom we actually hear what others say and how to use that in our stories.
Again, as always, I experienced humility, ultimately reveling in the talent of my fellow humans and noting our larger community, aspiring to accomplished. A circle, then, in person and on the page.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.