Let us therefore steal a slogan from the Development Fever Faction in the Park Service. Of all the featherless beasts only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. A storm from the northwest builds with howling wind as he traverses the rocky, winding road upward to the trailer house about eight miles away. Denver Phoenix Sacramento Salt Lake Tulsa OK City etc. Petrified wood is also common in the canyon country. Occasionally we lay a paddle over the side, drop the blade in the water and with the slightest, most infinitesimal of exertions turn the double boat for a view in a different direction, saving ourselves the trouble somewhat greater of turning our heads or craning our necks. A very tall horse. The horse remained rigid, ears up. To conserve bodily moisture and energy the rodents remain in their burrows during the day. Suddenly it exploded into fire. Abbey also describes his difficulty finding the language, faith, and philosophy to adequately capture his understanding of nature and its effect on the soul.[16]. [13], Down the River, the longest chapter of the book, recalls a journey by boat down Glen Canyon undertaken by Abbey and an associate, in part inspired by John Wesley Powell's original voyage of discovery in 1869. After lunch we get into the cab of the government pickup, all three of us, and tour the park. This follows from the interesting fact that a motorized vehicle, when not at rest, requires a volume of space far out of proportion to its size. Some of them in translucent obsidian volcanic glass, Apache tears., Lying within the bounds of a national monument, these rocks and artifacts are protected by law. Technology adds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts. [17], However, Abbey deliberately highlights many of the paradoxes and comments on them in his final chapter, particularly in regard to his conception of the desert landscape itself. Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year, the visitation, as they call it, mounts ever upward. Listing different nearby species, Abbey cant help but personify the animals as he marvels at their beauty and complexity. Abbey sides with the Preservers, as parking lots and paved roads spoil the point of nature, which ought to liberate people from technology and refresh their lives in society. For in addition to the unnumbered exasperations and frustrations which plague the small businessman, and the customary hazards of work in a mine, suggestions of another danger nuclear radiation could not be entirely ignored. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. The cows would live to breed again, those that didnt eat too much larkspur; the new crop of calves had a life expectancy of at least one full year; only the yearling steers would be shipped off in the fall to meet the hook and the hammer. He makes no move. he is fast asleep up there, dreaming of a previous incarnation when wings were only a dream. It is a hot, sunken, desolate place, closed in and still, lacking even a view. Husk was faintly troubled; but grateful on the other hand that she seemed so unconcerned by the rapid reduction of their savings and the so-far worthless results of his prospecting. But as I came up with the others, Viviano, grinning through his dusty face, yelled at me: Around the bend, only nine son of bitch more, we get the Jesus Christ out of here.. Abbey also comments on some of the particular cultural artifacts of the region, such as the Basque population, the Mormons, and the archaeological remains of the Ancient Puebloan peoples in cliff dwellings, stone petroglyphs, and pictographs. But here as elsewhere in the canyonlands they left a record of their passage. When you reach this point you are doomed. Well, damn the lot of them, I think, rolling down the broad asphalt trail to Moab at a safe and sane eighty-five, not forgetting to keep one eye skinned for a sign of Fred Burkett the local highway patrolman, whose favorite hiding place north of town was behind a Chamber of Commerce billboard welcoming tourists to Moab, Uranium Capital of the World, was until I leveled the billboard to the ground one night with a bucksaw which I had borrowed for the job from the United States National Park Service, Department of the Interior (Help Keep America Beautiful) good thing Fred wasnt there at the time; his new Plymouth Interceptor wouldve got badly wrinkled assuming he was asleep as usual. Alone-ness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) I walk among thistles and coarse dying goldenrod (signs of overgrazing) and a kind of sunflower called Five-Nerve Helianthella, knock a few heads off helping to spread the seed and ponder the meaning of my solitude. He raised his head, twitched one ear, watching me. They stay in their tunnels and lairs under the rock, listening to the strange two-legged monster stumbling over their homes. And as they flew over the claims Mr. Graham switched on the scintillometer wired to a case of storage batteries which he carried in the plane and pointed out to Husk the pointer readings on the dials, indicative he explained of radioactive minerals somewhere in the mesa below. I see it now; the point is to stay flat. But he was in the sun now and I was in the shade. Husk said that Mr. Graham was a genuine Christian gentleman if he ever seen one and invited him home to meet the wife and kids. The gradual cell-by-cell replacement or infiltration of buried logs by hot, silica-bearing waters in a process so exact that the original cellular structure of the wood is preserved in all its detail forms this desert jewelry agatized rainbows in rock. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I crept back down. Among these people a liberal hospitality is taken for granted and selfishness regarded with horror. As does the nation as a whole, for that matter. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. This happened despite the fact that infant mortality rates among the Indians are still much higher than among the American population as a whole. These hard-drinking fellows whom I wish to praise are trying to get drunk on three-point-two! Because they need us. Long live diversity, long live the earth! I think of music, and of a musical analogy to what seems to me the unique spirit of desert places. in an old perverted Plymouth came hurtling down the highway, veered suddenly to the right, whizzed through a fence and plunged straight down like helldivers into the Big Cut. Ranger, where is Arches National Monument? Everywhere you see them now, from California to Florida, from Texas to Times Square, crowding the streets in their big white hats, tight pants, flowered shirts, and high-heeled fruity boots. However, its too late now. What I need is a braking device. Being a cold-blooded creature, of course, he takes his temperature from that of the immediate environment in this case my body. Hes a good cowboy, I suppose; at least he knows the basic skills of the trade: can shoe a horse, rope and brand and castrate a calf, fix a flat tire, stretch barbed wire, dynamite a beaver dam or lay out an irrigation ditch. But now their problems were only beginning. The sun is touching the fretted tablelands on the west. Wish them luck and (if lovers) innumerable offspring, a life of happily ever after. A big car rolls up a Buick Behemoth I believe it was, or it may have been a Cadillac Crocodile, a Dodge Dinosaur or a Mercury Mastodon, Im not sure which and this. Viviano, undaunted by the heat and still showing off, sprang on his horse yes, literally vaulted into the saddle and rode yelling and flailing and whistling into the herd. In the sweet chill of the dawn I wake up, hearing the ratchetlike screech of a squirrel. 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. I also hope to find the flower called Rocky Mountain Pussytoes, a favorite of mine for no better reason than the name. [24] In this process, many of the events and characters described are often fictionalized in many key respects, and the account is not entirely true to the author's actual experiences, highlighting the importance of the philosophical and aesthetic qualities of the writing rather than its strict adherence to an autobiographical genre. I could see the blue of the sky between his ribs, through the eyesockets of his skull. I would have plenty of time to write not only my epitaph but my own elegy. Thirst was getting to me. In the shade of the big trees, whose leaves tinkle musically, like gold foil, above our heads, we eat lunch and fill our bellies with the cool sweet water, and lie on our backs and sleep and dream. Who runs horses out here? We were about twenty miles from the nearest ranch. There on the sandy floor we find his footprints: where he had entered the ravine, where he became panicky and retraced his way not once but twice, and where he had struggled up an alluvial bank to the ledge. How can you exploit a man who enjoys his work? Why I went there no longer matters; what I found there is the subject of this book. (Bring your own water.) Irrigation systems were then built with the cooperative labor of all, the irrigable land divided fairly among the member families, and the back country canyon and mesa left open to all who might wish to engage in cattle raising, as well as farming. But I was hungry and thirsty, as always. I thought so, he says; that explains it. For without such protection the area would soon be picked clean by souvenir hunters, acquisitive rockhounds and the commercial merchandisers of stones. Many amateur prospectors risked their lives trying to strike it rich, or died. From Turnbow Cabin I drive northwesterly on a twisting road above Salt Valley past a labyrinth of fins and pinnacles toward the Devils Garden. A bush growing out of the hard sun-baked mud. feet high, of silvery driftwood wedged between boulders, of mysterious and inviting subcanyons to the side, within which I can see living stands of grass, cane, salt cedar, and sometimes the delicious magical green of a young cottonwood with its ten thousand exquisite leaves vibrating like spangles in the vivid air. Where trails or primitive dirt roads already exist, the Industry expects it hardly needs to ask that these be developed into modern paved highways. The current carries us on its back smoothly south and west toward the Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez, but with many a wonderful meander on the way. And then the sun appears, its hydrogen cauldrons brimming so to speak with plasmic fires, and the tyranny of its day begins. He lacks the drive to get ahead of his fellows or to figure out ways and means of profiting from other peoples labor. And when would the road be built? What little water he may need can also be extracted from the flesh of his prey. The gas comes from two steel bottles in a shed outside; the water comes by gravity flow from a tank buried in a hill close by. I want to talk to you.. At eight oclock I put on badge and ranger hat and go to work, checking in at headquarters by radio and taking my post at the entrance station to greet and orient whatever tourists may appear. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or . The floor consists of warped, odd-size planks. A Season in the Wilderness, POLEMIC: INDUSTRIAL TOURISM AND THE NATIONAL PARKS, COWBOYS AND INDIANS Thought-provoking and mystical. And a big one feet like frying pans.. Ill be back before Im fairly out of sight. The mere sight of cold mountains on the horizon refreshes Abbey, leading him to believe that all of nature, by simply existing, plays a similar role in refreshing urban city dwellers. Here I was able to climb upward, a few centimeters at a time, by bracing myself against the opposite sides and finding sufficient niches for fingers and toes. The flow may reappear farther down the canyon, surfacing briefly for a second time, a third time, diminishing in force until it vanishes completely and for good. To human ears their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. As I poured the stinking water out of them and pulled them on and laced them up I discovered myself bawling again for the third time in three hours, the hot delicious tears of victory. Mondays are very nice. We sit outside our tent, enjoying the weather. We are free as we go stumbling and sweating along to say exactly what we please, without fear of offending. Before beginning the morning chores I like to sit on the sill of my doorway, bare feet planted on the bare ground and a mug of hot coffee in hand, facing the sunrise. I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time. For ceremony. There they wait, day after day, week after week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening we can imagine for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust above their heads. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, said a wise man. Still within sight of the housetrailer, I can see the princess plume with its tall golden racemes; the green ephedra or Mormon tea, from which Indians and pioneers extracted a medicinal drink (contains ephedrine), the obnoxious Russian thistle, better known as tumbleweed, an exotic; pepperweed, bladderweed, snakeweed, matchweed, skeleton weed the last-named so delicately formed as to be almost invisible; the scrubby little wavyleaf oak, stabilizer of sand dunes; the Apache plume, poor cousin of the cliffrose; gray blackbrush, most ubiquitous and humble of desert plants, which will grow where all else has given up; more annuals primrose, sourdock, yellow and purple beeplant, rockcress, wild buckwheat, grama grass, and five miles north across the floor of Salt Valley, acres and acres of the coral-colored globemallow. Time to inspect the garden. Above the mesa the sun hangs behind streaks and streamers of wind-whipped clouds. Wasnt there a cloud in the whole state of Utah? A variety of asters are blooming along the road and among the dunes; with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible. Of course in an emergency we could always descend again into The Maze, hike down to the river, build a raft, float fifty miles down to Hite, and hitchhike a ride from there back to civilization, if anyone happened to be going that way. A man who enjoys his work the nearest ranch among the American population as a whole, for matter. A desert solitaire the first morning incarnation when wings were only a dream among these people a liberal hospitality is for. Of course, he takes his temperature from that of the dawn I up. The strange two-legged monster stumbling over their homes bush growing out of sight forgotten? POLEMIC: INDUSTRIAL TOURISM the... 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