41 pages • 1 hour read
Edward AbbeyDesert Solitaire
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Havasu”
Abbey recounts a story of his visit to the village of Havasu, fifteen years before his gig as an Arches park ranger. He had learned of the village by accident, stopping by the Grand Canyon on his way to Los Angeles with some college friends. Drawn by curiosity, young Abbey walked the fourteen-mile trail down the canyon into Havasu, as his friends proceeded to Los Angeles without him.
Abbey wound up staying five weeks in this Indian village. He spends his first night in a lodge for tourists there, but then decamps to the ruins of an old mining camp where he “lived, mostly alone except for ghosts, for the next thirty-five days” (247).
Abbey kept mostly to himself during this sojourn, doing “mostly nothing” but catching an occasional rainbow trout and walking into the main part of the village about once a week to buy food. He participated in the Great Havsupai Sacred Peach Festival and Four-Day Marathon Friendship Dance, and briefly befriended a few of the villagers, including a colorful character named Spoonhead.
One day, Abbey went for a long, exploratory walk and then realized that if he went back the way he came, he would not make it back to his camp before nightfall. So he looked for a shortcut and got himself very lost, and almost killed, taking steep downward paths and often dropping into stagnant waters. He believed he was going to die, and he sobbed. Then a storm broke, complicating his predicament even more. In the end, he spent the night in a cave, drenched and miserable, yet happy to be alive.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Dead Man at Grandview Point”
Abbey is called upon to join a search party, seeking a lost tourist whose abandoned car has been found near Grandview Point, roughly fifty miles from Abbey’s station in the Arches. The search party includes Abbey’s brother, Johnny, who also works for the park service this summer.
The members of the search party do not expect to find the car’s owner alive. He has been identified as a 60-year-old amateur photographer who has never been in this region before: “[A]t least two days and possibly more spent in the desert heat of August with only what water (if any) he could carry is too much for a man of sixty, unfamiliar with the terrain and the climate” (263).
In the end, it’s Johnny who finds the dead man’s body stretched out under a juniper tree. Abbey and Johnny try to retrace the man’s steps, determining that the man had retraced his own steps twice, panicked, eventually used the juniper tree for some shade, and never got up again.
Abbey notes that the view from near where the man died is spectacular and he feels “inclined to congratulate the dead man on his choice of jumping-off place; he had good taste” (267).
As the search party carries the man’s body away in a rubber sack, they make crude, irreverent small talk. It is tough labor to transport the dead man through the merciless heat of the afternoon sun, and the men make jokes about this at the dead man’s expense. Abbey refers to this banter as “only natural and wholesome under the circumstances” (269), as none of them had known the deceased man; he was a stranger, not someone whom they would mourn.
Abbey concludes the chapter with some reflections on how death is necessary to make room for new life.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
In the first of these two chapters, Abbey, as a youth, faces potential death by exposure to the elements, but manages to survive. In the second of these chapters, an older man dies from exposure to similar elements, in a nearby vicinity.
The inevitability of death could be said to be a lurking theme throughout the book. In the end, we will all succumb to something. There is no choice about this, although, from Abbey’s perspective, the form that death takes does matter, at least aesthetically. Abbey sees the tourist’s demise as a relatively dignified and beautiful death, though, as Abbey acknowledges, the tourist may have felt otherwise.
That these chapters appear in succession suggests a unifying narrative. In the first instance, death is temporarily cheated, so to speak, while in the second, death prevails, as it eventually must. Abbey seems to relate to the deceased tourist, even going so far as to “envy him the manner” (267) of his passing.
Another theme that re-emerges in these chapters is the lack of sentimentality in the face of nature’s pitilessness. The search-party men feel no obligation to be “respectful” as they transport the dead man’s body. This is reminiscent of the dispassionate joking between Abbey and Newcomb during the episode in which Abbey rescues Newcomb from the quicksand, when there was a strong possibility that the rescue attempt would be unsuccessful and that Newcomb would die there.
Whenever an opportunity arises, Abbey reminds the reader that nature is not sentimental or merciful, and that a pragmatic and realistic orientation to our existence requires that we should not be sentimental either, at least not about human-centered concerns such as mortality.
