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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Cliffrose and Bayonets”
Abbey takes “inventory” (27) of his surroundings. He leisurely observes—and provides detailed commentary-laden descriptions of—the cliffrose shrub, the cactus flowers, the yucca, the juniper tree, the golden racemes, the pinyon pine. In the middle of this contented walk through his “garden,” he indulges an impulse to aggravate a nest of harvester ants by shoving his walking stick “into the bowels of their hive” (31-32). Abbey unapologetically dislikes ants and compares them unfavorably to scorpions.
As per his ranger duties, Abbey drives through the park, surveying the Arches and other areas, and commentating on the wildlife. He reflects balefully on the dearth of predators, particularly coyotes, whose populations have been decimated by “livestock interests and their mercenaries from the Department of the Interior” (38).
At one point, Abbey sees a rabbit jump from the brush and then freeze in fear under a bush. Abbey decides, as an “experiment” (40), to imagine that he himself is starving. He picks up a rock and flings it at the rabbit’s head, killing it. But he does not gather in his kill; rather, he “leaves [his] victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate [the dead rabbit] more than [Abbey] could” because the rabbit’s flesh is likely infected (41). Yet something about the successful kill affords a rekindled sense of strength and vigor to Abbey’s spirit. He adds, “I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow” (41).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks”
Abbey describes the rhythm of his weekly work routine: patrolling the roads and trails on Thursday; inspecting and preparing the campgrounds for visitors on Friday; dealing with the tourists and campers over the weekend; cleaning up after them on Monday; making forays into Moab for supermarket supplies and patronizing the beer joints on Tuesday and Wednesday, which are his days off.
Abby expresses contentment in his job, and imagines returning to it, season after season. But then, at his trailer, he receives a surprise visit from three men, a survey crew from the Bureau of Public Roads. The crew is laying out a new road that will, they say, bring “ten, twenty, thirty times as many tourists” (54) into Arches. This unsettles Abbey deeply.
It is now–at the time of Abbey writes his memoir–several years later, and Abbey reports that the road was indeed built and park visitors have increased a hundredfold. “Industrial Tourism” (55) has, to Abbey’s eyes, despoiled the Arches. Abbey also itemizes the many other national parks that have endured a similar fate, corrupted by “unnecessary, destructive development” (58).
Abbey discusses the deleterious effects of “Industrial Tourism” on both the national park system and the tourists themselves, whom he calls “the chief victims of the system” (64), as they never leave their cars. He offers a few “sensible proposals for the salvation of both parks and people” (65), including: “No more cars in national parks” (65), “[n]o more new roads in national parks” (67), and “[p]ut[ting] the park rangers to work” (69)–i.e., getting the park rangers out of their temperature-controlled offices and onto the trails.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Rocks”
Abbey names and describes a large number of the beautiful and exotic rocks that can found in Arches National Monument, rocks which are “protected,” meaning that it’s illegal to remove them from the park.
Abbey proceeds to recall that for about a decade, beginning in 1949, there had been a gold rush of sorts in the area, not for gold, but for the uranium contained in a type of rock known as carnotite. The US Atomic Energy Commission, in light of the necessity for uranium in making nuclear bombs, had “provided a guaranteed market at a guaranteed price […] for all of the uranium ore–at or above a specific grade–which the miners could produce. Plus a discovery bonus of ten thousand dollars” (79). This brought many prospectors to the area, only a relative few of whom struck it rich, and many of whom wound up suffering the ill effects of radiation sickness.
Abbey details the story of one such unlucky prospector, Albert T. Husk, who came to the area with his wife, his son, and his two daughters. Shortly after arriving in Moab, Husk made the acquaintance of one Charles Graham in Club 66, a local tavern, and Graham convinced Husk that the best uranium mining options had been claimed. However, Graham himself owned a few promising properties in the mining areas, and offered Husk a partnership. For $2250, which was half of Husk’s family savings, Husk could take legal ownership of 40% of Graham’s holdings–so long as Husk was willing to take on the actual labor of the location work. Graham himself was, so he said, too preoccupied with other commitments to take on the work himself, which was his reason for offering the partnership in the first place. He provided Husk with a Geiger counter and other critical geological equipment for the work.
Ultimately, despite his grueling toil over a period of some months, Husk never did locate any commercial-grade uranium ore. Meanwhile, Graham, essentially a man of leisure, commenced an affair with Husk’s wife while Husk was off for weeks at a time amidst the rocks, accompanied only by his 11-year-old son. The situation came to a violent conclusion in a confrontation between Husk and Graham out in the wilderness that ended with the death of both men. Husk’s son, unable to take himself home, perished shortly afterward in a flash flood. Mrs. Husk, however, did well, in that she sold her husband’s share in the properties to the United States Air Force for $100,000 about a year later.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
One senses that Abbey is comfortable with the inherent violence of nature, that he values wildness far more than human creature comforts, and he mourns the encroachment of the latter upon the former.
In Chapter 4, “Cliffrose and Bayonets,” Abbey’s arguably callous and gratuitously aggressive treatment of the carpenter ants, coupled with his unnecessary slaughter of the rabbit, suggest that he is also quite comfortable with the occasionally violent impulses within himself. He clearly reveres nature, and he also fluidly accepts his own nature, which includes strong preferences, likes and dislikes, and often unreasoned aversions and affections. Through it all, he maintains a steadily dispassionate tone. He seems to observe his own behavior much the same way that he observes the behavior of other animals.
The story in Chapter 6, about Husk and Graham, unfolds in a similar vein. Graham is the stronger man, Husk the weaker one. Thus Graham, the predator, outsmarts and ill-uses Husk, the prey. There does not seem to be any moral judgment here; it’s just the way of things.
Then again, in a sense, Graham’s own death, which but for a few small misjudgments and an unlucky (for Graham) twist or two of fate might have been avoided, seems also to suggest some force of poetic justice at work, as does the reward eventually obtained by Husk’s long-suffering wife.
The ruthlessness of nature–including human nature–is a salient theme in these chapters. Even the flood that ultimately kills Husk’s son, who is perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing, bears out this harshness.
It is this very quality of natural ruthlessness that Abbey would protect if he could. Chapter 5 is essentially a cry of despair against the creeping influence of all things soft, human-centered and prefabricated. Comfort and ease, in and of themselves, are viewed as the corrosive forces that threaten the natural world. It’s not simply that human technology threatens the natural environment; rather, it’s that the human craving for safety, familiarity, and ease may eventually eat up all that is vital and wild and untamed.
