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 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Cowboys and Indians”
Abbey assists his neighbor, Roy Scobie, proprietor of Roy Scobie’s Redrock Ranch, in retrieving his herd of cattle that wandered away: “The cattle wander far over the open range, driven by hunger and thirst, and forget who they belong to. Why no fences? Because in much of the canyon country there is no ground to dig postholes in–nothing but solid rock” (104).
Abbey and Scobie are accompanied in their task by Roy’s “hired man” (102), Viviano Jacquez, and it’s a grueling multi-day excursion for the three desert-hardened men. The cows don’t want to move, much less be shepherded home; Abbey speaks of them with raw contempt: “Ugly brutes, bound for a summer in the high meadows and then the slaughter house–too bloody good for them, I was thinking” (105). The men show the cows little mercy: “When they stopped we yelled and whistled at them, beat their gaunt hipbones with our bridal reins, and kicked them in the ribs” (104).
Abbey describes Roy and Viviano at length. Though Roy is “only about seventy years old,” (109) he is obsessed with death and the potential dangers associated with aging. Abbey, bemused by Roy’s inveterate melancholy, would comfort him if he could, but knows that his words would be of no use. Abbey also describes Roy as incorrigibly parsimonious, both with wages to his help and with food: “He hopes that by starving his employees they won’t live long enough to collect their wages” (111). Abbey also notes that Roy’s “paying guests don’t fare much better” and therefore “seldom come back for a second season at Roy Scobie’s Redrock Ranch” (111). Still, in all, Abbey deems Roy a “good man in most ways” (110).
Viviano, by contrast, is a high-spirited younger man, a capable worker who womanizes and drinks and is “completely and dependably totally unreliable,” (106) yet he works for very little and seems to enjoy the various labors he performs. His “one problem” (106) is that he has internalized the Anglos’ ethnic prejudice and would “prefer to merge into the pale-faced millions who own and operate America” (107).
At the end of this chapter, from a perspective of years later, Abbey reports that Viviano is said to have disappeared at some point, but no one is sure to where, and that Roy Scobie passed away from a heart attack while standing on a chair and hanging a picture.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Cowboys and Indians, Part II”
Abbey acknowledges that he is often lonely for human company, and that the world inside his solitary mind can feel suffocating at times. He reflects on the Indians who once inhabited the Arches, whose petroglyphs and rock paintings remain. He wonders: “What drove the ancient ones out of the canyonlands?” (128).
Abbey notes that in Arizona and New Mexico, the Navajo are making a “comeback” (128), in that their population is steadily increasing. Nonetheless, the descendants of the old Navajos are largely mired in poverty and cultural marginalization in the Anglo-centric world of modern America. In order to survive, they are “forced off the reservation and into rural slums along the major highways and into the urban slums of the white man’s towns that surround the reservation” (129). Some Navajos try to assimilate into white culture, but most seem fated to a kind of perpetual and vexing disorientation, as “nothing in their nature or tradition has prepared them to adapt to the regimentation of application forms and time clocks” (133). Industrial tourism provides some employment but “exacts a spiritual price for those dependent upon it for their livelihood” (135).
Towards the end of the chapter, Abbey observes that, due to the forces of modernization and automation, cowboys–people like Roy Scobie and Viviano–are also largely out of work: “Cowboys and Indians disappear, dying off or transforming themselves by torturous degree into something quite different” (140).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
In Chapter 7, Abbey details some of the character deficits in both his companions, Roy and Viviano, yet his rough-hewn affection for them is palpable. In Chapter 8, we glean why: for all their shortcomings, Roy and Viviano are what Abbey might call “genuine” people, in that they are essentially people of the land, men who interact vividly and viscerally with their natural surroundings such that they instinctively belong there, in contrast to the tourists and the “make-believe cowboys” (138).
In these chapters, Abbey continues to hammer away at his theme of the corrosive influence of modern culture and an exploding human population on the wilderness.
It’s notable that Abbey talks about his loneliness at the start of the second of these chapters. He describes “discover[ing] with a sudden shock that I was alone. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table” (120). And yet we recall, at the beginning of the book, he expresses a profound need to be free of human company, in order to not be distracted from his fundamental relationship to the natural world. Now, he says that “the only thing better than solitude is society” (121). This could be interpreted as a shift in his point of view, though perhaps not necessarily.
