Response 3: Desert Solitaire

My favorite of the essays is The Serpents of Paradise, which contains perhaps the most enthralling depiction of snakes I have ever read. Each of the three snake stories in this essay reflects a different aspect of how humans relate to animals: the dangerous rattler invading domestic space; the harmless gopher snake, tamed and kept as a pet; and snakes in their own world, secretly observed. Snakes are one of my biggest fears, as I think they are for many people, and so reading anything about them brings an irresistible horror-fascination. But this essay, especially the final story, also evoked beauty and mystery and a primal sense of relationship between humankind and the animals in our environment. In my mind’s eye I can see the intertwining snakes with perfect clarity; I feel the jolt of the eye-contact; I see them shooting straight towards me. There is something complex and impossible to articulate about the story of the intertwining snakes, something that can’t be reduced to anything other than the story itself, and that is what makes is a good story.

Something I’d like to steal from Abbey (in addition to his meticulous attention to sensory impression) is his way of establishing an intimate connection with the reader; of making readers feel they can trust him, even if they don’t always agree with him. Part of how he does this is through his tone, which can be casual, familiar, even folksy. He talks directly to his readers at times, acknowledging he is writing to us and knows we are reading. On page 40 he writes, “Insofar as I follow a schedule it goes about like this:” and then he recounts his weekly schedule to his imagined reader. Another technique that creates a more familiar relationship with the reader is his frequent use of parenthetical statements, often funny or light in tone. Also on page 40: “In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)” Especially in an essay entitled Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks, this strategy softens the hard-line edge of the message and makes it easier to swallow, I think, for those who might resist.

I think Abbey’s directness and frank approach helped to mitigate some aspects of his writing which otherwise might have bothered me more. For instance, he calls himself out repeatedly about his tendency to anthropomorphize, and so I found myself more willing to let it go when I saw it. Sometimes it did bug me a little though, like when he refers to a doe and her fawn as “madonna and child” (32). For some reason that just took me out of the moment he was describing. He also seemed to be rather objectifying of women, like “the chocolate-colored mistress I’ll have to rub my back” (42). And I pretty much hated him when he killed the rabbit with the rock. But overall, I find myself accepting him and valuing what he has to say. His meditations on the natural world are like nothing else I’ve ever read, and this book has shown me possibilities for nature writing that I didn’t know existed. This book has a clear message but at the same time it is an incredibly sensitive and lyrical rendering of a landscape, of a world. These two aspects of the book are inseparable, and, for me, that inseparability makes both aspects more compelling.