Overturning Idols

What if you could drive out into a wild corner of the desert, pour yourself a few fingers of rye, and sit down to hammer out disputes with the man who inspired a generation of disobedient naturalists bent on bombing dams and sawing down billboards? And in doing so, you could take that icon to task for championing anarchy and individualism in a way that narrows a movement that, now more than ever, needs to broaden is base? That's just what Amy Irvine does in Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, a collection of essays addressed to and in conversation with iconic desert rat and writer Edward Abbey.

Irvine's work started as an introductory essay to a 50th-anniversary edition of Desert Solitaire that would see his hand-revised manuscript published. Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn and, like Abbey, has worked as a park ranger. She's spent her own fair share of time striding solo through those canyons. But when she sat to write that 3,000-word intro, she entered into "10 days of a fever dream," from which she emerged with about 18,000 words of something else entirely.

"It felt like all these tributaries coming together into this raging river," she tells SFR. "I had this strong physical sensation that it needed to stand on its own, that it needed to have its own spine and speak directly to Abbey, because of the way women are speaking directly now about their experiences."

Irvine begins by pulling up alongside Abbey's grave somewhere in southern Arizona and declaring, "Hey, Mr. Abbey, can you hear me down there? … We should talk."

If you are not both schooled in the current assault on public lands and bedrock environmental laws, as well as familiar with personalities from Katie Lee to Dean Potter the text will at times feel unmooring. This is not a beginner's course; it's an ongoing dialogue among those in the know. But as any good eavesdropper knows, sometimes walking in on someone else's conversation can be most illuminating.

Abbey's rugged individualism has lured so many followers that southern Utah now suffers the consequences of popularity in the form of heavy traffic, crowded trails and congested campgrounds.

"You, Mr. Abbey, may have developed whole fleets—generations' worth—of desert defenders, but now they're out there en masse, bumping into one another on the very ground on which you taught them to go lightly and alone," Irvine writes. "They are as much the problem as they are the solution."

The news Irvine breaks graveside is that the world, and specifically "Abbey's country," has changed. But so, too, has our tolerance for the kinds of attitudes we can only hope Abbey adopted as a literary device, Irvine writes; the same way he presents himself as a loner when, in fact, he had a wife (rotating through five of them before his death) and children (also five). If we monkey-wrenchers are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the disparaging things he wrote about minorities and women can't just be given a pass as "boys will be boys," and there's no telling where those sentiments would place him in a landscape that now includes Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, a generation of female activists and the #MeToo movement.

That'll mean a conversation about wilderness—and this mythical vision of it as untrammeled by man when it has been lived in and shaped by humans for millennia—as well as how social justice is deeply entangled with environmental issues. The point, Irvine says, is to ask, "What are we missing in this ideal?"

"There's sort of an ivory cabin syndrome in the American nature writing canon that's happened in particular around wilderness," Irvine says. "We really have to open the door to the cabin, because there are all these voices out bumping around in the wilderness."

And it's not just a matter of women and minorities. Conservative public land users like ranchers and farmers who have their own love of the land, along with their own ideas on how to preserve and protect it, have been alienated from these conversations, Irvine says.

"We have to find a way to step over that divide and say, 'Here are the places I agree with you,'" she adds. "The misanthropy that he brings to the table as part of that value of solitude is a dangerous one in a very crowded planet, and we really can't afford to isolate anybody. … We need a multitude of people speaking and acting on behalf of public lands."

So her book is labeled with the antonym—not a Desert Solitaire, but a "cabal" now, a faction bent on political upheaval. The issues faced today, Irvine argues, will call not for rugged solitude, but for collective force.

Amy Irvine: Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness
6:30 pm Thursday Oct. 18. Free.
Collected Works Bookstore and Coffee House,
202 Galisteo St.,
988-4226