Even if the reservation could attract and sustain large-scale industry heavy or light, which it cannot, what have the Navajos to gain by becoming factory hands, lab technicians and office clerks? The flight over the canyons next day was a success, though Husk whod never been up in an airplane before got slightly airsick on the return. I stuff my share into my shirt pockets and lace up the boots, hang a canteen over my shoulder and march off. Of course in an emergency we could always descend again into The Maze, hike down to the river, build a raft, float fifty miles down to Hite, and hitchhike a ride from there back to civilization, if anyone happened to be going that way. After the necessary soporific smoke and a weary conversation we unroll our sleeping bags and go to bed. Also the chamisa, bright and stinking as rancid butter; and the mule-eared sunflowers, enjoying a great autumnal renascence; and the wild buckwheat, the matchweed, the yellow borage, and on the mountain slopes a league away, the preliminary golden dying of the aspens. or human life in general. Ive left my canteen behind at the boats; Hole in the Rock, clearly visible from the river, doesnt seem far away. Stores seem to be getting low from now on itll be catfish or nothing. A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. He was alone. Out of the heat and stillness came an inaudible whisper, a sort of telepathic intimation that perhaps the horse did not exist at all only his tracks. None show. What did I have to lose? Sand becomes a part of our existence which, like breathing, we take for granted. The drop-off over the white rim is too far for our rope but about a mile to the east we find a break in the caprock where we can descend to the dark-red stratum below. PDF downloads of all 1715 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. He understood their fear, their desperation, and wept in sympathy with their helplessness. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started. Other voices also speak: queer squawks and honkings from the thickets, sounds we cannot identify until we see, a little later, a great blue heron flap its wings among the lavender plumes of a tamarisk tree. And justly so. I knew how they felt. We were here, say the hunters. In the meantime we refill the water bag, get back in the Land Rover and drive on. Walking up the Escalante is like penetrating a surrealist corridor in a Tamayo dream: all is curved and rounded, the course of the mainstream and canyon as indirect as a sidewinder, winding upon itself like the intestines of a giant. Plans for new roads can be discarded and in their place a program of trail-building begun, badly needed in some of the parks and in many of the national monuments. Far away to the south I can see the headlights of a car or truck approaching Moab. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time. From that point he could see the juniper with its promise of shade. Useless to try and reassure him that he has more to lose than gain by such assimilation; somewhere, in a way we all know, his pride was damaged and his confidence shaken. In coat and hat and scarf and gloves and long underwear, freezing, I linger on my terrace near the ramada, which is now being unroofed branch by branch in the winds, the red flag whipped to shreds, the windbells jangling like a Chinese fire alarm. Noontime here is like a drug. Consoling nevertheless, those shrunken snowfields, despite the fact that theyre twenty miles away by line of sight and six to seven thousand feet higher than where I sit. There are some who frankly and boldly advocate the eradication of the last remnants of wilderness and the complete subjugation of nature to the requirements of not man but industry. Well, Ranger Abbey, says Merle, how do you like it out here in the middle of nowhere?. There are lonely hours. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. You might think we could make a landing anyway and walk back upriver on the bank but in Glen Canyon, where the sandstone walls often rise straight up out of the water, this is sometimes impossible. For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. We move deeper inside until we see in the dimness what looks like a white beach attached precariously to the foot of a sheer wall. like human beings! According to some astronomers the major stars of this constellation are approaching us at an inconceivable speed. How does this theory apply to the present and future of the famous United States of North America? I came to a lip on the canyon floor which overhung by twelve feet the largest so far of these stagnant pools. Now it is simply a component of the lab to market food-processing apparatus: you take a steer, drop a hormone tablet in his ear and step back quickly. By this area I mean southeastern Utah: the canyonlands; Abbeys country. But at once another disturbing thought comes to mind: if we dont name them somebody else surely will. Nothing, not even a soaring buzzard. He crumples, theres the usual gushing of blood, etc., a brief spasm, and then no more. He tramped bitterly, soggily, toward the mens room and disappeared in a dim, rancid, yellowish light. The glare was hard on the eyes and for relief I looked down, past the mane and ears of my drinking horse, to something near at hand. Theres a horse living up that canyon, I announced; a wild horse. In all these years of prowling on foot through the canyons and desert mountains of the Southwest I have yet to see, free and alive in the wild, either a lion or a bighorn. Abbey's impression is that we are trapped by the machinations of mainstream culture. Its a fact. Edward Abbey's "The First Morning" from Desert Solitaire. When they reached the junction with the Green River something went wrong; the motor failed and they drifted helplessly into the forty-mile millrace of Cataract Canyon, a place where they had not planned to go. When I reach one of the islandlike areas of solid rock in the midst of the scree I lie down for a while to catch my breath and examine at close range, six inches, the buttercups, the Sticky Polemonium, the moss campion (lovely name) and the miniature alpine violets with their flowers no bigger than the head of a thumbtack. In all those years of feverish struggle, buying and selling, cheating and swindling, isolation, loneliness, hardship, danger, sudden fortune and sudden disaster, there is one question about this search for the radiant treasure the hidden splendor which nobody ever asked. Im coming in where you are now. I started to push through the boughs of the juniper. he doesnt want to go back. It is no longer easy, on the South Rim, to get away from the roar of motor traffic, except by descending into the canyon. Two empty water bags flapped at the bumper. Angry and loving. For example, in settling a given area they did not scatter themselves abroad over the landscape in isolated farms and ranches, each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, but rather built small, rational, beautiful and durable towns in which all could live together, centered about the Church, which served not only as a religious center but also as a social and political focal point for the community (in this respect harking back to the model of New England). The. To all accusations of excessive development the administrators can reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are giving the public what it wants, that their primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the wilds. Easy boy, easy now. Here I find the familiar fascinating semimelancholy debris of free enterprise: rusted tin cans, a roofless frame shack, the rags of tents and broken canvas cots, rusty shovels, a blunted old iron bullprick, rotting rat-bitten steel-toed boots, dynamite boxes, battered hard hats, two sticks of blasting powder (but no caps), sheaves of legal documents pertaining to mining claims and production agreements (rather interesting reading), a couple of withered sun-bleached topographical maps, and an astonishing heap of tattered magazines of the All-Man He-Male type . Carefully they removed the body which was covered with a mass of second and third degree burns. When and if our astronauts are actually launched off to the moon or Mars through the cold black and white of space they will, I predict, be expertly drugged beforehand how else could they endure the coffinlike confinement, the static surroundings, of such a venture?) Halfway to the river and the land begins to rise, gradually, much like the approach to Grand Canyon from the south. When I reach park headquarters near Moab I telephone the airport and learn that nobody is flying from here to Denver tonight; the storm has ruled out all flights in the area. It would be unforgivably presumptuous to pretend to speak. Im going to bring a boxful of Christmas tree decorations silver-blue tinsel, red candles, peppermint canes, silver bells, golden stars and frosted baubles and Im going to pick out the loneliest, most forlorn of those little junipers and dress it in splendor, gay and glittering, and leave it there shining in the wilderness for a season or two, until the winds and the sun and the birds strip it bare again. The urge to destroy is then a creative urge.). Near the top of the rise is a juniper, rooted in the rock and twisted toward the sky in the classic pose of its kind in the canyon country. It would be like Ohio, wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. Another half mile and I come to a dripping spring. This is a seep high on the canyon wall, two hundred feet above my head, where ground water breaks out between beds of sandstone and slides over the contours of the cliff, nourishing the typical delicate greenery of moss, fern, columbine and monkeyflower. But then they detected a trace of life. Portents: Red skies at morning, sailors take warning. A rivulet of clear water pours into the pool; glints and flecks of light reflected from its agitated surface dance over the dark-golden walls of the glen. But it floats, this toy boat, and I can find no more excuses for delay. When its ready I scoop two shallow holes in the sand, one for the hipbones and one for the shoulder blades, lay out the sleeping bag and turn in. Since we have missed Music Temple I am more determined than ever that we must not pass Forbidden Canyon and the trail to Rainbow Bridge, climax and culmination of any trip into Glen Canyon. Through moonlight and darkness, as the moon is revealed, then concealed, by the turning of the canyon walls, I continue the march toward camp. We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us! Yes, I say, let them all SQUEEZE TO RIGHT FORM SINGLE LANE REMOVE SUNGLASSES TURN ON LIGHTS REDUCE SPEED OBEY SIGNALS MERGING TRAFFIC AHEAD as they supinely gas themselves dead (passive nonresistance) tunneling into Hoboken Manhattan Jersey City Brooklyn New Haven Boston Baltimore Oakland Berkeley San Francisco Washington Seattle Chicago Pittsburgh L.A. San Diego etc. Here I find the track of a coyote superimposed on the path of many deer. Husk was faintly troubled; but grateful on the other hand that she seemed so unconcerned by the rapid reduction of their savings and the so-far worthless results of his prospecting. Her long straight yellow hair, wet now, hung before her eyes; indolently, with languid grace, she was combing it. In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well. They must learn to be quaint, picturesque and photogenic. If so, what happens to excellence when we eliminate the difficulty and the rarity? Each night brought relief, enough to stir his drugged consciousness and arouse his agony. Merely opinion, of course. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely;. The boulders, carried down from the flanks of Navajo Mountain, cause the rapids which lie before us. Perhaps in the vicinity of Weavers Needle in the Superstition Range; in the Funeral Mountains above Death Valley; in the Smoke Creek Desert of Nevada; among the astonishing monoliths of Monument Valley; in the depths of Grand Canyon; somewhere along the White Rim under Grandview Point; in the heart of the Land of Standing Rocks. You can use double quotes to search for a series of words in a particular order. Cultures can exist with little or no trace of civilization; and usually do; but civilization while dependent upon culture for its sustenance, as the mind depends upon the body, is a semi-independent entity, precious and fragile, drawn through history by the finest threads of art and idea, a process or series of events without formal structure or clear location in time and space. Even the Government itself has not entirely escaped censure. I was going to use nothing but sympathy and understanding, in direct violation of common sense and all precedent, to bring Moon-Eye home again. Is the affection reciprocated? Morning on the river: up with the dawn, before the sun, Ralph still sleeping, strange invisible birds calling and croaking from the bush, I wash last nights dishes in the muddy river. Enough. Pika: a harelike mammal, a lagomorph, having two pairs of upper incisors, one set behind the other why? I limp back to camp to exchange them for something else. What is it thats haunting me? Dark when I return, with only the light of Ralphs fire to guide me. Perhaps. He decides to think it over. In the end the beer halls of Moab, like all others, become to me depressing places. Even offer to bring him supplies at regular times, and the news, and anything else he might need. The limbs spreading out on either side, like outriggers, kept the tree from rolling as it sailed toward its destiny. All of this is now under change, of course, and in the accelerating process of urbanization the Mormons of Utah are already discovering their interdependence with the rest of the nation and with the world. But Havasu. The next obstacle, the overhanging spout twelve feet above a deep plunge pool, looked impossible. I stand on broken rock, slabs of granite veined with feldspar and quartz, colored with patches of green and auburn lichens. Deeper than I expected. Before it passed over the farther wall he fell asleep. Unfortunately, most of the pinyon pines in the area are dead or dying, victims of another kind of pine the porcupine. I walk lightly across shoals of quicksand and ford the river when necessary, but over the pebbled and rocky stretches the going is hard and slow. The water is lapping at the sand less than a foot from my sleeping bag. The water does not flow very far before disappearing into the air and under the ground. He is short, dark and savage, like most good Basques, with large brown glamorous eyes which seem to appeal to the ladies; from fourteen to forty-five he pursues them all, and if I can believe his lies, makes out with every one. Once in the Valley they will find the concessioners waiting, ready to supply whatever needs might have been overlooked, or to furnish rooms and meals for those who dont want to camp out. But he wants others to have the same freedom. He describes how the desert affects society and more specifically the individual on a multifaceted, sensory level. You old brute, I murmured, you hideous old gargoyle. Too late to make a liberal out of Viviano Jacquez. The fire. Theres no telling and it certainly doesnt matter. He tried to move and a sickening jet of pain coursed through his shoulder. I picked up my flattened hat, reformed it, put it on. My hands tingle, burning with cold. But even so it became apparent after a time that only large-scale operations in this as in most other businesses would make a profit. He is gone we remain, others come. When a cloud bursts open above the Devils Garden the sun is blazing down on my ramada. The wind by this time has risen to a magnificent howl, the sky is purple, and jags of lightning strike at Navajo Point, the remote crag two thousand feet above the river on the north side. We camp the first night in the Green River Desert, just a few miles off the Hanksville road, rise early and head east, into the dawn, through the desert toward the hidden river. Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. They usually appear in crowded clusters, with figures of a later date sometimes superimposed on those of an earlier time. Retaining ownership of their land, the Navajos have been able to take maximum advantage through their fairly coherent and democratic tribal organization of the modest mineral resources which have been found within the reservation. You goddamned nightmare of a horse Moon-Eye, look at this. Because theres something about the desert. A lash of lightning flickers over Wilson Mesa, scorching the brush, splitting a pine tree. Floyd lends me a park ranger shirt which he says he doesnt need anymore and which I am to wear in lieu of a uniform, so as to give me an official sort of aspect when meeting the tourists. This is comfort. The ravens mock us as we float by. And theyre still building fires on the ground, with wood! 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