The northwestern part of this park, known as the Kolob area, has until recently been saved as almost virgin wilderness. Far better to have stayed at home with the TV and a case of beer. We pass the mouth of a large river entering the Colorado from the east the San Juan. I was sure that Moon-Eye would not go far from water in this weather. When the A.E.C.s ten-year guarantee ran out most of the independents went out with it out of business. It does not. Are the Navajos grateful? It was the longest tongue I had ever seen outside of a butchers shop. Though resembling the birch, the quaking aspen like the cottonwood is a member of the willow family, and reveals its kinship by the delicate suspension of the leaves. Weve forgotten to keep a close track of time, have no clock or calendar, and no longer know for certain exactly how many days and nights weve been on the river. I have to keep my promise. We think we have forgotten but we cannot forget the knowledge is lodged like strontium in the marrow of our bones that Glen Canyon has been condemned. But was hurled back by what appeared to be clouds of mustard gas rolling in from the west on a very broad front. I knew how they felt. (One leap and he was in the saddle; five beers and he was on the floor.) Moon-Eye is very shy. Going farther up-canyon I come to a fork, the first of many branches in the canyon system. I touched the rope and hackamore bunched up inside my shirt. One afternoon during the last week in August Mr. Graham sat in his office checking the action of the small pistol which he kept in his desk. Then I went home to the trailer, taking a shortcut over the bluffs. Better fill your water cans there; might be your last chance. Lets not make fools of ourselves.. The stuff was now halfway up his thighs. 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. Clouds edged with fire sail on the clear horizon. What do you say? Abbeys cohabitation with mice introduces the idea that human beings and animals are equal creatures. Late in the morning, close to noon, the sun comes glowering over the wall in a burst of fire and we are driven out of our sacks. Instinctively he crawled deeper in among the roots of the tree and clung there with his good arm and both legs as the deluge smashed over him. Long ago the cliff dwellings were abandoned. I am so thirsty by this time that I try digging a waterhole, but the deeper I go the drier the sand. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization. I reach for the bottle. Sticky Polemonium has an engaging sound. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. These prospectors, miners, etc. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase. Distance and space are functions of speed and time. In silence they watched the tall figure of Mr. Graham emerge from the helicopters plastic bubble, stoop under the slow-turning blades of the prop and walk toward them. But I keep to the right, under the rim of the overlook where we had camped the night before, and scan the walls for a possible route to the top. For there is no land in the canyon country not already fully occupied, to the limit of the range, by their own kind. As I lean back over the edge I cant help but look down and the sight of Waterman far below looking up at me is frankly kind of sickening. Come on, Moon-Eye, I want to take you home. Stars which are unusually bold and close, with an icy glitter in their light glints of blue, emerald, gold. There on the sandy floor we find his footprints: where he had entered the ravine, where he became panicky and retraced his way not once but twice, and where he had struggled up an alluvial bank to the ledge. They stay in their tunnels and lairs under the rock, listening to the strange two-legged monster stumbling over their homes. Chapter 5 Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks, Chapter 10 The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud, Chapter 14 The Dead Man at Grandview Point, Chapter 15 Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert, Chapter 17 Terra Incognita: Into the Maze. The new road to be paved, of course would cost somewhere between half a million and one million dollars, depending on the bids, or more than fifty thousand dollars per linear mile. But such a revolution, like it or not, is precisely what is needed. The motorized tourists, reluctant to give up the old ways, will complain that they cant see enough without their automobiles to bear them swiftly (traffic permitting) through the parks. Many amateur prospectors risked their lives trying to strike it rich, or died. The descent is four miles long, in vertical distance about two thousand feet. But that horse wouldnt come, though I waited a full hour by the sun. My juniper, though still fruitful and full of vigor, is at the same time partly dead: one half of the divided trunk holds skyward a sapless claw, a branch without leaf or bark, baked by the sun and scoured by the wind to a silver finish, where magpies and ravens like to roost when I am not too close. To my amazement the stone flies true (as if guided by a Higher Power) and knocks the cottontail head over tincups, clear out from under the budding blackbush. The great horned owl cries again and a rabbit breaks, dashes for what might be a better place, revealing his position. In this first chapter, Abbey offers his first impressions of his new, temporary environs. I try to pull on my boots but theyre stiff as iron from the cold. So I went down into Havasu fourteen miles by trail and looked things over. He imagines that the mans energy has been recirculated into the bodies of buzzards who eat him. He followed the water. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate him more than I could the flesh is probably infected with tularemia I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but unmistakable. My second thought was to scream for help, although I knew very well there could be no other human being within miles. You wait here, I said, while I go back to Albuquerque and get the book. At once I spot the unmistakable signs of tourist culture tin cans and tinfoil dumped in a fireplace, a dirty sock dangling from a bush, a worn-out tennis shoe in the bottom of a clear spring, gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and bottlecaps everywhere. His hunger made him sick with misery, worse than the pain of his arm and shoulder to which he was now accustomed, or the fiery discomfort of his sunburned back. The little fire wavers, flickers, begins to die. If Im serious, and I am, the desert has driven me crazy. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation. My lone juniper stands half-alive, half-dead, the silvery wind-rubbed claw of wood projected stiffly at the sun. Dont you have any sense at all?. The dull, painful creaking of the branches in the wind indicates, however, an internal effort at liberation. Obviously the only sensible thing to do was to turn back. His only request is that they cut their strings first. I am here not only to escape for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us."[18]. In the sweet chill of the dawn I wake up, hearing the ratchetlike screech of a squirrel. Teachers and parents! Some of my liberalized friends regard the LDS with disdain; they see in the Church only a bastion of sectarian foolishness and political reaction and in its adherents a voting bloc of Know-Nothings, racially prejudiced, religiously bigoted, opposed alike to the graduated income tax, the United Nations, urban renewal, foreign aid, legislative reapportionment, public welfare, Medicare and even free lunches for schoolchildren actually or potentially a rabble of John Birchers. After six months in the desert I am volunteering for a winter of front-line combat duty caseworker, public warfare department in the howling streets of Megalomania, U.S.A. Mostly for the sake of private and selfish concerns, truly, but also for reasons of a more general nature. What particular meaning, if any, have these pictures on the canyon walls? We waited then, the horse and I, enduring the endless afternoon, the heartbreaking heat, and passed the time as best we could in one-sided conversation. Not that it makes much difference. This situation came about through the conscientious efforts of a federal agency known formerly as the Wildlife Service, which keeps its people busy in trapping, shooting and poisoning wildlife, particularly coyotes and mountain lions. Or says he doesnt. Even the noise I made unscrewing the cap from the canteen seemed harsh and exaggerated, a gross intrusion. As for the technical competence of the artists, its measure is apparent in the fact that these pictographs and petroglyphs though exposed to the attack of wind, sand, rain, heat, cold and sunlight for centuries still survive vivid and clear. Dust sailed into the air as it crashed into mudbanks; cracks rippled like lightning over the surface of the alluvium, yawning wide apart as chunks and blocks and sections of dried-out earth slid or toppled into the torrent. McKinley, even Everest, have been surmounted by men on foot. My boots were floating under the surface of the little puddle above. I stepped as close to him as I could without getting bogged down myself but our extended hands did not quite meet. Not a silence so much as a great stillness for there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. But if it appears innocent and pure, beware. But the joke still points to an important truth about how words distort the world: Abbey laments that since language is human-made, when people use it to describe or understand nature, they are in fact defeating natures nonhuman essence. We unsaddled the horses and brushed them as best we could with handfuls of juniper twigs and turned them loose in the pasture. Because in much of the canyon country there is no ground to dig postholes in nothing but solid rock. I look at my watch. He decides this the day he arrives, after a long drive from Albuquerque to begin his summer job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument. Dusty? Of the genus. Among these rocks, in chutes, whirlpools and great waves, with rushing breakers and foam, the water finds its way, still tumbling down. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal. This is a courageous view, admirable in its simplicity and power, and with the weight of all modern history behind it. Unidentifiable birds call to us from the dark depths of the willow thickets solitary calls from the wild. Much depends on the season. I had an answer all right but I was saving it for later. The ascent of Tukuhnikivats has taken me half the day, the descent from summit to timberline less than half an hour. Weird, unearthly song like the legendary wail of banshees, or more precisely, like the sounds produced by new electronic instruments such as the. Deliberately, I was sure. Activate your 30 day free trialto continue reading. 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