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- Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott, 1968. Reprint, Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1988.
- Ed Abbey's most enduring nonfiction work is this
account of his seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park
outside Moab, Utah. By turns Abbey reflects on the nature of
the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our
remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization
that cannot reconcile itself to living in the world. He also
recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate
tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerfully of
all, with his own mortality; his account of getting stranded
in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at
once hilarious and terrifying. By any definition, this is a
classic of modern American writing.
- David G. Campbell. The Crystal Desert. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992.
- Antarctica, the most arid continent on Earth, may be
uninhabitable, but geologist David Campbell spent three
summers there at a Brazilian research station, where only
all-night parties and black-bean stews kept him and his
coworkers from going batty. From his base on King George
Island, Campbell ventured out onto the nearby ocean and,
eventually, to the mainland itself. His particular interest
is in Antarctica's ancient past, when it formed part of the
great landmass of Gondwanaland, which broke up over millions
of years to form the present continents. Why, he asks,
should only Australia and North America have marsupials like
the kangaroo and opossum? (Antarctica once joined those
continents, he replies, forming a bridge for faunal
migration.) Campbell offers an invigorating line of argument
to address such questions, and in The Crystal Desert, for
which he received the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary
Fellowship Award, he unravels many antipodal puzzles. His
book combines travelog, natural history, oceanography, and
the tortured attempts of early explorers "in an alien
environment, beyond the edge of the habitable earth."
- Bruce Chatwin. The Songlines. New York: Viking, 1986.
- "In my childhood," Chatwin recalls in the opening pages
of The Songlines, "I never heard the word 'Australia'
without calling to mind the fumes of the eucalyptus inhaler
and an incessant red country populated by sheep.... I would
gaze in wonder at pictures of the koala and kookaburra, the
platypus and Tasmanian bush-devil, Old Man Kangaroo and
Yellow Dog Dingo, and Sydney Harbour Bridge. But the picture
I liked best showed an Aboriginal family on the move." The
exotic images remained with Chatwin into adulthood, urging
him to seek, almost obsessively, the remote, arid corners of
the world - Kashmir, the Sahel, Tierra del Fuego, the
Sudan - where his earlier books of travel and fiction were
set. His wanderings made him the most authoritative English
desert rat since Charles Doughty and T. E. Lawrence, and his
gifts as a writer assure his book a permanent place in
English literature.
- Charles Doughty. Travels in Arabia Deserta. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1888. Reprint, New York: Dover,
1979.
- The English have an expression to describe one of their
own who adapts too closely to another culture: "going
native." Inspired by Sir Richard Francis Burton, who
undertook an illegal hadj to Mecca, the sickly Doughty quit
England and wandered for two years in the Rub'al Khali, the
"empty quarter" of what is now Saudi Arabia. His accounts of
Bedawin life, depicting both those nomads' generous
hospitality and their wastefully fierce infighting, are
among the best in the English language. This two-volume work
doesn't make for easy reading; Doughty believed that English
prose had fallen into disrepair since the glory days of the
Renaissance, and he aimed both to restore it and to capture
the elliptical quality of Arabic discourse by concocting an
orotund style unlike any other writer's: "When the Beduins
saw me pensive, to admire the divine architecture of these
living jewels [the rabia, a kind of flower], they thought it
but childish fondness in the stranger." If you stay with the
narrative, however, you'll find ample rewards.
- John Wesley Powell. Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United
States. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 45th
Congress 2nd Session H.R. Exec. Doc. 73,1878.
- In the mid-1870s John Wesley Powell, who a decade
earlier had led the first party of Anglos down the Colorado
River, traveled throughout the so-called Great American
Desert to observe farming and ranching practices. He
returned to Washington convinced that the West should be
divided into self-governing irrigation districts that
followed natural watersheds, with individual settlers
allowed eighty acres. The rest of the land, he argued,
should be reserved to the public domain. However, the notion
of the quarter section of 160 acres as the basis of agrarian
democracy had become sacrosanct, and the congressional panel
that had commissioned his report dismissed it. When the
panel did so, Powell retorted, "I tell you gentlemen, you
are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over
water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply
the land." Bernard De Voto, the social critic and
conservationist, called Powell's report on the arid lands
the most prophetic book "in the range of American
experience." The fifty-year battle over the Colorado River
Compact and occasional flareups of the "Sagebrush Rebellion"
prove De Voto - and Powell - to have been right on the mark.
- George Gaylord Simpson. Attending Marvels. New York:
Macmillan, 1934. Reprint, New York: Time-Life Books, 1982.
- George Gaylord Simpson, late professor of geosciences
at The University of Arizona, was famous among his students
for an aristocratic irascibility. There's not a trace of
haughtiness or ire in the book he considered his best, an
account of a season exploring Patagonia. That arid, cold,
treeless region of central Argentina is classic desert - a
desert is defined, after all, by patterns of rainfall and
windflow, not by temperature - and Simpson has a grand time
bringing its geomorphology, creatures past and present, and
human inhabitants to his audience. Careful readers will want
to note how Simpson elevates his field notes into
literature: in his pages you can see both origin and
evolution at work in the making of a book - a neat trick
indeed.
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No. 35, Spring/Summer 1994
