Item: 1 copy of Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey (Part II)

I didn't say too much yesterday about the book itself.  It's really put together brilliantly, broken up into discrete and tangential subjects that make a composite experience.  What seems to be at the center of it is a chapter called "Down the River," in which he and a friend take small inflatable rubber boats down the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, before the dam was constructed.  They purposely don't learn about the topography, place names or where the rapids are in advance, because they want to experience it as explorers, not knowing what comes next.  So they have this intimate relationship with the river, and there's this passage of exultant freedom when they first shove off and let themselves be taken by the water.   Yes, this makes me jealous.

And I never think this while I'm reading it, but when I start writing about it, there's a part of me that's saying "oh come on, grow up."  Okay, sure, I'd rather go on float trips and sleep under the stars, but do I not have to live up to certain responsibilities?  Should I expect to live my entire life in a state of childlike joy?  I don't mean this to be directed at Abbey particularly, but this is what I have to ask myself when I start throwing in with this sort of prophecy against the way we live now.  There are certain people in whom this only sounds like whining:   I want to be carefree and frollicky, and I can't, because I have to pay off the mortgage, I never have any fun.

On the one hand, he's right in what he says about the rat race and the destructive aspects of our civilization.  A lot of the power of the "Down the River" chapter comes from the fact that everything he talks about is now under water:  nobody will ever have the experience he's talking about again.  Maybe he isn't actually suggesting that life is only about personal recreation and joy, but that collectively we rob ourselves of joy.  And we do.

Because even Abbey feels the need to leave the desert eventually.  "After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken."  This seems to me the perfect image of necessity breaking into the silence.  Are we made this way, to crave not only freedom but also its end?