Rimrock and Paradox: A book review of Amy Irvine’s Desert Cabal: A new season in the wilderness
It’s hard to let go of old friends. I discovered the redrock and rimrock country of the southwestern U.S. in the same year I uncovered one of its most famous voices, a writer who could proclaim anarchy and wax polemically about the claret cup cactus of Arches National Park in the same sentence. He could make littering the road with old beer cans and infidelity to his many wives seem acceptable against the harsh backdrop of the romanticism of wild, beautiful places. His name was Edward Abbey. After I read The Monkey Wrench Gang, I read everything I could find from him. I perused book stores for all his books, becoming a lifelong, loyal customer of “Back of Beyond Books” in Moab, Utah in the process. During one of my trips to the sandstone, red rock “Abbey’s country” in southeast Utah, the proprietor of the bookstore gave me a copy of Desert Solitaire. I, like many, so many others, wandered into the canyons for a week, was lost in the book and the landscape, had love affairs with both, and emerged a woman wet with contempt for desecration of wilderness and a new and devout, though not official, young member of the “Coyote Clan”, an unorganized world of environmental activists born of the desert, united by Edward Abbey’s writings, and the desire to bring voice to our country’s wildest and most threatened landscapes.
My love affair with Abbey’s words have spanned almost four decades, so I was skeptical, in November 2018, when I heard of Amy Irvine’s attempt to re-examine Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaireduring its fiftieth-year anniversary. The owner of Back of Beyond Books in Moab took a chance and helped co-publish Irvine’s Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, and I swung in and picked up a copy when I was heading out for a week in the desert over Thanksgiving.
She had me on page 3, the first page with her own words. Clear, slicing words that pierce desert silence and scream for attentive audience. “Between land and sky, in the liminal, a figure. Vague, hovering between forms: it drops, incarnate. Into the rancorous red.” She invites the reader into the desert she inhabits, the same desert Ed Abbey loved and devoured with pen and paper. She brings her questions, her passion, her desire for change and unity, to the gravesite of Edward Abbey, and begins a dialogue fueled by hot desert sun, whiskey, desire for water, and the occasional reference to a firearm.
Irvine takes one of the most iconic pieces of environmental literature, which gave birth to generations of environmentalists, desert sojourners, adventurers, and she gives it a new voice. I cringe to call it “eco-feminism” like to I cringe to call anything “eco-feminism”(can’t we all just be ecological conscious beings regardless of race, sex, gender, class?). But, her voice does lend a feminine lens to Abbey’s contemplations. She is a mother, as he was a father, but instead of hiding his family in the pages of a book that was built on the idea of “Solitaire” she uses “Cabal” and brings her family, and her own lessons from family, into deconstructing and reconstructing Abbey’s desert solitudes. She relates solitude to being a solitary woman in the desert, the fear and vulnerability most women will feel and experience in their lives. Women do not live like men. She discusses fidelity with her daughter when a favorite tree is demolished for development. She counters the current social culture of highlighted individualism when she writes, “Going it alone is a failure of contribution and compassion, and this is what drains the world dry.” A cabal is a group of people who “gather around a panoramic vision” to deconstruct the myth that a solitary individual’s experiences in a wild landscape will be enough to change the tides of current political and industrial interests. Climate change will not be solved by one person. She fights fire with fire, bringing whiskey, her own firearm, and her strong, present desert voice to match that of a dead literary hero of the children of canyon country and beyond.
I read Irvine’s short book like poetry as I descended through the canyons of Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, racing to see a place whose protected status is currently in jeopardy under the Trump administration. I was dazed and disentangled from reality as I watched light filter across 1 billion years of exposed geologic formations, breathing juniper fire smoke at night and waiting for the sun in the morning like a whiptail lizard in January. But, in my fleeting attempt to know a new place in the desert, I also felt like one of the voyeurs she condescends: “No longer can we be voyeurs, catching from scenic pullouts mere glimpses of the wild, uneven territory of our collective unconscious. The hour at hand demands that we molt all that we want and believe we know. Now we must slither — belly to stone — -into the dens and burrows of our souls.” This book made me want to take her words, alongside with Ed Abbey’s words, and crawl, on my hands and knees, with good companions and extra water, across the Navajo sandstone, through the purple-red Wingate formations, into the Dirty Devil river, down, down, down the canyons and the rivers, until I grope and find bedrock, the common ground, where we all reside, the muse of Abbey’s country, Amy’s country, our country.
