Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey Series )

Recall the Proverb: “Set not thy foot too often in thy neighbor’s house, lest he grow weary of thee and hate thee.”

The sun went down and the light mellowed over the sand and distance and hoodoo rocks “pinnacled dim in the intense inane.” A few stars appeared, scattered liberally through space. The solitary owl called.

Finally the moon came up, a golden globe behind the rocky fretwork of the horizon, a full and delicate moon that floated lightly as a leaf upon the dark slow current of the night. A face that watched me from the other side.

The air grew cool. I put on boots and shirt, stuffed some cheese and raisins in my pocket, and went for a walk. The moon was high enough to cast a good light when I reached the place where the gray jeep had first come into view. I could see the tracks of its wheels quite plainly in the sand and the route was well marked, not only by the tracks but by the survey stakes planted in the ground at regular fifty-foot intervals and by streamers of plastic ribbon tied to the brush and trees.

Teamwork, that’s what made America what it is today. Teamwork and initiative. The survey crew had done their job; I would do mine. For about five miles I followed the course of their survey back toward headquarters, and as I went I pulled up each little wooden stake and threw it away, and cut all the bright ribbons from the bushes and hid them under a rock. A futile effort, in the long run, but it made me feel good. Then I went home to the trailer, taking a shortcut over the bluffs.

ROCKS

The very names are lovely—chalcedony, carnelian, jasper, Chrysoprase and agate. Onyx and sardonyx. Cryptocrystalline quartz. Quartzite. Flint, chert and sard. Chrysoberyl, spodumene, garnet, zircon and malachite. Obsidian, turquoise, calcite, feldspar, hornblende, pyrope, tourmaline, porphyry, arkose, rutile. The rare metals— lithium, cobalt, berylium, mercury, arsenic, molybdenum, titanium and barium. And the basic rocks—basalt, granite, gneiss, limestone, sandstone, marble, slate, gabbro, shale.

Most of them can be found in this area. If you look hard enough and long enough. By this area I mean southeastern Utah: the canyonlands; Abbey’s country.

The various forms of chalcedony, for example, are strewn liberally over the dismal clay hills along Salt Creek. Here you will find tiny crystals of garnet embedded in a matrix of mica schist—almandite or “common garnet.” Fragments of quartzite are everywhere, some containing pure quartz crystals. You might find a geode: a lump of sandstone the size and shape of an ostrich egg, or sometimes much larger; slice it through with a diamond wheel and you may find inside a glittering treasure trove of crystals. A treasure not in money but in beauty. (Although I have been told by some rockhounds that they can make a better living peddling gemstones and curious rocks than they could mining gold.) In the washes are flintshards, edges scalloped with marks of secondary chipping—man- made. For the Indians were here too. Centuries ago. Trace the drainages upstream and look in shady alcoves under the canyon walls; there in the sand and dust, among the packrat storehouses and the litter of other animals you will find the mother lode, the place where the naked, indolent savages lounged about making jokes, pictures, and conchoidal fractures in flint. Flakes, scales, splinters of failed and incompleted points scatter the ground; if you are extremely lucky you may discover a complete and intact arrowhead. Possibly a spearhead. Some of them in translucent obsidian—volcanic glass, “Apache tears.”

Lying within the bounds of a national monument, these rocks and artifacts are protected by law. That is, you are welcome to look, to pick up and examine but not to remove. And justly so. For without such protection the area would soon be picked clean by souvenir hunters, acquisitive rockhounds and the commercial merchandisers of stones. For my own part I seldom take rocks home, no matter where I might find them; in my opinion they are best enjoyed in situ, where God Himself, so to speak, and the leisurely economy of Nature have seen fit to deposit them.

Petrified wood is also common in the canyon country. Not so much in the vast formations of sandstone which bulk largest in the landscape but at odd, irregular places where clays, shales and mudstones appear. Among the liver-colored hills along the Paria; under the Orange Cliffs west of the standing rocks; in the exquisitely carved facades that line the Fremont River; and in general in any sort of “badlands” or painted-desert terrain. Nothing so extensive or spectacular as the deposits in Petrified Forest National Park, to be sure, but interesting and beautiful just the same. The gradual cell-by-cell replacement or infiltration of buried logs by hot, silica-bearing waters in a process so exact that the original cellular structure of the wood is preserved in all its detail forms this desert jewelry—agatized rainbows in rock. Coming unexpectedly upon such a trove a man is sometimes overcome by greed; by the mad desire to possess it all, to load his pockets, his knapsack, his truck with these hard lustrous treasures and somehow transport them all from the wilderness to the shop, garage and backyard. An understandable mania; packrats, hoarding string, tinfoil, old shoes and plastic spoons, suffer from the same instinct. So that over the surface of the earth a general redistribution of all that is loose, not nailed or bolted down, takes place, hastening the processes of geology, and continents sag at the edges. Silly perhaps but not in the long run harmful; nothing is really lost except that epiphenomenon known as human delight. This too will be replaced.

Up north in the Roan Cliffs are seams of low-grade coal; and throughout an area larger than many states where Utah, Colorado and Wyoming meet lies an immense reserve of shale oil—riches for somebody. But these are not strictly speaking rock forms. There are traces of gold in the Colorado River and the sunken ruins of gigantic dredges; a few lead, zinc and silver mines scattered about; but the only rock which has so far proved to be of commercial value in the canyon country is that called carnotite. Carnotite, a greenish-yellow ore, is a complex mineral containing radon gas, vanadium and—uranium.

Here was a treasure. Spurred by the exciting demands of the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission, soon after our technicians had shown what they could do (Hiroshima, Nagasaki), began to promote an intensive search for uranium. With known deposits in the Southwest, the search was concentrated here, attracting fortune-hunters from everywhere. Some struck it rich; the professional geologist Charles Steen after years of patient development and hard-luck frustrations suddenly patented a mine he called (with revealing pathos) Mi Vida. Aided by a discovery bonus from the A.E.C., financed by the bankers of Denver and Salt Lake City, he bought heavy mining equipment and a fleet of ore trucks, hired miners and truckers, built an ore-reduction mill on the banks of the Colorado, and became after years of effort a happy if beleaguered millionaire. He constructed a modest mansion on a rocky waterless ledge overlooking Moab; invited relatives, friends and neighbors in for one great barbecue after another; endured threats of blackmail and kidnapping (he had children) from mysterious strangers; built a garrison-type steel fence topped with barbed wire around his entire property and employed guards and a gatekeeper; planted trees along the fence to soften the warlike aspect; ran for public office and was elected; tried to legalize hard liquor and was defeated; sold his mill to the Vanadium Corporation of America; moved elsewhere; came back; moved again.

Another prospector, an amateur but equally fortunate, was Vernon Pick. Drifting in from somewhere out of the Midwest, he lost himself for weeks at a time among the haunted monoliths and goblin gulches above the Dirty Devil River; poisoned himself drinking its foul waters but survived to locate deep in that intricate voodooland a smoldering radioactive hoard which he named, poetically, The Hidden Splendor.

Some of the native Utahns also made money, particularly the ones shrewd enough the moment the boom took off to hustle out into the boondocks and stake claims on everything in sight. A few of these claims were developed and some yielded a profitable tonnage of uranium ore; but most of the wealth was acquired not in mining but in