4. A Passion for the Desert: Bill Broyles, Sunshot; Charles Bowden, Inferno; Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert, even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

—Georgia O’Keefe

The desert is, as Edward Abbey maintained, “paradox and bedrock,” combining a persistent inexpressibility with “the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us” (6). It seems that the more it is so very much there, the harder it is to capture in language. Yet the experience of the desert is remarkably similar among all the writings I shall reflect on here. Certain themes and tropes recur and frequently resonate with those I have examined in Thoreau, particularly the experiencing of the sublime, the turn to paradox in the attempt to translate this feeling into language, and the yearning for identification with the natural world at its least human.

For most of us the obvious aspect of the desert is its emptiness. If one is driving through it on the way, let us say, to the golden land of coastal California, it appears to us as miles and miles of miles and miles. From another perspective the desert has striking forms of life, if of a hardscrabble sort:

The strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms.

(Abbey i)

Though the writers here recognize the distinctive fauna and flora of the desert world, what seduces them most is the emptiness, “the bare bones of existence,” the unwelcomeness to human presence. One doesn’t go to the desert for the society (at least that of fellow humans). The Arizona high school teacher and desert hiker Bill Broyles, in his 2006 book Sunshot (photos by Michael P. Berman), finds that the appeal of the desert is that “it has too much sand, too many thorns, too little entertainment, too much nothing” (11). (Imagine hiking through the desert with an iPod—you might never hear that warning rattle.) It is “another world, which humans—my kind—have never figured out how to call ‘home’” (45). It calls forth such observations as the one Broyles quotes from Harley Shaw, that “the Universe would not miss the planet. It will not miss lions. It will not miss humans” (29). Broyles boasts that in 1925 his native state was so “despoblado” that there was one person living between Ajo and Yuma (55), a distance of roughly eighty miles. Further back yet he cites the government explorer Lt. Nathaniel Michler, who wrote in 1886 that though the dirt road he was following was sometimes erased by high winds he could hold to it via the “continuous line of bleached bones and withered carcasses of horses and cattle, as monuments to mark the way [. . .]” (9). This is Broyles’s ideal. He is an adept at desert hiking, “a cross between numbness and Nirvana” (171), as good a summary of the desert experience as could be.

Broyles knew Abbey and knows Charles Bowden, another desert maven. These three resonate to the same, dare I say, mystical desert vibrations. For Bowden, a newspaper reporter and a desert bard, author of the aptly titled Inferno (2006, photos by Michael P. Berman), a splendid essay and photo book of the Sonora, the desert is “this huge empty” (37), where the basic rules are:

1. 1. YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

2. 2. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.

3. 3. DEAL WITH THIS FACT.

4. 4. TIME’S UP. (35)

As these injunctions indicate, neither the desert as a habitat nor Bowden as its Pindar is user-friendly, nor was Abbey...