Desert Solitaire.. What the Thankful Do

“Just remember this my girl when you look up in the sky. You can see the stars and still not see the light…” —“Already Gone,” the Eagles

I finished reading Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire last night, a personal history of Abbey’s summers as a seasonal park ranger in what was then Arches National Monument. (Now Arches National Park.) Desert Solitaire is an American classic, one of the greatest nature narratives of all time and a book worth reading if only for Abbey’s luminous prose and vivid descriptions of the Four Corners region (“…crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds.”)