BETTER TO DIE IN JEANS, I thought as I labored up the long hill, than in one of those hospital gowns. I had missed a couple of days of my normal walk routine. I was feeling it. The day before had been a bad day. I had a screw loose. In an oral implant, that is. It had to be fixed, which was disturbingly more complicated, apparently, than twisting a loosened light bulb. More stressful and more immediate than the daily national news.
My habit, following a bad experience, is to open a favorite book at random and start reading, often by just thumbing through it and looking for passages that I had underlined on original reading. With dozens of prospects on the shelf, I pulled Edward Abbey’s classic DESERT SOLITAIRE.
Abbey, who died in 1989, was a western icon. A cantankerous and curmudgeonly loner, he was early on a seasonal ranger at Arches National Monument, before it became a Park in 1971. He described it simply in the opening sentence of his book: “This is the most beautiful place on earth.” One cannot visit Arches without understanding his enthusiasm. It is over 76,000 acres of high desert on the Colorado Plateau, home to over 2,000 natural sandstone arches, as well as dozens of other vertical stone wonders. It breaks my heart that I’ve only been there twice.
Here’s a sample of what drew him to Arches:
“I like my job. The pay is generous; I might even say munificent: $1.95 per hour, earned or not, backed solidly by the world’s most powerful Air Force, biggest national debt, and grossest national product. The fringe benefits are priceless: clean air to breath (after the spring sandstorms); stillness, solitude, and space; an unobstructed view every day and every night of sun, sky, stars, clouds, mountains, moon, cliffrock and canyons; a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate – though impossible to name – in the remote.”
I suppose it says something about me that I am cheered by the writing of a world-class misanthrope.
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