The Obligatory

Upon boarding my ANA plane – or, as everyone else calls it, “You mean Japan Air? No? Airways,” the monitors began playing some airline courtesy rules. It was, understandably, very Japanese. In the first series, an animated ‘no’ sign danced around icons of people who were breaking the rules. In the second, a hand drawn duo of passengers bothered each other on sheets of wrinkled paper, including doing things like drinking too much alcohol and intentionally reading a newspaper so the person behind couldn’t see the TV.

Japan rules.

Wow, we’re taking off already! Efficient! Also, I am the only person in my row, which is fucking amazing. That’s never happened before! Time to stretch out and start readin’.

3:58PM L.A. time. I think we’ve got about 8 more hours to go on the plane ride, which has been very nice so far. A hearty vegetarian meal – served well before the ‘normals’ – and plenty of green tea and white whine.

Since I thankfully have the entire row to myself, my only company so far has been the vast, unending blue Pacific. The water, occasionally splotched with patches of low (at least from my altitude) clouds.

I’ve also got some quality time to spend with books, which is nice. I just finished Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” a book in the Grand Tradition of American Misanthropes. It follows the author as he works as a Park Ranger for a summer in Arches National Monument.

It’s a fantastic, sprawling mess. Equally literate and vulgar, philosophical and profane, in tones delicate and screeching. He’ll spend an entire chapter lovingly detailing the different kinds of rocks in the park, right before launching into a tirade against the Park Service, tourists, and paved roads. Cranky and wry asides pepper an emerging philosophy of the wilderness-civilization symbiosis, what makes a ‘mountain man’ different from his ocean and desert-loving cousins, and how a man who died alone in the desert could and should be envied.

And it’s all in the context of daily park duties, hiking trips, and rescue attempts. It’s like “Walden,” but way more badass.

Of course, with a voice so willfully iconoclastic, you have to take what he says with several grains of salt. In one passage, for instance, he states one of the most important reasons National Parks should be preserved is so they can be used as bases for guerilla warfare should our government get too tyrannical.

While I’d also like to see cars banned from wilderness areas and replaced with shuttles and bike paths, for example, I don’t know if I could live with denying anyone the chance to see the vastness of the Grand Canyon, or the cascades of Yosemite Falls, or the otherworldly blue of Crater Lake. Are traffic and congestion a problem in those areas? Hell yes. Is there a less extreme way to deal with them? Probably … although I still think anyone who leaves a water bottle or pudding cup on the side of a trail should be shot.

Toward the conclusion of thee book, Abbey eloquently puts into words the allure of the ‘empty’ desert that I caught when I first moved to California, without every really nailing down exactly what it is. While that doesn’t really make sense now that I’m looking at that sentence, somehow it does. Maybe it’s just ‘cause I dig the desert. Whatever.

To me, at least, a lot of the apparent desolation in deserts – or anywhere in nature – is really just an illusion. There is life, or signs of life, everywhere. Urchins hiding in a brackish tidal pool, pinyon and bristlecone pines clinging to weather-beaten peaks, or tiny red ocotillo flowers blooming against an endless beige desert.

They are revealed only by stopping what you’re doing and looking closer. Their magnificence understood only by looking inward.

Labels: books, travel

he's not a misanthrope, he's anthropocentric

or anti-anthropocentric.