Edward Abbey is a writer which I am assured is celebrated in Western United States although he has been nearly forgotten in the East. Since I'm studying at a college in Abbey's hometown, and taking a class from an Abbey biographer, I am quickly getting a crash course in Edward Abbey.
In hsi book
Desert Solitaire, originally published in 1968, Abbey recalls two summers working seasonally at state parks. His encounters with isolation, the occasional stray tourist, and park officals is the basis of the creative non-fiction book. In a chapter entitled "Industrial Tourism and the National Parks" Abbey laments the paving of National parks to fascilitate automotive culture and the limited but destructive interaction of the tourists.
Abbey writes:
Let us therefore steal a slogan from the Development Fever Faction in the Park Service. The parks, they say, are park and national monument we shall erect a billboard one hundred feet high, two hundred feet wide, gorgeously filigreed in brilliant neon and outlined with blinker lights, exploding stars, flashing prayer wheels and great Byzantine phallic symbols that gush like geysers every thirty seconds. (You could set your watch by them.) Behind the fireworks will loom the figureo f Smokey the Bear, taller than a pine tree, with eyes in his head that swivel back and forth, watching You, and ears that actually twitch. Push a button and Smokey will recite, for the benefit of children and government officials who might otherwise have trouble with some of the big words, in a voice ursine, loud and clear the message spelled out on the face of the billboard. To wit:
HOWDY FOLKS. WELCOME. THIS IS YOUR NATIONAL PARK, ESTABLISHED FOR THE PLEASURE OF YOU AND ALL PEOPLE EVERYWHERE. PARK YOUR CAR, JEEP, TRUCK, TANK, MOTORBIKE, SNOWMOBILE, JETBOAT, AIRBOAT, SUBMARINE, AIRPLANE, JETPLANE, HELICOPTER, HOVERCRAFT, WINGED MOTORCYCLE, ROCKETSHIP, OR ANY OTHER CONCIEVABLE TYPE OF MOTORIZED VEHICLE IN THE WORLD'S BIGGEST PARKINGLOT BEHIND THE COMFORT STATION IMMEDIATELY TO YOUR REAR. GET OUT OF YOUR MOTORCIZED VEHICLE, GET ON YOUR HORSE, MULE, BICYCLE OR FEET, AND COME ON IN.
ENJOY YOURSELVES. THIS HEAR PARK IS FOR people.
As we discussed the oddity of Abbey advocating the tongue and cheek billboard to welcome motorists out of their vehicles and into nature my professor turns to me and says, "John, you'll have to leave your winged motorbike home." I thought two things immediately: 1) if I had a winged motorbike I would ride it everywhere! 2) I wondered if I could declare today a holiday, run from class on my near-mythical Valkyrie up into the parking lot of a nearby state park and lose myself for a while.
That sounded like a better way to spend the day.
Instead I headed to the library to eat prewrapped food and read about nature. Abbey writes in the first Chapter to
Desert Solitare, "The First Morning"
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, teh one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
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To wit I have realized that my true home may not be in this study cubicle in the library despite the hours I have been imprisoned here this summer. I have been trapped here away from my true home, a home that wanders aimlessly with family and friends across this country. I snuck away to that home this weekend all to briefly. Now I have been pulled back into the enslavement of academia.
Oh well. It is about over and I will soon be back on the road again.
