Once described as "America's prickliest and most outspoken environmentalist," Edward Abbey wrote about the American Southwest with equal parts bitterness and affection. In more than 20 books of nonfiction and fiction, he passionately conveyed his "surly hatred of progress" and his love of stillness, solitude, and freedom.

Abbey described the theme of his book Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (1977) as "the need to make sense of private experience by exploring the connections and contradictions among wildness and wilderness, community and anarchy, between civilization and human freedom." In this passage from Chapter Two of Journey Home, he identifies some of the most unappealing characteristics of desert life through a series of vivid examples and deliberate fragments. At the end of the chapter, he answers the question that he raises here: "But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.

That's why."

The Great American Desert*

from The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

Anyway--why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes slowly evaporating under a scum of grease, full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes, and down at the bottom, inevitably, the pale cadaver of a ten-inch centipede. Those pink rattlesnakes down in The Canyon, those diamondback monsters thick as a truck driver's wrist that lurk in shady places along the trail, those unpleasant solpugids and unnecessary Jerusalem crickets that scurry on dirty claws across your face at night. Why? The rain that comes down like lead shot and wrecks the trail, those sudden rockfalls of obscure origin that crash like thunder ten feet behind you in the heart of a dead-still afternoon. The ubiquitous buzzard, so patient--but only so patient. The sullen and hostile Indians, all on welfare. The ragweed, the tumbleweed, the Jimson weed, the snakeweed.

The scorpion in your shoe at dawn. The dreary wind that blows all spring, the psychedelic Joshua trees waving their arms at you on moonlight nights. Sand in the soup du jour. Halazone tablets in your canteen. The barren hills that always go up, which is bad, or down, which is worse. Those canyons like catacombs with quicksand lapping at your crotch. Hollow, mummified horses at night, iron--shod, clattering over the slickrock through your camp. The last tin of tuna, two flat tires, not enough water and a forty-mile trek to Tule Well. An osprey on a cardon cactus, snatching the head off a living fish--always the best part first. The hawk sailing by at 200 feet, a squirming snake in its talons. Salt in the drinking water. Salt, selenium, arsenic, radon and radium in the water in the gravel in your bones. Water so hard it bends light, drills holes in rock and chokes up your radiator. Why go there? Those places with the hardcase names: Starvation Creek, Poverty Knoll, Hungry Valley, Bitter Springs, Last Chance Canyon, Dungeon Canyon, Whipsaw Flat, Dead Horse Point, Scorpion Flat, Dead Man Draw, Stinking Spring, Camino del Diablo, Jornado del Muerto . . . Death Valley.

Well, then, why indeed go walking into the desert, that grim ground, that bleak and lonesome land where, as Genghis Khan said of India, "the heat is bad and the water makes men sick"?

Why the desert, when you could be strolling along the golden beaches of California? Camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water in colorful Colorado? Loafing through a laurel slick in the misty hills of North Carolina? Or getting your head mashed in the greasy alley behind the Elysium Bar and Grill in Hoboken, New Jersey? Why the desert, given a world of such splendor and variety?

Selected Works of Nonfiction by Edward Abbey

• Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1968
• Appalachian Wilderness, 1970
• The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West, 1977
• Abbey's Road, 1979
• Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside, 1984
• One Life at a Time, Please, 1988
• A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Notes from a Secret Journal, 1989
• The Best of Edward Abbey (excerpts from fiction and nonfiction), 1992
• Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989, edited by David Petersen, 1994

*"The Great American Desert" is the title of the second chapter of The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West by Edward Abbey, published by E.P. Dutton in 1977 and reprinted by Plume in 1991.