Praise for Desert Cabal
“Desert Cabal is a grief-stricken, heart-hopeful, soul song to the American desert, a wail, a keening, a rant, a scolding, a tumult, a prayer, an aria, and a call to action. Amy Irvine implores us to trade in our solitude for solidarity, to recognize ourselves in each other and in the places we love, so that we might come together to save them. In this time of all out war being waged on America’s public lands, I’m glad she’s on my side.”
—Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
“Amy Irvine is Ed Abbey’s underworld, her roots reaching into the dark, hidden water. In a powerful, dreamlike series of essays, she lays Desert Solitaire bare, looking back at the man who wrote the book and the desert left behind. This stream of consciousness, this conversation, this broadside, is an alternate version of Abbey’s country. It is another voice in the wilderness.”
—Craig Childs, author of Atlas of a Lost World
“If you’ve ever talked back to the canonical tomes of the environmental movement, this is a book for you. Here are the women, the people, the children, and the intimate dangers those old books so frequently erased. Here is a new and necessary ethic that might help us more openly love the land and the many living beings who share it. I found myself nodding—Yes! Yes! Thank you!—on nearly every page of Desert Cabal.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers and editor of Black Nature
“Ed Abbey’s rise to sainthood has been a bit awkward: here is an earth hero who guzzles gas in search of his personal Eden, a champion of the underdog who snubs Mexicans and Natives, an anarchist rabble-rouser who utters not a peep about his perch atop the patriarchy. Finally someone—and it could be no better iconoclast than Amy Irvine—wrassles him off the pedestal back down to the red dirt where he belongs. Half riot and half tribute, this is a roadmap through a crisis that neither Abbey nor any of us imagined.”
—Mark Sundeen, author of The Man Who Quit Money and The Unsettlers
“Amy Irvine lays bare the mostly bleached bones of Desert Solitaire fifty years hence. Amy shows an uncanny ability to scrape the joints clean and dig deep into the marrow to find truth. Desert Cabal will make you squirm, yet reminds us that Edward Abbey was only human, that our human psyche continues to evolve as does our understanding of life and nature.”
—Andy Nettell, Back of Beyond Books
“For those of us who wanted to be Bonnie Abzug, Amy Irvine is a kindred spirit. And she’s right; times have changed, Mr. Abbey; we’re negotiating tricky territory in the world of environmental rights, especially in the West. Who’s right? Who’s left? What will remain when the dust settles? Desert Cabal is brutally honest, which is just exactly what we need right now.”
—Anne Holman, The King’s English Bookshop
“If there wasn’t a woman in Ed Abbey’s trailer in Arches back in the 1950s, there is one now. And she has a room and a voice of her own.”
—Ken Sanders, Ken Sanders Rare Books
Desert Cabal
A New Season in the Wilderness
Desert Cabal
A New Season in the Wilderness
AMY IRVINE
First Torrey House Press and Back of Beyond Books Edition,
November 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Irvine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publishers.
Published by
Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
Back of Beyond Books
Moab, Utah
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-97-8
E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-96-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948873
Cover art Red Swell by Amy O. Woodbury
Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf
Interior design by Rachel Davis
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson, from GLASS, IRONY, AND GOD, copyright ©1995 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
For DevinAll that was lost, now found
CONTENTS
Foreword by Blake Spalding
Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks
