Paths less travelled Book

I enjoy Abbey’s libertarian spirit, to a degree. As in his other writings, Abbey experiences his freedom, in part, by tossing his wine bottle “high in the air” to hear “it crash on the rocks,” by tossing his beer can near Ayers Rock, by tossing another beer can into Lake Powell, and by leaving his calling card “in a peanut jar (my peanut jar) on [a] summit.” This seems self-indulgent. Elsewhere, Abbey calls the chuckwalla a stupid lizard and refers to a great blue heron as “not too bright,” which seems at odds with his statements that “all the creatures great and small” are part of a greater whole, but each an individual as well, one and unique…” and that “even a rock has being.” He pops off on this and that with his political opinions. He espouses gun libertarianism (to protect us against “the government”) and says that in this predator-prey world “the moralistic vegetarian is a hypocrite,” as if it’s wrong to not impose suffering if we have a choice not to do so.

Abbey says he is a “feeler, not a thinker”and that’s why he’s fun to read. Alone, at a remote point in the canyons, he pulls out his flute to “play a little desert music. Improvised music: a song for any coyotes that may be listening, a song for the river and the great canyon, a song for the sky, a song for the setting sun. Doing only what is proper and necessary. I stop; we listen to the echoes floating back. I write ‘we’ because, in the company of the other nearby living things – lizards, ravens, snakes, bushes, grass weeds – I do not feel myself to be alone.” And then he writes, “Every time I go anywhere out in the desert or mountains I wonder why I should return. Someday I won’t.” Given his death and the whereabouts of his body, that statement was prophetic.