Abbey's The Journey Home

I just finished reading (well, mostly reading--I have two essays left) Edward Abbey's The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West, which is a collection of his essays on topics ranging from his experiences with his wife during a stay in a fire lookout cabin,  a meditation on Hoboken and New York City, and his first cross-country road trip at the age of seventeen.

I've read Abbey's fiction and non-fiction before--but always while I lived on the East Coast.  Now that I've camped in the desert and lived here for a few months, my reaction to his writings is different.  Before I'd spent time in the Southwest, before I'd spent hours staring at the sky in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, before I'd stood still and listened to the wind move through the Junipers and Sagebrush, and before I'd smelled, heard, touched, and tasted the desert, I had one kind of understanding for Abbey's description of the desert, and a very remote appreciation of his passion for this area and its preservation.  Now, my understanding is different, and I'm coming to develop an appreciation of my own of this unique area.

I suppose it's true of all good books:  They have enough richness and complexity for multiple readings because as you, the reader change over time, and the nature of your understanding of the world changes, so does your understanding and appreciation of the text.

When I read Abbey before, I understood that he was passionate about the Southwest and its preservation; I understood it in the sense that there are places in this country that I also love and would hate to see ruined through human development.  I shared the belief that it's important to keep some places untouched, un-ruined by commercialization and exploitation of natural resources.  But now, when I read his descriptions of specific places in the Southwest, I feel a kind of passion of my own for these and similar places, and their inhabitants.  I never before appreciated the appeal of the relative emptiness, the barrenness, the aridity.

I wonder what Walker Percy would say about all this.  In his essay, "The Death of the Creature," Percy talks about the differences in experience that two people have of what is the same geographic place.  Percy writes,

Garcia Lopez de Cardenas discovered the Grand Canyon and was amazed at the sight. It can be imagined: One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one's feet. Later the government set the place aside as a national park, hoping to pass along to millions the experience of Cardenas. Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cardenas saw? The assumption is that the Grand Canyon is a remarkably interesting and beautiful place and that if it had a certain value P for Cardenas, the same value P may be transmitted to any number of sightseers

I think Percy's analysis is a little fuzzier than it could be--for example, he switches between talking about the value that a place has for two different people and the nature of the experience for them, and those are two different things.  He also assumes in some instances that there is a place-in-itself, apart from the experiencer or valuer, and in other instances, that there is no place in itself, apart from the experiences of the experiencers.

But I love this essay because it draws to our attention to weirdnesses (for lack of a better word) around two things:  1)  With respect to any given individual:  how their understanding of a given place differs immensely, depending on many things, including the context in which they experience that place, their prior knowledge and experience of that place, and their own prior knowledge, experiences, and values more generally.  So, to use Percy's example, if I first encounter the Grand Canyon as I hike across the desert and happen across it, if I merely read about it in a guide book, if I experience it by looking at it through my camera, or if I take an official guided tour with my significant other---in each case my experience and likely my understanding of that place will be different.

2)  With respect to two or more individuals:   Percy asks, was Garcia Lopez de Cardenas' experience and understanding the same as mine?  Given the complexity and multiplicity of ways that an individual might experience a place,  how do we even begin to think about whether or not two individuals experience and have the same understanding of the same place?  Argh....

Bringing this back to my readings of Abbey:  both kinds of weirdnesses apply.  1)  I've experienced the Southwest now in very different contexts (visiting vs. living here vs. through a camera lens; as a married person working in a university vs. as a divorced, disabled person).   I have numerous kinds of experiences of the Southwest.  I don't know how to think about those numerous kinds of experiences.  Is each one a separate thing, a separate understanding? Does each new experience and my understanding of it become integrated with all the previous ones, forming a single new understanding?  Is it perhaps both? Or some mixture of the two?  Because it seems like I have now a single understanding of a place that is an integration of all the previous experiences and my understandings of them, but I can also bring to mind some memory of my prior understandings.

And 2) Even more aRGhhh....there's all the complexity of (1) above, but we now add to it how my understanding(s) of a place can be compared to Abbey's understanding(s).

And finally, I realize that I'm also muddling things because I'm not sure if an experience of a place is the same as an understanding of a place, and I wasn't sufficiently careful in making clear which of the two I was referring to in my analysis above.  Now I'm thoroughly befuddled.

You can access the full text of Percy's "The Death of the Creature" here:  (www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/loss_creature.pdf)