Thursday, April 10. Good Friday in the Christian calendar. My spouse is worshiping alone, her church being locked up, a sign of these pandemic times. I go for my usual walk in the foothills. Spring blooms, mostly fritillaries and glacier lilies, dot the north slope of the hill in back of our home, which stays moist into May. Yellow petals hang above rich, lily-like leaves, all surrounded by the emerging shoots of meadow grasses.  Even the ubiquitous cheatgrass, which will turn brown in a matter of weeks, is a lively green. Life is bursting forth from newly warmed soil. I think of Goethe’s lines from the first part of Faust, where his protagonist observes the scene outside the city gate at Easter:
 
Released from the ice are river and creek,
Warmed by the spring’s fair quickening eye;
The valley is green with hope and joy;
The hoary winter has grown so weak
He has withdrawn to the rugged mountains.
From there he sends, but only in flight,
Impotent showers of icy hail
That streak across the greening vale;
But the sun will not suffer the white;
Everywhere stirs what develops and grows . . .
(trans. Walter Kaufmann)
 
How can one’s thoughts not be elevated in such surroundings, even in a time of world crisis? How can one not think of renewal, or meditate upon the idea of resurrection? I turn to the original German in this famous passage, and note that the last line I’ve quoted—the words Kaufmann translates as “develops and grows”—are actually Bildung und Streben, two terms which I’m sure Goethe did not choose lightly. Bildung in its simplest sense means “education,” but it carries much deeper connotations. Wikipedia calls it “the process of harmonization of mind, heart, selfhood and identity,” a term for how the individual learns to take on a constructive role within society, typically by undergoing a period of adventure and travail during one’s youth. It is exemplified by the Bildungsroman, the German literary form which Goethe himself employed in his early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Streben, or “striving,” is another of those meaning-laden words Germans use so often, and can denote a person questing for power, moving with determination toward some goal, or (as in this usage) a plant reaching for the light. Clearly Goethe is not using these words to mean only that flowers and plants are pushing up from the earth in spring; they are stand-ins for the greater human quest toward knowledge and power, which obsesses Faust and leads him into mortal difficulty. Goethe is framing the human struggle as if we arose out of the Earth itself--which of course we did. We see this made explicit at the very beginning of the tragedy, where we witness Faust contemplating the symbol of the macrocosmos, which “with mysterious potency/Make nature’s hidden powers around me, manifest.”

Faust then turns the pages of the old tome he has pulled from his shelf to the symbol of the Earth spirit, which fills him with a strange sense of power:
 
As if I’d drunk new wine I’m glowing,
I feel a sudden courage, and should dare
To plunge into the world . . .
 
But, when he pronounces the name of the spirit, a red flame appears and a voice quickly puts the old doctor in his place, telling him he is “Peer of the spirit you comprehend/Not mine!”  With this the earth spirit vanishes, leaving poor Faust to search anew for the powers and understandings he seeks.
(continued below)

I leave the meadow and walk back down the street toward home, scanning the open hillsides, listening for birds, trying to relish this moment as much as I can.  It is noticeably quieter than usual, and even the dull roar of the city, five miles distant, seems to have lessened. There are fewer cars and trucks on the canyon road and the intervals of quiet are longer. “Quiet” is a poor term, of course, for an atmosphere filled with small sounds—leaves rustling in the wind, a robin’s call, a hawk’s cry, the whole movement of air through the oaks and pines.

Later today, with the warm weather, the figurative gates of our city will open and hundreds of its citizens will stream out and head up into our canyon: bicyclists, runners, people going for a drive or a ride on their Harley. The sounds they make range from the slap of runners’ shoes on pavement, the conversation of cyclists riding alongside each other, the usual car noise, and the loud rumble of the motorcyclists. The latter sound can be heard from a mile off, and will increase throughout the day until by late afternoon it becomes a more or less continual roar. By then all peacefulness will have vanished from our canyon, and I will shelter in my home office with the radio on.

I think about those two words from the German: Bildung--to become educated in the larger, most useful sense; to realize one’s place in the world; to find one’s own way to contribute. Streben­­—the striving that is so much a part of our western civilization and is both our highest aspiration and our ultimate downfall. Faust, the epitome of the learned man, looks back on a life of pursuing knowledge and finds that the encompassing, universal comprehension he seeks has eluded him, so he turns to darker forces for help. This is a very old theme—a mortal human seeks godlike powers and cuts his ties with the Earth to obtain them. Tragedy inevitably follows.

Goethe set these opening scenes at Eastertide, a time of enormous significance for Christians as well as for pagan mystics, as represented in the ancient book of wisdom with which Faust summons various spirits. Faust observes the citizens of the city streaming out into the open air, singing, dancing, and flirting with each other, while a column of soldiers marches off toward a far-off war with the Ottoman Turks. He tells his assistant, Wagner, who accompanies him, of his ineffectual attempts to treat victims of the plague many years earlier, for which the peasants still thank him, though he believes his remedies poisoned more than were saved. “I must live/To hear the shameless killers blessed,” he laments. Could Dr. Faust’s times be more like ours than we have imagined?
(continued below)

My mind is not really on spiritual matters this morning, just trying to take in the sights and sounds of this little piece of the planet on which I walk. My personal Bildung story has for the past six decades led me to places like this, where some force or spirit has had its way with me, cleansing ill thoughts, filling me with joys I cannot name, and awakening a better nature in me. Just to step outside the door on a morning such as this is to realize that the world out there is the only real one. This puts me at odds with my Christian neighbors, but there I stand. Though I read many old texts, I feel no need to summon spirits from their dusty pages, nor do I seek them in sacred groves; the sight and sound of green and growing things (striving upward, the eternal Streben nach Licht) is enough.

So much of modern life, on the other hand, is made up of the striving toward power, exemplified above all by the quest for speed and control. The kind of education which might moderate and direct this quest is often lacking—the sense of proportion, the correct place, the knowledge of where certain things belong. This applies to the sonic environment as well,  a realm to which I seem to be peculiarly attuned. To me, race cars and motorcycles belong on a track, but if one desires to exercise these machines in the free and open air, a certain respect for other ears is called for. But the point seems to be to make one’s mark through some kind of sonic shock wave, to impress others with one’s power. The noise coming from the road is representative of the entire way we handle power in this culture. It brings to mind the conquistadors and friars who displayed the military and spiritual might of western civilization (sixteenth-century shock and awe, as Jared Diamond points out) in these heathen lands many centuries ago.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, and these folks who surround themselves with cylinder explosions are just seeking an escape, and they find it most easily by immersing themselves in in a sea of sound, no different than at a rock concert. The generous view is that we each choose our own means of getting away from the city and the life it represents. Many powersport advertisements employ the word “freedom,” as though a motorcycle or snow machine were a magic carpet, and perhaps in a weird way they are. I know that when I head for the desert in my truck I feel that lure of open spaces, although it doesn’t really begin to sink in until I switch off the engine, hoist my pack, and begin to walk. 

There’s also a sense of freedom to be found in strolling quietly among these foothills, where one can observe, smell, feel, touch, and hear as much of the life that lives here as our senses allow. To set aside striving for a while and simply listen. To me this is a form of reciprocity, somewhat akin to what Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as the indigenous relationship with the land, which calls for giving something in return for what we so bountifully receive. I don’t carry a pouch of corn pollen with me to sprinkle on the glacier lilies, nor do I believe they need a physical offering, so my gift, poor as it may be, is to look and listen.

At heart (and this is as close as I’ll come to spiritual matters here) I do not even think that the plants and animals blossoming and growing all around me need or want my gratitude. Mostly they need to be left alone. They will do fine without my strewing benedictions on them this morning. What seems to be called for is to absorb the lessons they offer, without getting too anthropomorphic. To understand that beauty is, or should be, paramount in our lives, that it is something we must cultivate and celebrate in all its forms, but especially those which spring out of the Earth. To not destroy that which grows free—without our aid or direction--not unless we first sit down and think for a good long while. To realize that the Earth is a living provider to all forms of existence, not a storehouse to raid as we see fit.

Many of us these days are being forced into a much slower pace of life, which perhaps allows us to see things we might otherwise miss. My own life hasn’t changed a great deal, other than my usual car travel being limited, and that’s probably a good thing. I see people out walking I haven’t seen before. Even the air in town seems clearer. All these improvements are being purchased at great cost, especially for those who can least afford it, which tempers the quiet and the beauty, but the changes are still undeniable. What if we were to make these adjustments deliberately, as a matter of personal choice and public policy? What if growth, power, speed, and control were not the prime motivators for our economy? What if convenience and easy entertainment were not prized above all else? Would there not be more of the natural world around us to enjoy? 

What it might take to achieve this, I do not know. I only hope that the path to a quieter and less crowded future does not involve disease, collapse, and social disintegration. It should not be required of us to disappear as a species in order to make room for nature. There is a choice to be made of which direction to follow, and we don’t have very long to make up our minds. We are not Faust, though we too often assume his mantle. Instead, we must set aside for a moment our great, learned wisdom, and turn humbly to the spirit that animates this Earth.

Utah Parks Company motor coaches line up outside the original Zion Lodge, around 1929.
Library of Congress

Travel to these remote but scenic locations remained arduous, but the UPC's tour guests knew that at the end of the day they would be welcomed by friendly hotel staff, a good meal, and some of the most stupendous vistas on tap anywhere. This long-overlooked corner of the American West was heading into the big time, thanks to the cooperative relationships forged by the National Park Service, the railroads, the road lobby, and the hospitality industry. National parks were for many decades considered “business friendly” and a means to boost local economies. This supportive attitude persisted in Utah until the mid 1970s, when a great change in the management philosophy of the National Park Service began to create dissension over the role that parks would play in southern Utah’s economy.
 
More later in this series of “lookbacks” at Utah’s national park system, in advance of my next book, Wonders of Sand and Stone, to be out this spring.
 
-

Zion auto decal, 1923.     National Park Service

Delicate Arch, early March 2018, 3 p.m.  My wife and oldest daughter are resting with their backs to a boulder of reddish-pink Entrada sandstone, a few yards from the east pillar of the rock formation known to early residents of Grand County, Utah, as the Ladies’ Bloomers. Standing next to the arch is a woman differently attired in a tasteful, full-length wedding dress. She sheds the flipflops she walked in with and dons black pumps, while her fiancée gets the rings ready.  A photographer hovers nearby, trying out camera angles around the arch. In a few minutes they will tie the knot underneath the iconic span, to the applause of us and several dozen other onlookers, none of whom they know. It’s just another afternoon at Arches National Park’s best-known attraction.

Not wanting to be caught up in the festivities, I’ve taken a seat against the north wall of the slickrock amphitheater which frames the arch. In front of me a half-dozen college students on spring break are lounging and chatting, while out on the bare expanse of sandstone an Asian mom and dad encourage their young and obviously fearful child to make his way across the slope. Two ravens perch on the arch, also surveying the crowd. Perhaps they expect to clean up after we humans leave, but that will be quite a while yet; already photographers are assembling along the stone parapet beside me, setting up their equipment and waiting for the setting sun to cast its carmine glow on the whole scene.

As many as two thousand people make the hike to Delicate Arch on a nice spring day. My adult daughter is seeing it for the first time; a flatlander, she was pretty nervous as we walked the last bit of trail, which is an exposed catwalk above a sheer dropoff. But she was determined to see the arch, and now she can savor memories of this amazing piece of natural sculpture.  Meanwhile I relax and enjoy the laughter and amazement of the others around me, many of whom also appear to be seeing the arch for the first time. Parks are for people, the saying goes, and I, like the ravens, contemplate the curious admixture of geologic and human spectacle on display here.

My own introduction to Arches came more than forty years ago at the Devils Garden campground, a few miles northwest of Delicate Arch. It was a cold evening in December and few others were around. After making dinner I watched, enthralled, as a full moon rose over the distant Uncompahgre Plateau, illuminating a strange territory of mesas, canyons and sandstone fins. I remember the excited feeling of having discovered a special place. Do others experience that today? Perhaps, but they’re sharing their find with a mass of humanity. Some may prefer it that way. Crowds lend a kind of safety to strange places such as this. Being with others reassures us that if something happens, we’re not alone.

One who didn’t relish the crowds was the writer Edward Abbey, who served as seasonal park ranger here in 1956 and 1957, when the only road access was a sandy, often impassable track leading in from the west to Balanced Rock. His ranger residence was a drafty government trailer close by the rock; the site has become a place of pilgrimage for Abbey’s legion of admirers. Abbey drew from the extensive journals he kept during his two seasons at the monument  (it didn’t become a national park until 1971) to craft his best-known work, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, which appeared in print fifty years ago--“on a dark night in the dead of winter,” the author recalled in the preface to the 1988 edition. The book took time to catch on, but after Earth Day 1970 many young seekers of the wild were drawn to this unusual work with its provocative message, distilled in an  oft-cited chapter titled “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.” In it Abbey presented his argument against letting the automobile roam freely within the national parks.

 Abbey’s opposition to “windshield tourism” stemmed from two concerns: that paved roads diminished the national park environment, and that seeing the parks from behind a wheel impoverished the viewer. During Abbey’s time at Arches, the National Park Service, under its Mission 66 program, was laying ribbons of asphalt into formerly wild reaches of Arches, Canyonlands, Natural Bridges, Capitol Reef and other national parks and monuments in the Southwest, shrinking distances and displacing the solitude that so entranced him. But the chief victims of this modernization program, according to Abbey, were the tourists themselves. No one could see, hear, or learn anything through a car window, he argued, and the sheer numbers of people that would stream into Arches on its new access road appalled him. “Why is the Park Service generally so anxious to accommodate that other crowd, the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and corner of the national parks?” he fumed.

Always one to take an argument to its extreme, Abbey favored banning autos entirely in the national parks. Let people enjoy the scenery on foot, he insisted; let them “rediscover the pleasure of actually operating their own limbs and senses in a varied, spontaneous, voluntary style.” Besides putting tourists in closer contact with nature, it would jolt them out of their middle-class suburban torpor and possibly kindle “the fires of revolt . . . which means hope for us all.” Here Abbey is touching on another favorite theme: the wilderness as refuge of the rebel against society.  But despite Abbey’s frequent anarchistic rantings, and he issued many, Desert Solitaire is in many ways a romance of the Old West--or what remained of it in 1950s Utah. He spins stories of uranium prospectors and grizzled cowhands, searches for a lost horse and a dead hiker, climbs a nearby mountain peak, and takes us down the Colorado River in soon-to-be-drowned Glen Canyon.

Each of these accounts conforms to conventions of the Western novel, in which a lone, upright American male seeks salvation in the arid wastes. Abbey’s tropes are almost identical to Zane Grey’s, though expressed in a modern idiom: the honest, hardworking yet deluded ranchers and settlers who try to wrest a living from the overgrazed range, the avaricious proto-capitalist who exploits the work of others, the Easterner who arrives in the desert to search for his destiny and find redemption through bold action.

Abbey even dreams of finding that fabled refuge in the red rocks which so captivated Grey--some Edenic spot behind a wall of red rock where a hero and heroine could spend the rest of their days, living a life untainted by the common cares of the world. For him Glen Canyon was such a place. “A man could live out his life in this place, once he had adjusted his nervous system to the awful quietude, the fearful tranquility,” he muses while floating down the Colorado with his companion Ralph Newcomb.

In Abbey’s imagining, humans in their ideal state would live in small bands close to the land, independent of each other and with plenty of space between them. He had only contempt for modern mass culture. “Man is a gregarious creature, we are told, a social being,” he wrote in Desert Solitaire. “Does it mean he is also a herd animal? I don’t believe it.” Given Abbey’s desire for solitude, it was no surprise that the National Park Service’s plan to modernize Arches with a paved road, a new campground, comfort stations and parking lots enraged him and motivated his rant against industrial tourism.

The road was built, however, despite Abbey supposedly going out at night and pulling up the road surveyor’s stakes, which had been planted clear from Balanced Rock to park headquarters. By 1958 the paved road was extended to the Windows section of the park and tourists were arriving en masse--forty thousand of them that year, more than a hundred thousand just four years later--a “serpentine stream of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer,” Abbey lamented. Arches was now on the family vacation map, no more a forgotten holdover from the West of the 1930s.

Every time I drive the main park road in Arches, I think about Ed Abbey and his rage against the machine, in this case the “big and glassy” automobiles that he urged visitors to dispatch with a rock through the windshield. (Never mind that he liked to drive big old trucks and even owned a Cadillac--just another contradiction in this paradoxical writer’s life.)  Ed died in 1989, when the annual visitation to Arches exceeded half a million; last year three times that many people entered the park, clogging parking lots and backing up traffic onto Highway 191. Only in the depths of winter is there any promise of solitude on the park’s main trails.

Cactus Ed was fighting the inevitable when it came to cars in the national parks. From their beginnings in Yellowstone and Yosemite, our parks were meant to be refuges for people to enjoy. The 1872 law establishing Yellowstone defined it as "a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."  Large parts of the parks would remain free of roads, but park advocates and leaders such as Stephen Mather and Horace Albright understood that without a strong constituency, national parks would wither under a parsimonious Congress. That constituency is now stronger than ever, as congressmen keep discovering whenever they try to choke off funding for these popular vacation sites. Americans want to see their land heritage, and they’ve been joined in recent years by unprecedented numbers of international visitors. In a time when much that our government does is hated or feared worldwide, the national parks remain our best ambassadors.

It’s true that Ed Abbey’s detested pavement has brought unseemly throngs to our national parks. Too many people crowd into places that once breathed silence and solitude. But the roads are there and the parks are incredibly popular. Sitting in my little sandstone nook next to Delicate Arch, I watch as kids, parents, college students, the elderly, the desert-wise and the excited newbie all enjoy the scene.  While they’re not exactly out in the boonies--at least by the standards of modern adventurers--they have gotten away from their cars, as Abbey urged us to do. These happy folks are out in the sunlight and wind, experiencing a mild degree of freedom, self-reliance, and perhaps even a little fear.  For some, Delicate Arch may bring about feelings of wonder--at least in between shutter clicks. Although most will go home with little more than another mark on their bucket list, perhaps their perspective will have been subtly changed, and they will be a little more open to the idea of leaving a few bits of the earth alone. They may become more aware that there is, indeed, an Earth out there beyond their screens and windshields.

As popular as they have become, our national parks and monuments have become a prime venue for some much-needed education in responsible outdoor behavior. This includes promoting better awareness of the natural values of our parks, something that the Park Service does well and should do more of.  As Congress considers whether to allot more money to the agency for needed infrastructure improvements, it should also fund a healthy increase in the number of interpretive rangers the Park Service employs. These women and men are the parks’ best face. Every one I’ve met is deeply committed to sharing scientific knowledge with visitors. They are a front line in the most desperate battle of all, the struggle to educate Americans about the worth of the planet they live on.

The national parks of today may be a long way from Cactus Ed’s notion of a free, leaderless society of independent, upright and capable dwellers in the land, but they offer a better vision than much of what we see in the modern West, especially here in the land of Moab. The Arches that this ornery, intransigent author fell in love with a half century ago is gone for good, but his sandstone monuments still stand, open for all to visit, marvel at, and take away whatever lessons they hold.

If we want to understand the impact that Desert Solitaire had on readers of my generation, we have to consider the times: 1968, the year of its publication, and those that followed were a period of unprecedented social upheaval and overriding angst in America. It wasn’t only young radicals who wondered if our country was going to get through it all without major damage to our ideals.  Abbey’s book gave us both a confirmation of our anxiety and an escape from it. We could read about a place in the desert that appeared to exist out of time, virtually untouched by war, racial unrest, venal politicians and pervasive pollution. Although Abbey warned us in his preface to Desert Solitaire that the Arches he knew no longer existed, this seemed not to diminish our pleasure in reading his book and imagining that somewhere in southern Utah, a place like it must surely still exist.
 
Even by the early 1970s, when sales of Desert Solitaire began to pick up, Arches National Park (it gained this status in 1971) remained a little-known destination, and the greater Utah canyon lands had yet to attract big-time attention.  Canyonlands National Park, created in 1964, was beginning to draw visitors, but few ventured into The Maze or boated the Green River down to the Confluence. A small but determined band of hikers and canyoneers in Salt Lake City were battling to protect the Escalante Canyons from a tourist highway that Utah politicians wanted to build, but other than in Coyote Gulch, you could still find plenty of solitude (and not a few cows) within its amazing sandstone gorges.
 
I first visited Arches in 1976, on a cold, cloudy day in late December. My wife and drove down from Montana to find some sun and warmth, but as we reached the mostly deserted campground at Devils Garden, the overcast sky promised snow. Off to the east a full moon rose above the Uncompahgre Plateau, its light showing from behind the clouds and illuminating a mysterious world of river canyons, mesas, and open slickrock.  I had read Desert Solitaire by that point and as we stood by our tent I felt a little of the thrill that must have filled Ed Abbey when he arrived at Balanced Rock in April 1956. True, the road was now paved, but it still seemed like an adventurous destination.
 
I didn’t make all that many trips to southern Utah during the ensuing years, but each time I went I seemed to be comparing my experience to Abbey’s, looking at how wild the landscape remained, how touristed it was becoming, where new roads and highways were being built. In 1985 I moved to Salt Lake City to work with a conservation group, the Utah Wilderness Coalition, which was developing a wilderness proposal for the state’s portion of the Colorado Plateau Province as well as for the Great Basin desert.  Abbey’s message had become real, and urgent: threats to the integrity of the canyon country landscape were cropping up all the time, each one contested by a small but amazingly dedicated band of canyon aficionados. These were the early days of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an organization Abbey supported and for which I worked briefly. Canyon country was starting to attract nationwide notice, and none too soon, for the drilling, scraping, dust-raising fraternity, allied with most of Utah’s congressional delegation, wanted no part of preserving these lands—at least outside of the state’s national parks, which were generally regarded as cash registers for the tourism industry.
 
I would venture that nearly all of those who joined SUWA, the Sierra Club, and other such organizations in Utah had read Desert Solitaire and regarded it as something of a bible, as I did. It became a prophetic work, which enshrined the Utah canyon country in our minds and gave us the intellectual and philosophical rationale for preserving it. Not that there weren’t other writers who made similar points—Wallace Stegner eminent among them—but Abbey laid the foundation and egged us on to preserve the red rock country. 
 
In its focus and outlook, Desert Solitaire was, and remains, unique.  Other writers, from Mary Austin and John Van Dyke to Joseph Wood Krutch, had written glowingly about desert environments, but they focused on the far Southwest—the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the ultimate arid spaces. No one else seemed to capture the Utah canyon country in quite the same irreverent, ironic way, writing in an idiom we could understand. John Wesley Powell wrote memorably about the region’s great rivers, and Clarence Dutton about its geology, but their words came out of a different century. Abbey managed to combine accurate observations of nature (despite his continual protestations that he was not a naturalist) with an alternative vision of America. His anti-establishment invective, as well as his peculiar brand of late-Beat generation anarchism and wild living, suited me and my peers—and not a few of us set out to emulate him. (I didn’t try, for I was never attracted to his free-and-easy demeanor, his Cactus Ed routine, which I learned much later was to some extent a deliberate bit of image-making).
 
At the same time, certain chapters in Desert Solitaire seem to belong more to a 1940s and 1950s style of desert writing, the kind that sometimes showed up in True West magazine. In a chapter titled simply “Rocks,” Abbey fictionally portrayed a uranium prospector who ran afoul of his scheming stakeholder.  In “Cowboys and Indians,” he joins hard-bitten, impoverished rancher Roy Scobie (a fictionalized name) to round up cattle in Courthouse Wash. He even engages in a search for a lost horse, an episode which some Abbey biographers speculate may itself be fictional (Abbey was known to draw on experiences from many places and conflate them in his writing). In this sense Desert Solitaire straddles the Old West and the New West, much as Abbey did in his first work of western fiction, The Brave Cowboy, wherein the mysterious cowhand Jack Burns runs headlong into the awful regimentation of the modern world. (Abbey made fun of True West and its kind, even though he sometimes placed articles and fiction pieces in similar magazines.)
 
Desert  Solitaire gave us a vision of a strange, beautiful and possibly dangerous land, but it also laid out a challenge to complacent, self-satisfied Americans: to grow out of our consumerist, fat-lazy-and-contented suburban lives and examine what was happening to our land, to our system of government, and to our own psyches. It dared us to stand up, like Abbey’s mythical cowboy loners, and seek a free life in the wilderness, beholden to no government or institution but only to each other.  Some of us took up the challenge, or imagined we did, and tried to create an alternative vision for what the American Southwest could be.  If it wasn’t a coherent vision, and if ultimately the economic imperatives that lay behind tourism overwhelmed our efforts to find a free land in the desert, we at least had fun trying. That’s an old American story, one that just happened to play out a little later in Utah than in other places. But it was all foretold in that subversive book that came out in 1968, which changed how so many of us looked at red rock and sunsets.