Wild Visions by Ben A Minteer

Author:Ben A Minteer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

48. Len Jenshel, Rt 127, near Death Valley National Monument, California, 1990

49. Joshua Haunschild, Rock Springs, Wyoming, 2015

In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, author and public lands activist Amy Irvine writes (with clear ambivalence), “Desert Solitaire framed the American West” through Abbey’s lens, creating a set of aesthetic and experiential expectations about the “red raw desert” that would exert considerable power over generations of readers.12 Yet despite the highly visual character of Abbey’s writing, he apparently didn’t think much of landscape photography as a catalyst for environmental ethics. “As I say to my friends Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, and Philip Hyde, one word is worth a thousand pictures,” Abbey snickered. But he offered an immediate qualification: “If it’s the right word.”13 This being Abbey, though, his relationship to photography was a little more complex than that.

In fact, Abbey published a series of major photographic books in the 1970s following the success of Desert Solitaire, both for the Time Life American Wilderness Series and the Sierra Club, working with photographer heavyweights like Porter and Hyde. But he was apparently somewhat bitter about the books’ failure to generate the response of some of his other work. Abbey felt that the pictures tended to overshadow his prose and would later refer to them as his “trashy little picture books.” (For the record, they’re actually quite appealing publications. Some of this has to do with Abbey’s tone, which is generally more tempered than in many of the essays he wrote after The Monkey Wrench Gang—and when the Cactus Ed persona was in full bloom.)

Abbey understood that the aesthetics of wilderness preservation often rested on romanticized, and thus partial, images: the photographic iconography of the wild sublime. But he also knew that these images were at the same time idealizations, artistic inventions.

We can see evidence of Abbey’s more nuanced view on this question in an essay he wrote describing a return visit to Yosemite National Park in 1970 (collected in his book The Journey Home). During his trip, Abbey ends up at the park’s most iconic vantage point. “Somewhere near Cascade Creek,” he writes, “we stopped at a turnout for the classic view of Yosemite Valley, as invented by Ansel Adams [emphasis added]. There was El Capitan, Half Dome, Sentinel Dome, Bridalveil Falls.”14

But he also noticed something else, something that altered the classic Adams image. There was, he observed, “a blue haze above the valley floor.”

Was it woodsmoke, he wondered? Or was it exhaust fumes?

“The Secret of the Green Mask” appeared in print in March 1989, the month and year of Abbey’s death. It remains a little-known piece and hasn’t to my knowledge been reprinted. Still, it’s a nice example of the author’s easy hand with the immersive travel essay and a reminder that Abbey didn’t always carry a rhetorical blowtorch when he wrote passionately about a wild place that meant something to him.

And it turns out there’s one more secret buried in Abbey’s Grand Gulch piece, one that also hinges on a key image from the trip.

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