When I was a young man I was consumed with a blazing ambition to move to a big city, earn a fortune in the advertising biz, live the urban hipster life, then parlay my business contacts into a lucrative writing career and live a life as huge and as different as a rural, farm boy could possibly conceive.
Being promptly fired from, not one but, two small ad agencies within my first year might have deterred most people, but I was committed to The Dream. I tossed my Smith Corona typewriter and my few meager possessions into the Oldsmobile and headed towards the West Coast where I was positive the hipper agencies would “get” me and, if not, then I’d simply break into the screenwriting business and effectively leap ahead of the first part of The Plan.
On the way, I stopped to visit an older brother who had just started a business in Sedona, Arizona. 1984 was a boom year in Sedona, as people were just then discovering the sleepy little retirement village in the middle of nowhere. There were jobs aplenty and my brother convinced it me it was worth hanging out for a while and fattening up my meager cash reserves. Within two weeks, I was living in my brother’s shed and had five part-time jobs. Someday, I knew, the story was going to look good in my autobiography.
Anyway, entertainment (and women) were scarce in Sedona in those days and I passed my time by basically hiking and reading and drinking a lot of beer. The hiking was all new to me. Nobody ever hiked in the Midwest unless they ran out of gas. But there was something about the desert, the light, the sweat and the solitude that started to suck me in. On my days off I found myself venturing deeper and deeper into territory I knew nothing about and had never imagined existed. Not only was it scenic and beautiful, but there was something magical about the hiking itself. It was a workout with beautiful distraction. It was meditation with endorphins.
Between the physical labor and the hiking I was getting shape for the first time of my life…
At the same time, I attended a book sale at the tiny uptown Sedona library and picked up a paperback book entitled Desert Solitaire. I had never heard of it before or the author (an ugly looking fellow by the name of Edward Abbey) but it was 25 cents so I took it home to my shed.
“This is the most beautiful place on earth,” Abbey began and I was hooked.
Written about his one year as ranger at a, then, little known national park called Arches, Desert Solitaire was both poem and tirade, manifesto and musing. To Abbey the wilderness was not some mystic, idyllic happy place, but a place where wildness ruled and humans were but a visitor. He abhorred development, regulations and roads. Of national parks he wrote, “A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their way; let them take risks for godsake, let them get lost, sun-burnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive by avalanches—that is the right and privilege of every free American.” This was no David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. Here was a beer-drinking, cigar chomping, frontier rabble-rouser.
Abbey’s work was an exposition of an entire worldview that I could have never known existed—but had felt wordless inklings of on my own meager ventures into the backcountry. Suddenly it all made sense. It was, in point of fact, a life as huge and as different as a Midwestern farm boy such as myself could have ever conceived.
From the moment I closed that 25 cent paperback book, my urban hipster life was over before it ever began. Instead of continuing to the West Coast, I stayed in the Sedona area and kept hiking (and kept accepting promotions at the grocery store). Today I no longer live in my brother’s shed, but I’m still exploring. Abbey doomed me to forever haunt the trails and backcountry on my days off like some ghost of my former self. Doomed me to the unbreakable addiction of physical activity and solitude. Doomed me to a life of beautiful poverty.
Thank you. I think.
@photographs by Mark Hofmann
Enjoy the journey ! :)
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