Cropping The Desert: Erasure and Reclamation in Jen Bervin and John C. Van Dyke

Abstract

In the summer of 1898, John C. Van Dyke abruptly abandoned his comfortable life as a librarian and professor of Art History at Rutgers College in New Jersey and set off on a nearly three-year journey across the deserts of North America. He had no fixed itinerary, no companions other than his terrier Cappy, and brought only about fifty pounds of supplies. For an indefinite sojourn into some of the hottest and driest portions of the planet, he carried one gallon of water. Forty-two years old, and by all accounts asthmatic, Van Dyke hardly seemed the type to embark on such an ambitious, one might even say reckless, adventure. Indeed, a certain air of mystery and rumor still surrounds his voyage: had he fathered an illegitimate child and was thus fleeing a scandal? Did Andrew Carnegie send him to Mexico on a secret diplomatic mission? 1 Whatever precipitated the voyage––and despite his apparent lack of preparation––Van Dyke would survive his wanderings across California, Arizona, and Mexico to write The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances. Originally published by Scribner’s in 1901, the book was, for a time, extremely popular and is described by Richard Shelton in his introduction to the 1980 edition as “a touchstone, a model of accuracy, deep feeling, and simplicity” that “not even the poets” have “surpassed” (xvi–xvii).