The Other Wilderness: Outside the Text

Abstract

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thy heart. —Deut 8:2 KJV Edward Abbey, born and raised in the early twentieth century in an evangelical family in rural Pennsylvania, is understandably placed not in the traditions of Christian literature but as a Western or Southwestern or Environmental writer. Fair enough. But to do so is to lose sight all too often of the theological core of Abbey’s use of wilderness. His father may have been a Wobbly, but his mother was an evangelical Christian. Men have mothers too. In his 1968 classic Desert Solitaire Abbey asks: Wilderness. The word itself is music. Wilderness wilderness … We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. Why such allure in the very word? What does it really mean? (Abbey 189) and in his answer to that question, he reveals his own profound debtto both the imagery and the theology of the Old Testament: Under that desert sun in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean; the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore sublime. (219)