"Desert Solitaire" [.]

[fiefoe]

The author is clearly a guy who's at peace with the prospect of dying on a solitary hike, which he did a lot of during a trip down the river through Glen Canyon.

• For entertainment we have the murmur of the river, the drone of cicada and amphibians, the show of nighthawks plunging htrough the evening gulping bugs.
• Occasionally we lay a paddle over the side, drop the blade in the water and with the slightest, most infinitesimal of exertions turn the double boat for a view in a different direction, saving ourselves the trouble - somewhat greater- of turning our heads or craning our necks.
• While we dream and drift on the magic river the busy little men with their gargantuan appliances are hard at work.. Nature's polluted, There's man in every secret corner of her / Doing damned, wicked deeds.
• Heart of the whole and essence of the scene is the river, the flowing river with its thin fringe of green, the vital element in what would be otherwise a glamorous but moon-dead landscape... "I love all things which flow," said the most fluent of Irishmen.
• Somehow, with a skill and tenacity I could never have found in myself under ordinary circumstances, I manged to creep stright up that gloomy cliff and over the brink of the drop-off and into the flower of safety. My boots were floating under the surface of the little puddle above.
• I open my eyes and see first a tall stem of grass bending over my face, weighed down by a drop of dew that glistens like a peral on its tip. Beyond the grass the pale trunks of the aspens stand in serried formation, thick as corn, blue-white and ghostly, their leafy crowns in perpetual motion.
• I climb and scramble over the rocks, which sometimes seesaw under my weight or start sliding, adding the hazards of surprise, twisted knee, sprained ankle or crushed foot to the general interest of the ascent.
• This (blue columbine) is growing alone -- and wears therefore the special beauty of all wild and lonely things.
• that gallant infirmity of the soul called romance / peaceful as a hanging judge / the silence unbroken by even a thought

__ the people: .. a superior breed in the deserts - consider the Bedouin, the Kazaks and Kurds, the Mongols, the Apaches, the Kalahari, the __ Aborigines of Australia.
__ Like death? Perhaps. And perhaps tht is why life nowhere appears so brave, so bright, so full of oracle and miracle as in the desert.

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