The virtue of noticing: On Edward Abbey's "Cliffrose and Bayonets"

This fall, I taught a class called “Writing About Nature” at the Stone Cottage at Hines Hill Conference Center in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, held in partnership with the Conservancy for CVNP. In the class, we talked about the virtues of noticing our environment and using keen observation to ground your writing in place and sensory details. We lauded noticing – using one’s five senses to make one’s writing vivid and real for readers – as a writing practice, yes. However, we also talked about the power of noticing to calm our souls and selves during times when our attention is stretched, our lives are filled with distractions, and we are separated from nature.

The class shared a lot of laughs around the shared table in beautiful Stone Cottage, some short walks in the woods, and discussions of nature writing. One of the pieces we read was an essay called “Cliffrose and Bayonets” by Edward Abbey from his memoir Desert Solitaire. Abbey worked as a park ranger in Arches National Park in Utah in the 50s and 60s, and in the interconnected essays in Desert Solitaire, he writes about living alone in the wilderness and exploring the natural and human history of the area. He also rails against the federal government for building roads into the park to make it easier for people to explore – and destroy – Arches. Ultimately, the book is a powerful argument for wilderness, for the need to maintain and retain it as something that is separate from humans, and for the virtues of noticing.

Abbey, always a provocateur, begins the essay with the words “May Day,” indicating not only that it’s May 1st, the start of spring, but also that there’s something revolutionary, something pro-worker and anti-capitalist, about taking a walk in the desert. He refers to this desert as a “garden” that is “uninhabited” and sets off to explore it. The first thing he does is take “inventory,” which is exactly what we talked about doing in the nature writing class, that by taking inventory of our surroundings in nature, by stopping to notice what we might otherwise pass by in ignorance, we not only learn something new and gain insight into our environments, but we also might gain insight into ourselves. And that, in turn becomes powerful material for our writing.

Abbey catalogues that plants and flowers of the desert, showing us in equal parts their biological features – how they survive and have adapted in this harsh environment – as well as their natural beauty. Along the way, again, his essay is a provocative argument for the separateness of nature, not that it’s separate from us, but that it should be given its own place free of human intervention. “I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous,” he writes. “(Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)”

There are some amazing descriptions here – the honeybee “wallowing drunkenly” in the pollen of the cactus flower and refusing to leave “until the flower wilts, until closing time,” the “bayonetlike leaves” of the yucca, the juniper tree “glittering shaggily in the sunrise.” He goes on to explore the flowers, return to his trailer for breakfast, then head out to describe Arches National Park itself. Yet a few pages in we get one of my favorite paragraphs in Abbey’s memoir, one that exemplifies his theory not only of nature but a kind of moral philosophy for life. In his writing, he calls on us not only to stop being narcissistic and to notice the nature around us, but also to free ourselves from capitalistic, acquisitive behavior, from our obsession with possession. Instead, he suggests that we should live as part of natural systems, we should question capitalism and herd thinking to reconnect ourselves to our surroundings and develop our own ideas and thinking. 

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

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