The Music of the Wilderness
The theme which dominates the text is the beauty of the wilderness. Passage after passage frames the natural wonders in richly metaphorical imagery. Throughout the book, the wilderness is forwarded as something both beautiful to behold and terrifying to underestimate. The desert becomes a place where the author can sit for hours just looking at the glory of a sunset or the formation of a rocks. And then the very same wilderness also becomes the agency of a hopeless situation he views as certain death and the maze which must be traversed to locate the body of a hiker who was not as lucky in his attempt to escape its death grip.
Arches Natural Money-Mint
In the Introduction, the author warns that some reader may find the text “violently prejudiced” and his corrosively satirical name for what became of the area he writes about afterward. Abbey terms progress a “dark cloud” hanging over the wilderness areas of the United States as he looks with regret upon how parts of the frontier that never saw more than a few campers a year just a few years before now must host tens of thousands of tourists whose greatest area of interest once there is where to find the bathroom and the Coke machines.
Preservation
Another persistent theme that Abbey returns to again and again is the need for wilderness preservation. His arguments on how to accommodate the desire for progress to allow greater tourism were at the time of publication viewed as controversial in his insistence upon separating tourists from their vehicles, but many of those very ideas have since not just been implemented, but are standard operating procedure. This is mainly due to a shift in attitudes by Americans toward leisure activities. At the time, hiking, rock-climbing, rafting and other outdoor adventures were the domain of a dedicated but small minority of people. Today, what had been sole domain of a certain “type” is pursued actively by millions of tourists every year and so it is with some irony that Abbey’s suggestions for preserving the wilderness have actually increase the same type of tourism he elsewhere rejects. It must be admitted, however, that National Parks have revolutionized the means by which visitors take advantage of these wilderness areas, not to mention that his once-radical calls for preservation have since very much entered the mainstream.
