Amy Irvine - Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

Praise for Desert Cabal

Desert Cabal is a grief-stricken, heart-hopeful, soul song to the American desert, a wail, a keening, a rant, a scolding, a tumult, a prayer, an aria, and a call to action. Amy Irvine implores us to trade in our solitude for solidarity, to recognize ourselves in each other and in the places we love, so that we might come together to save them. In this time of all out war being waged on Americas public lands, Im glad shes on my side.

Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

Amy Irvine is Ed Abbeys underworld, her roots reaching into the dark, hidden water. In a powerful, dreamlike series of essays, she lays Desert Solitaire bare, looking back at the man who wrote the book and the desert left behind. This stream of consciousness, this conversation, this broadside, is an alternate version of Abbeys country. It is another voice in the wilderness.

Craig Childs, author of Atlas of a Lost World

If youve ever talked back to the canonical tomes of the environmental movement, this is a book for you. Here are the women, the people, the children, and the intimate dangers those old books so frequently erased. Here is a new and necessary ethic that might help us more openly love the land and the many living beings who share it. I found myself noddingYes! Yes! Thank you!on nearly every page of Desert Cabal.

Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers and editor of Black Nature

Ed Abbeys rise to sainthood has been a bit awkward: here is an earth hero who guzzles gas in search of his personal Eden, a champion of the underdog who snubs Mexicans and Natives, an anarchist rabble-rouser who utters not a peep about his perch atop the patriarchy. Finally someoneand it could be no better iconoclast than Amy Irvinewrassles him off the pedestal back down to the red dirt where he belongs. Half riot and half tribute, this is a roadmap through a crisis that neither Abbey nor any of us imagined.

Mark Sundeen, author of The Man Who Quit Money and The Unsettlers

Amy Irvine lays bare the mostly bleached bones of Desert Solitaire fifty years hence. Amy shows an uncanny ability to scrape the joints clean and dig deep into the marrow to find truth. Desert Cabal will make you squirm, yet reminds us that Edward Abbey was only human, that our human psyche continues to evolve as does our understanding of life and nature.

Andy Nettell, Back of Beyond Books

For those of us who wanted to be Bonnie Abzug, Amy Irvine is a kindred spirit. And shes right; times have changed, Mr. Abbey; were negotiating tricky territory in the world of environmental rights, especially in the West. Whos right? Whos left? What will remain when the dust settles? Desert Cabal is brutally honest, which is just exactly what we need right now.

Anne Holman, The Kings English Bookshop

If there wasnt a woman in Ed Abbeys trailer in Arches back in the 1950s, there is one now. And she has a room and a voice of her own.

Ken Sanders, Ken Sanders Rare Books

Desert Cabal

A New Season in the Wilderness

Desert Cabal

A New Season in the Wilderness

AMY IRVINE

First Torrey House Press and Back of Beyond Books Edition,

November 2018

Copyright 2018 by Amy Irvine

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publishers.

Published by

Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

Back of Beyond Books

Moab, Utah

www.backofbeyondbooks.com

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-97-8

E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-96-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948873

Cover art Red Swell by Amy O. Woodbury

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

The Glass Essay by Anne Carson, from GLASS, IRONY, AND GOD, copyright 1995 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

For Devin
All that was lost, now found

CONTENTS

by Blake Spalding

by Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk

FOREWORD

N early two decades ago, I moved to the edge of one of the most rugged and remote landscapes in the American West: Boulder, Utah, bordered by the newly designated Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I had been a Grand Canyon river cook for ten years before this, and had learned firsthand the transformative power of time spent in a protected wild landscape combined with a lovingly prepared meal. I had also been an advocate for public lands all of my adult life, largely informed by my obsession with the writings of Edward Abbey. So when the opportunity arose to open a restaurant in southern Utahs redrock country, I seized it joyfully, and I and a friendanother womanstarted a business in a town so tiny and remote that it was the last in the country to receive its mail by mule.

Our concept was simple: we wanted to be a warm hearth for the kind of traveler who was seeking an authentic, heartfelt wilderness experience; we would offer a place to gather before and after the journey, a welcoming room in which to be received and fed. We were proud to be women business owners in old-fashioned southern Utah, and proud of our work: we were delighted to bring everyone to the table. Deeply committed to our new community and fostering ideas of sustainability, we started a farm and hired locally, paying everyone a living wage. But more than anything, we wanted to help people fall in love with this high mountain desert through the intimate act of feeding them food literally of this place. Think of it as culinary activism: help guests develop a devotion to the land, and they will be moved to speak and act on its behalf.

During my camp cook days, deep in the Grand Canyon, on the banks of the Colorado River, I had held the hands of visitors who were shaken to the core by the profundity of absolute quiet. I had wiped their tears as they sobbed over the almost unbearable magnitude of beauty. I often asked them to imagine what the state of the place would be today, had it not been protected more than a hundred years ago.

I ask this again, this horrid imaginingonly now I ask it of everyone I encounter, and I ask on behalf of the wild, rugged redrock country where I live. What will the state of this place be, in fifty years, if its not protected?

Just over two decades back, we rejoiced as one president declared 1.9 million acres surrounding our restaurant as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. And less than a year ago, we mourned as another president shrank its boundaries by more than half. Now a foreign company has bought rights to mine the landdespite the fact that the updated management plan for the newly amputated monument has not yet been approved nor the pending lawsuits resolved.

All my life, I have fought to preserve wilderness for the sake of wilderness, but my fight is no longer about that. Were talking now about survivalours and that of the plants and animals and habitats under siege by runaway human destruction. Saving our common home will only happen if we preserve large, intact ecosystems in which whole communities of species, including humans, can flourish. And only if every one of us cares, engages, and takes action.