Writers Can Secretly Shape Your Life. Watch Out!

How Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire nudged me toward vanlife, off-grid living, and homesteading in the Southwest

I was set up! By a writer. Edward Abbey, to be precise. (There were others, but he snuck in.) He’s one of the main reasons I live in New Mexico now—though I didn’t realize it until about two weeks ago.

Back in high school, my environmental science teacher assigned us passages from Desert Solitaire. I remember liking them. Pretty sure I read the whole book, being the bookworm that I was.

I remember parroting his opinions in class—talking back to my teacher with a borrowed swagger, complaining about Washington bureaucrats and lazy tourists. “You should join Earth First!” she said once, laughing. I don’t think I knew then that those enviro-radicals were actually inspired by Ed’s other book, The Monkey Wrench Gang. I just liked his attitude. The cantankerous poetry of it. His passion for the wilderness.

And then I forgot all about him. About the book. Mostly. Or so I thought.

Over the years, little bits of Ed kept bubbling up. Like that thing about cottonwoods—how they’re always near water if you dig deep enough. Anytime I saw cottonwoods after that, I thought of Ed. Still do. But I didn’t think he had anything to do with me—not really.

Turns out he was down there all along. Like that hidden water beneath the cottonwoods. Just waiting.

Because two weeks ago, I got the urge to re-read Desert Solitaire. I found the audiobook on my library app, narrated by a gravel-throated guy named Michael Kramer.

As I listened, I saw the whole scheme laid out before me—like the big reveal at the end of Ocean’s Eleven.

I saw it: how I’d been following a trail of Ed’s breadcrumbs for years without noticing. The road trips. The passion for the Southwest’s landscape and culture. The disdain for so-called "development." The pull toward the open desert and solitude. The dry cabin. The jugs of water. The moral allergy to plumbing. Hell, even the tone of voice I often use when I write—somewhere between sermon and wiseass—owes a debt to Ed.

It was his influence that got me into vanlife, at least in part. How do I know? I first got serious about the idea at Arches National Park—the focal motif of Desert Solitaire. Ed had been a park ranger there in 1956 and ’57. Arches is the book’s opening setting, and his time there its organizing framework.

It was 2014. My friend “Beth” and I were rushing through Arches. I hated the rush. I hated the crowds and the paved road that Ed had bitterly foreseen.

Beth and I were on a two-week, whirlwind road trip from Guadalupe Mountains National Park all the way up to Glacier, on the Canadian border, then back home to Texas.

Arches was just a quick stop late in the day—maybe a couple of hours. That day, we’d hit Mesa Verde in the morning, swung by Arches, and still had to push on to Salt Lake before midnight. Just enough time to walk a short trail or two, snap a few photos, and hit the road again. The trip was going fast. Way too fast. Arches wasn’t the only park we’d shorted.

Beth had been diagnosed with ALS. She’d come to live with me as her symptoms started creeping in, though she was still mobile and working at the time. We were squeezing in this trip while she could still walk—one last hurrah, a chance to experience some of the best this world has to offer before her disease immobilized her.

“Once you’re retired on disability,” I told her, “we could do it. Get a van outfitted for a wheelchair. I can keep freelancing from the road—just need internet.”

Looking back, it was a naïve idea. Dumb, really. Most ALS patients require more care than you can pull off in a campground. Beth definitely did before the end. But that day at Arches, I was filled with hopeful ignorance.

Beth died the next year in my home. She only made it a couple of years from diagnosis to final exit. But before she went, she made me her heir. Left me enough to take up vanlife, to visit all the parks we’d dreamed of seeing together, and to keep on rollin’. To return to the wilderness and a slower, pre-industrial pace of life.

That moment in Arches—the dream sent out its first tender shoot. At Arches, of all places. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.

Ed got me. He got me good.

I always thought I was doing things my way. Turns out I was just following the breadcrumbs Ed had scattered fifty years ago in a paperback. Which I read. At age sixteen. In a public high school. And somehow, that book slipped past the sensors and rewired my sense of how life could be.

That’s the thing about writers. The good ones sneak in like that. They plant ideas like burrs in your sock—easy to ignore at first, but eventually you find yourself sitting down on the side of the trail, picking through your own choices and wondering where the hell you picked that up.

I’m not saying it’s Ed's fault I live in a one-room off-grid cabin and collect rainwater in barrels. I’m just saying it’s a little suspicious.

He’s not the only one, of course. There’s Thoreau, who's been my mentor and hero since high school. Maybe he’s more to blame for the one-room cabin. (Mine is technically smaller—a silly point of pride.)

And then there’s Jack Kerouac. Re-reading The Dharma Bums in my forties, I realized my first college apartment had been modeled on Japhy Ryder’s Berkeley shack—right down to the teapot, the books, and the Japanese floor cushions.

But I’m talking here about Edward Abbey and Desert Solitaire. How he sneakily made me fall in love with the desert, with wilderness solitude, and with exploring dirt back roads in the Southwest.

And I can’t even be mad. A good con only works if you want to believe. And I did. I still do. Even now, with wind in my eaves and dust in my teeth and the Rio Grande glittering down below, I think:

You got me, Ed! You got me good! … And honestly? I’m grateful.

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My writing is free, but…

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Either way, I’m real glad you’re here. Don’t let the bastards grind you down!