Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken

When Edward Abbey signed and dated the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire, he appended the location as Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.  After his first term as a seasonal ranger in 1956, Abbey left Arches National Park for Hoboken, New Jersey, where his wife and son were living.  On his ostensible last day at Arches, Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire:  “After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken.  I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue.”

I’m uncertain how much of Desert Solitaire was composed in Hoboken or whether any of the author’s introduction was written in one of the city’s bars.  The earliest surviving outline of what would become Desert Solitaire dates from July 1962, when Abbey was working as a welfare caseworker in Hoboken.  The possibility that Desert Solitaire, one of the most beautiful books about the Colorado Plateau, was conceived and composed in Hoboken is fascinating; it raises the question how one place influences our view of another.  Abbey’s longing on city streets and in Hoboken bars must have elicited a memory shadowed by distance, shifting subtly the tones of the sandstone landscape of Utah.   I am curious about the desires we fulfill in prose rather than place.  Longing flaps-about at memory’s edges, wearing it away, allowing through various projections, brighter views, simpler places.  The biting flies and midges that light at the edge of memory are the first to be worn away, to be lost in the projection.  Through projection the abrasion of sand is lost; it becomes golden.

Abbey claimed that the composition of Desert Solitaire required little more than transcribing his journals as typescript.  David Petersen, who edited Abbey’s journals, found them “far short of anything approaching even a coherent book outline. . .”  The journals had descriptive notes, literary and philosophical allusions, and hyperbolic rants; they didn’t hold Desert Solitaire.   I wonder about the Hoboken invention of Desert Solitaire and how Abbey’s scant notes were amplified by the bars and echo the dense populace.

As I walk and drive I scrawl notes.  In field this spring, my evenings were often busy pressing and identifying plants and keeping my collection notebook up-to-date; I didn’t initially transcribe my notes until I returned to my apartment, by then details were fading from my memory, and my largely illegible notes were more curiosity than comprehensible—too much was lost.  I bought a larger sketchbook into which I transcribed the rough field notes in the evenings—taking the time to record a narrative, allusions, and hyperbolic rants.  When I look back at the notes I wonder, however, how my reading in another place is influenced by the scream of magpies rather than the streaks of mountain bluebirds, how shade from my spruce, cherry, and maple cools the heat of the desert, what comes from desire for a distant landscape.

*   *   *
Notes: 

Quote from p. 265 in E. Abbey, 1968. Desert Solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness, Touchstone (1990 reprint).

Information on the original outline of Desert Solitaire and Abbey’s work as a welfare caseworker comes from Cahalan, J. M. 2001.  Edward Abbey, A Life.  University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

David Petersen quote from p. 40 in “Cactus Ed’s Moveable Feast:  A Preview of Confession of a Barbarian:  Pages from the Journals of Edward Abbey” from Western American Literature 28: 33-41 (1993).

Comments

[Phil Floyd]

Excellent reflection on Abbey, writing, and memory's influences.

Edge of the Earth Rd.
Lexington, OK

[jeffrey t.]

love this book, love reading about it. nice writing.

[larry]

Phil and Jeffrey--thanks for stopping-by and for the kind comments. And Phil, that's an excellent address--Edge of the Earth is as good as the Back of Beyond on any day.