The Desert Author:John C. Van Dyke In the early summer of 1898, John C. Van Dyke, an asthmatic forty-two-year-old art historian and critic, rode an Indian pony out of the Hemet Valley, and headed southeast into the Colorado desert. With his dog, his guns, and few supplies, this sickly aesthete wandered, mostly alone, for nearly three years across the deserts of California, Arizon... more »a and Mexico. He crossed the Salton Sea Basin, forded the Colorado below Yuma on a raft he built himself, followed the railroad line to Tucson, then turned west again toward Sonora. His exact route is not known; he did not always know where he was himself. He sought both health and beauty in the dry country and wrote that the desert "never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover".
This extraordinary book, composed "at odd intervals, when I lay against a rock or propped up in the sand", is a masterpiece of personal philosophy, containing precise scientific analysis of diverse phenomena-- from erosion to sky colors-- and prescient ruminations on the nature of civilization. "The desert should never be reclaimed!" Van Dyke wrote, yet he lived long enough to see the reclamation projects in what became the Imperial Valley. He did not witness the virtual destruction of the Colorado Desert still ongoing. As poet Richard Shelton wonders in his introduction, "Where are the herds of antelope Van Dyke spoke of, and the gray wolves and the pure air?"
The first paperback publication of this classic account of the aesthetic qualities of the desert environment of the southwestern United States. First published in 1901, the book has been widely acclaimed by Lawrence Clark Powell, Joseph Krutch and other noted writers on the beauties of the desert as the first and best of the American desert appreciations.« less
It sounded like a very interesting story about a amn who sets off with his dog and indian pony into the western wilderness, not very well equipped. The author was so boring I could not get past the introduction.