Meaghan Duffy
9/24/14
English Composition
Dr. Adam Johns
I awake suddenly to a series of
crackles followed by a loud thump. I
wipe my tired eyes and force them open to see nothing but a dusty haze
surrounding me at all angles. I slowly
roll over on my stomach to face where Abbey had been camped out for the night,
slightly nervous to find out his state of being.
“Abbey,” I yelled over the noise of
the bulldozers and cranes directing themselves through the seemingly empty
desert. His flashlight, water bottle, harness, boots and jacket were exactly where
they were left last night, but his person was missing.
“God damn it!” I flinched as I
heard his deranged tone screech from practically right behind my ear. I flung around now in a seated position to
see Abbey hunched over the twisted juniper tree trunk, which I was under. His face was pale and longer than usual; his
breath sounds were loud and more frequent than normal.
“What’s going on,” I asked
confused, partially because I was still half asleep and partly because I could
barely see past the thick clouds of debris filling my airways and clogging my pores.
“The elitist corporate men are
butchering the junipers to create a parking lot for the spoiled tourists incase
they want to park and walk for a little while instead of drive the whole way
through in their gas-guzzling box cars.
At this rate, there will be nothing left for the unappreciative tourists
to see in a few years time! Every living
and nonliving inhabitant of this desert will be gone, but I’m sure the ignorant
tourists won’t know the difference…” Abbey ranted on, barely getting out a word
before beginning the next.
I sat in silence twiddling my
finger for what felt like days, knowing I shouldn’t waste my breath on useless
words that wouldn’t stop the machines from running and the men behind the machines
from doing their jobs to pay the bills. With
a split second decision, I stood up and began vigorously walking toward to source
of all the noise. One step in front of
the other I preceded having absolutely no plans of what I would do or say once
I got there. I consistently increased my
pace as Abbey nervously skipped after me, I assume because he wanted to know
exactly what I was going to do before I did it; that was just his personality,
he always had to be a step ahead and never behind.
“Where are you going? What are you
planning on doing? You can’t change their minds! We don’t have any clout Grant!” I had never
seen Abbey so nervous in my life, not even when we were young kids and a cop
caught us steeling snacks from the convenience store down the hill. Throughout my entire trip here, he has talked
my ear off about the cowards of this world who refuse to break out of their
sheltered bubbles and structured societal roles, yet the very second he has a
possible chance to change the fate of the place he considers home, he decides
to criticize from a distance rather than take action and confront the
destroyers.
“You want change, then you have to
go and get it!”
“This isn’t how we do it, there is
a better way.”
What’s the better way? Please
enlighten me on the golden process you speak of!”
“We…uh…I-”
“Exactly, you never have a plan!
You talk and you say, but you don’t do, you don’t execute. If you want change you have to go and get it!
Put yourself out there, take a leap of faith, be proactive.”
“Saving a dozen trees in a national
park in Utah really means nothing in the grand scheme of things. My true goal is unreachable, unachievable! It’s
like trying to count all the stars in the sky while standing on the earth,
impossible. There are billions of people
in this world; nothing I say will change a single thing. You
can’t just decivilize a highly civilized society, stripping it of all the
things that keep it grounded and relevant and expect everything to be okay!”
“Well then what’s the point,” I
asked turning back around heading for the juniper tree where my morning began,
the tree that would soon be destroyed and unseen by every tourist that would
ever walk around this park in the future.
Abbey, Edward. Desert
Solitaire; a Season in the Wilderness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Print.
Your writing here is clear and fast-moving. Most people need more time to generate a reasonable feel for the characters and the environment, so it's good in those ways. More importantly, you have a argument beginning to bubble up.
ReplyDelete"Throughout my entire trip here, he has talked my ear off about the cowards of this world who refuse to break out of their sheltered bubbles and structured societal roles, yet the very second he has a possible chance to change the fate of the place he considers home, he decides to criticize from a distance rather than take action and confront the destroyers. "
That's an interesting and worthwhile critique of Abbey, at least potentially. All talk and no action, he envisions an impossible change without doing anything about it (in his defense, of course, he lays out plans for the reform of the park service, but that's a pretty narrow subject).
What I would have liked to see, even in this rough draft, is some textual references helping us understand this side of him that you see, and/or an attempt by Grant to directly speak to Abbey in this way, maybe envisioning something more drastic, or maybe something a little more conformist.
Ironically, you're constructing a critique of Abbey for being impractical, but don't really either defend the status quo he criticizes (in some form), or begin to articulate some part of his vision which is obtainable (which seems like what the character, at least, wants to do...).
Something more needs to happen if you revise this - possibly something fairly drastic. Certainly if there are ideas here to be articulated, they need to emerge partially through the plot. I guess another implicit idea here is that we might get a different took at Abbey's Juniper trees by having one put under threat - but that possibility isn't developed yet.