I wrote a novel, called it "Sagehen." The editor at Homestead Publishing said, "No, that title won't do," and the publisher weighed in with, "We need a title that will help sell the book." So, Alison and I forwarded lots of catchy titles and some of them were pretty good, but none of them got the nod. Finally, a phone call: "How about 'Losing Solitude'? I said, "Sure., anything to get the damn thing to the printer."

That title does have one virtue; it has, unlike a lot of them, something to do with the novel's theme: Isolated town of Sagehen under sudden invasion by a massive Cloud Rock style of development. Then a strange thing happened. A reader (Bless all readers!) wrote that the title was great: "We have to come out from our solitude in order to fight for it." All right!

Flash forward, Jim asking if I'd like to contribute to The Zephyr. Wow! Absolutely yes! Jim also suggested I might want to write under the Losing Solitude flag. Good idea. I'll do my level best to come out from isolation, up here in far north New York state, to unearth a few topics that have a certain edgy look, begging to be opened.

Solitude, that's one of those. Let's open with a few bytes from Alpha lone wolf Edward Abbey who was, when in writing mode, solitaire extraordinaire.

1) "Alone on Wheeler Peak, far from man and near to my God ....the ravishing loveliness." Journal, July 26, 1952.

That's clear and conventional enough, at first glance. But notice that the ravisher up there on the mountain is loveliness, not sanctity. Also, note the pronoun modifier: "my" God. Abbey's notions about the great mystery had to be his very own, generated from earth life, not taken from distant authority. In his essay "Down the River," we find this: "I am not an atheist, but an earthiest. Be true to the earth."

I walked up Wheeler Peak once; but not alone; others were there, coming and going. One man clung to the mountain in the grip of panic fear of being swept away. The curious thing was that he had plenty of reassuring company and the route was broad and easy. Several of us stopped to tell him it was no big deal, but our words were irrelevant. That man was experiencing an aloneness with raw nature as stirring as any most of us ordinary solitaires ever get next to. Maybe more so: primal fear, the very essence of "the wild." He was being ravished all right, and it wasn't lovely. I mention this to remind that nature has more than one face. Thoreau found that out, so did Abbey. Animals know, from birth. Notice their wariness.

2) "In these hours and days of dual solitude on the river we hope to discover something different, to renew our affection for ourselves and the human kind in general by a temporary, legal separation from the mass." Desert Solitaire, 1967.

Here he's giving solitude a reverse spin, asking it to refurbish his allegiance to humankind. A chancy try, this going away to make the heart grow fonder. Did it work, for him? He doesn't say, but in that river journey lessons are driven hard home by solitary wanderings in side canyons. "Alone in the silence I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert ... that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility, but in something far worse --its implacable indifference."

3) "The hawk soars, the ravens quarrel. And no man sees. And no woman hears. No one is there. Everything is there." Abbey's Road, 1979.

The unpeopled land, is everything. But notice that Abbey and three friends were there and they rolled big rocks into the canyon,"only for fun, meaning no harm." Here we have the man in the role of redneck violator, acting-up in the heart of the sacred, his own beloved desert wilderness. Even his awe, expressed so often, has to be rudely jostled from time to time. A man's animality, his instinctive cleverness and high spirits, his don't give a damn, must be let loose from time to time. Also, that letting go is a writer's tactic, arrows directed at narrow correctness, buttoned-down minds.

Abbey makes a sharp distinction between places where the masses roam and those where they don't. His brand of solitude requires huge realms of land untouched by human presence and contrivance. This is similar to Aldo Leopold's vision of true wilderness: a spread of wild country that requires several days to cross on horseback. Both of these writers write from experience "out there," know the limits of human self-sufficiency, are able to laugh at themselves, which is a saving grace holding them gently back from taking themselves too seriously. Here's John Moss, asking a question:

"Imagine wilderness: what is it you are imagining? Absence, adversary, a field on which we impose ourselves like figures in an existential journey ...?" (Journal of Canadian Studies, Sept. 1998).

Should we "lock up" certain parts of the earth so that a few privileged visitors can enter, to be ravished by beauty, to meet their god or gods or God; to escape from the masses; to stand high and alone and roll rocks? No, there are better reasons for protecting wilderness. I think that Abbey would agree. In fact, indulging his habit of going to the limit, he said at least once that he favored barring huge regions from any and all human entry, implying that even savvy rebels like himself might willingly deprive themselves of escapes to the wild. The idea makes sense in Abbey's world, because in that world humans have been revealed as ravishers, subservient sheep in the service of greedy hierarchies. Let us then do the honorable thing, allow wild nature to proceed without us. The ultimate solitude, the final solution.

That's rhetoric, not an immediate political demand. Don't expect tame consistency from Abbey. In the land of bland he took up the double-bitted axe of confrontation, deliberate ambiguity, and let the chips fly. But even at the rhetorical level I wonder if he didn't see, as I do, somewhere down the road, government agents, armed, roaming perimeters to defend Nature Pristine, a goddess caged for her own good.

Wait! Did I just now say "somewhere down the road"? Wrong. It's with us now, in modified versions. Take a look.

In our United States, the Wilderness Act of 1964 decreed that federal establishments survey their public holdings and recommend to the President and Congress certain areas to be kept free from human interference. To be a candidate for wilderness designation an area must be uninhabited and of a certain size (5,000 acres minimum), and provide "outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive or unconfined type of recreation." Later statutes elaborated on this theme. And then came the deluge, acres of print, as public servants struggled to apply legal mandate to particular landscapes. The language encoding their decision is sometimes blunt, and revealing.

Exhibit 1. FEIS (Final Environmental Impact Statement) for the Red Desert of Wyoming rates the South Pinnacles WSA (Wilderness Study Area) high on the solitude requirement: The rimrock area provides outstanding opportunities for solitude. The numerous pockets and small draws provide excellent opportunities to avoid the sights and sounds of other people."

The same FEIS gives high marks to the Sand Dunes WSA: "Large dunes in parts of the WSA make it possible for a visitor to experience naturalness because human-caused disturbances are not apparent." Bureau of Land Management, Rock Springs District, 1990.

Exhibit 2. DEIS (Draft Environmental Impact Statement) for Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests in Colorado downgrades the Greyrock Roadless Area's "wilderness capability" because of its "popularity" and the presence of adjacent private land that would make "management" difficult. U.S.Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region, 1995.

These are samples from a vast enterprise of government boundary-making, zoning and surveillance, where human experiences are predicted and arranged for. Wilderness pristine, where we hide from each other. Something's gone haywire here, solitude trivialized, turned into a guaranteed product. Do I exaggerate? Let me know.

Not that the final set-asides provide much extra in the way of protection of actually existing ecological structure. Motorized contrivances (including chainsaws) are prohibited, but enforcement is a joke. Grazing leases are grandfathered in. Things go on pretty much as before, except that human presence is more closely monitored. Pity the poor old Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service; they're catching up with the Park Service, they're now into people management, bigtime, on top of keeping track of sheep, cattle, burros, wild horses and llamas.

Let's shift scenes. The year is 1914. Elinore Stewart and her friend, Mrs. 'Shaughnessy and Stewart's husband and a few other men are on an elk hunt, travelling by buckboard and horseback across wide Wyoming plains and, at long last, into the Wind River Mountains. (Letters on an Elk Hunt, 1915). The hunting party seems to have been acutely aware of the wild and difficult nature of those mountains, just as we are, 88 years later. But one dramatic difference separating us from those Wyoming homesteaders is that their hunt lasted several weeks, much of the time allotted to getting the wagons to the mountains from far-off Burt Fork, Wyoming, and back again. A lot can happen in weeks of life with horses, wagons, guns, tents, weather. And it did. They even witnessed a landslide on the Upper Gros Ventre river, triggered by rifle fire.

"At the report of the gun two huge blocks of stone almost as large as a house detached themselves and fell. At the same instant one of the quaking aspen groves began to move slowly. I couldn't believe my eyes, I shut them a moment, but when I looked the grove was moving faster. It slid swiftly, and I could plainly hear the rattle of stones falling against stones, until with a muffled roar the whole hillside fell into the stream."

Today a privileged few of us are lucky to get a three-day weekend away from home base. Ten days in the Wind Rivers or Gros Ventres or Absarokas would be a grand prize, almost like winning the lottery.

I want to stay a little longer with that elk hunt. Along the way, getting to the hunting grounds, Elinore Stewart and Mrs. O'Shaughnessy befriended an orphan in Green River, aided and abetted a pair of runaway newlyweds north of Pinedale, sympathized with a crazed sheepherder and comforted a bereft widow. As I read Stewart's account I speculate that the two women's Christian virtues are safely housed in their own life experiences, ready for each day's challenge.

I'll take a little leap here, to imagine a time and place where "spiritual refreshment" is not an up-front issue, where "recovery from Western civilization" is not a desperately imagined goal, where two women relatively free of spiritual starvation in the modern sense are more objective, more down-to-earth and capable of action, than many a modern wilderness devotee.

Is that a stretch? Maybe, but one thing is clear enough. Stewart and O'Shaughnessy were not bedeviled by the thought that their presence was a dark stain on the wilderness. They endured snow and cold and bogged wagons and balky horses and down timber; enjoyed their own make-do enterprise and expertise, and the scenery; they savored sly judgments of the men, and of themselves; and everyone "got their elk."

Today the Wind River mountains are hedged in by grazing allotments, campgrounds and signed trailheads, but it's still wild; different, of course, but less so, I think, than we who go there as short-term visitors. The Stewart party were visitors too and I suppose they thought of themselves in that way; but their recreation and sight-seeing were subordinate to a task that was part of their homestead lives.

Nations, having proclaimed a vital need for citizens to experience "the wild," have legislated accordingly. However, as Stephen Lyons reminds us, most of humanity lives in towns and cities and many fine people lead "extraordinarily rewarding lives without ever wanting to "experience the silence of the forest ..." ("Enough with the Nature Already. Do you Know a Good Dentist?" Whole Earth, Fall, 1999).

I agree. Lyons goes on to say that very few people drive for hours over bad roads so that they "can be alone to write about the experience of being alone." Yes, but "silence of the forest" is a reality, though rare and endangered, and those of us who drive for hours over bad roads to listen to it are not going to all that trouble just for the experience of being alone. There's more to it than that, and I'm running out of space. That's okay, I'm not aiming for a neat conclusion. Here's one more image:

Colorado mountains, late afternoon and warm; wind a bare whisper and cars parked along the highway and people coming out of the cars to walk across rocks embedded in alpine turf. They're not talking. A huge canyon is alight, timberline below and the sky high, wide and handsome; and range after range before us and everybody walking in straggles, a ragged front of people, a skirmish line, if you will, a mass. I looked at the walker closest to me, opened my mouth to speak, noticed the intent look on her face, shut up and went on. We were people loosened from where we'd been, all together alone in the wilderness.

Consider the Pequod, designed for profit, owned by devout Quakers, a microcosm of humanity in the immensity of ocean, destroyed at last by the White Whale. Consider Ishmael, survivor, returned to tell of wildness beyond our power to comprehend, manage, divide, designate.

Martin Murie grew up in Jackson, Wyoming and now lives in Upstate New York. He is a regular contributor.