Moché’s Reviews > The Best of Edward Abbey > Status Update
Moché
is 18% done
Looking out on this panorama of light, space, rock and silence I am inclined to congratulate the dead man. I envy him the manner of his going: to die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird. To die in the open, under the sky, before this desert vastness opening like a window onto eternity—that surely was an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck.
— Jul 24, 2026 08:05PM
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Moché’s Previous Updates
Moché
is 80% done
Early in the morning I hear coyotes singing again, calling up the sun.
☀️☀️☀️
— Jul 29, 2026 08:17PM
☀️☀️☀️
Moché
is 65% done
A bear does not pick berries with a little tin pail; the bear grasps an entire blackberry branch between its paws, bends it down and into the mouth, and strips it clean of berries, thorns, leaves, bugs, spiders, everything. The bear rolls this mix around for a while in its mouth, looking thoughtful, like a wine lover sampling a new wine, makes distinctions, spits out the leaves and thorns, and grabs another branch.
— Jul 27, 2026 10:42PM
Moché
is 55% done
Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. What I saw was the moon - the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We are. And each such moment holds all that we could possibly need.
— Jul 26, 2026 10:06PM
Moché
is 31% done
Mesquite burns with a slow hot flame.
Fire is magic, a purifying and sanctifying magic, and most especially a mesquite fire on a sand dune at evening under desert skies, on the shore of a pool that gleams like polished agate, like garnet, like a tiger’s eye.
The sun goes down. A few stray clouds catch fire, burn gold, vermillion, and driftwood blue in the unfathomed sea of space.
— Jul 25, 2026 06:13PM
Fire is magic, a purifying and sanctifying magic, and most especially a mesquite fire on a sand dune at evening under desert skies, on the shore of a pool that gleams like polished agate, like garnet, like a tiger’s eye.
The sun goes down. A few stray clouds catch fire, burn gold, vermillion, and driftwood blue in the unfathomed sea of space.
Moché
is 20% done
Roy is a leather-hided old man with gray hair, red nose & yellow teeth; he is kind, gentle, well-meaning, but worries too much, takes things too seriously. He’s afraid of having a heart attack, falling off the horse, dying there on the sand, under the sun, among the flies, weeds & indifferent cattle. Seems to me like a decent, clean way of taking off, better than the slow rot in a hospital with bedsores & bedpans.
— Apr 18, 2026 01:34PM
Moché
is 7% done
McMurtry called him “the Thoreau of the American West.” I’ve read some of his work but really I’ve only scratched the surface. I live and breathe the wilds so I should have dug into more of his works a lot sooner.
Typically I eschew “best of” collections however he put this together himself and declared it damn tight or something like that ☺️ so I grab my pack and bottle and Bowie and head out.
— Apr 18, 2026 07:49AM
Typically I eschew “best of” collections however he put this together himself and declared it damn tight or something like that ☺️ so I grab my pack and bottle and Bowie and head out.
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Jul 24, 2026 08:33PM
I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, sand-colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself through the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening—a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.
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It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry, and fierce as the animals. Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity. The soft evolve out. Except for sleek and oily growths like the poison ivy—oh yes, indeed—that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down in those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.