Technology Available to Solve Landscape Problems— Session A: Descriptive Approaches Seeing Desert as Wilderness and as Landscape-An Exercise in Visual Thinking1

2/ JOHN OPIE

Abstract: Based on the components and program of VRVA (Visual Resources Values Assessment), a behavioral history of the visitor's perception of the American desert is examined. Emphasis is placed upon contrasts between traditional eastern "garden-park" viewpoints and contemporary desert scenery ex- periences. Special attention is given to the influence of John Wesley Powell's writings and the art of Georgia O'Keeffe. The specific region examined is Canyonlands.

One of the most important new commitments assessment literature from England and the Con- of contemporary society has been toward environ- tinent. The task of this essay is to explore mental quality. Landscape planning, assessment the essential historic, cultural, and social and impact statements have become decisive as- presuppositions of the modern traveller, tour- pects of environmental preservation, conserva- ist, or vacationer. The needs of permanent tion and development, based on the influence of residents and the profit-motive of the business- public opinion, special interest groups, gov- man are another subject. Our attention is ernment agencies and legal statutes. These focussed on the visitor who experiences the new circumstances have also meant an enormous desert, notably the Canyonlands region, as a growth in the need for information, more or temporary interlude intentionally different less precise, about landscape aesthetics, in- from his usual environs. cluding the visual resource. But such reports have often been of poor quality or limited use- The following outline seeks to organize fulness, based upon outdated, irrelevant, or complex visual subjects into a manageable and excessively narrow data. Major historic pre- interpreted framework. Nevertheless, in this conceptions which control landscape values reduction the landscape-observer interaction are rarely considered. Analysis of written must not be ignored. Nor can the immeasure- descriptions, illustrations, paintings and able and often-subjective nature of values photography are rarely given much credibility. assessment be denied. This outline is proposed Contemporary viewpoints of scenic landscape to encourage further disciplined enquiry, by the general public are played down for the analysis, criticism and review in order to sake of professional evaluations which may shape a viable program for a visual resources miss the mark entirely. One difficulty is values assessment. that aesthetic and value information is diffi- cult to quantify. Another difficulty is the lack of significant normative guidelines and PRELIMINARY OUTLINE hence a lack of pragmatically useful infor- mation. VISUAL RESOURCES VALUES ASSESSMENT: This is not the place to develop abstract theories of landscape values, or to review the A structural analysis of the visual experience extensive (and excellent) visual landscape of American landscape

Equation: Physical Environment + Behavioral l/ Presented at the National Conference on Ap- Environment = Perceptual Environment plied Techniques for Analysis and Management of the Visual Resource, Incline Village, Neva- Behavioral Environment da, April 23-25, 1979. cultural tradition historical development 2/ Editor, Environmental Review; Professor of natural history History, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pa. social patterns

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technological innovations and limits here as a sample region to explore VRVA as a information processing capability useful framework. In other words, Canyonlands economic conditions will act as an informal case study for the political interfaces suitability of certain components for values assessment. To make the case study as produc- Physical Environment (components) tive as possible, two highly suggestive con- space/scale trol exercises will not be abstract, but his- observer position toric and concrete--traditional view of desert form regions; and historic descriptions of American climate scenery which travellers find visually desire- light able, interesting, or aesthetically pleasing. color Limits of space make the following narrative vegetation description highly selective and obviously in- wildlife complete. archaeological, historic, culture sites existing human impact NARRATIVE Physical Environment (dynamics) dimensions Unlike most other geographic zones, the 2-D (picture plane) legendary image of desert is an environment 3-D (space perceived) utterly hostile to human settlement and develop- 4-D (observer motion in space) ment. This strong antipathy is not mere fable. sequence Mankind emerged in subtropical regions, while vertical/horizontal a desert can be defined as an arid zone of inner/outer high heat, intense sunlight and radiation, order/zone and low humidity, perhaps as little as six panoramic inches of rain a year. Summer temperatures feature reach 120°F and nights can be uncomfortably enclosing cold. Desert soils are often highly alkaline, focal not prone to agriculture even if water were detail available. Vegetation and animal life are more scarce than in humid regions. Giving Perceptual Environment (Physical + Behavioral) little direct support for human life, deserts controls are known for their "terrible indifference to uniqueness man" (Tetsuro 1943, Shepard 1967). There is naturalness a profound consciousness that "this wide ex- environmental quality tent of hopeless sterility" is a world not land-use priorities easily domesticated by man. It is among "the land-use compatibility presently uncomfortable empty places," parts hazard level of the world literally off the map of any limits on intrusions geography of human habitation. Psychologically, controls on disruptions it was believed that entering the desert impact framework (dialectical tensions) courted not only death, but also madness and nature/man the dissolution of one's being in a primeval nature/culture chaos which was best left alone and unknown. beauty/ugliness What if, during the era of discovery, North aesthetics/economics America's Atlantic coast had been a desert? rarity/abundance The physical and psychological problems of elitist/public inland penetration and survival would have public/private been insuperable. policy guidelines (management decisions) project description American painters, who influenced so many definition of clientele of our notions of pleasant scenery, historically accessibility disliked desert regions. In 1835 the romantic land-use activities landscapist Thomas Cole said every landscape available technology without water was defective. A modern painter type and quality of intrusions said it took him a long time to adjust his work jurisdictional authority to the desert: the land impressed him as vast, fiscal resources empty and paralyzing, with only four or five externalities colors (Gussow n.d.). Georgia O'Keefe, master at evoking the sense of the desert, observed while "a flower touches every heart, a red hill The unique desert of southern Utah and in the Badlands, with the grass gone, doesn't" northern Arizona, notably Canyonlands, is used (O'Keeffe 1976). In contrast, the Canyonlands

102 painter, Harold Bruder, a New England man, wrote and safety (Conron 1974, Stilgoe 1978). in the 1960's: "I don't like New England. I don't like green mountains. I don't feel like These viewpoints involved a long visual painting them and I don't respond to green land- history involving the simultaneous development scapes. I like desert, I like rocks, and I of travel for pleasure, nature painting and like the sense of the West. I can smell the the use of leisure time. Dutch painting in air, feel the vast open sky....There are the seventeenth century portrayed the small, things you've got to go to the edge of--an self-sufficient farm scene--a cluster of abyss--and look in, and the thing opens up. houses circled by fields and woodlots. This What I try to get in the paintings is a qual- was a civilized space--a landscape--devoted ity of discovery" (Gussow n.d.). to plowing, sowing, harvesting and husbandry. This would be followed by Gainsborough, Turner To the earliest settlers and frontiersmen, and eventually the French Impressionists the visual experience of the eastern United (Shepard 1967). For most of American history, States presented a familiar and even friendly our artists were unabashedly nature-romantics, aspect. Like Europe, it was heavily-forested, including Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, with occasional open spaces, with natural en- Frederick Edwin Church, Thomas Moran and the tries through seacoast bays and river valleys, transplanted Albert Bierstadt. In 1905 the and with a temperate climate. For a millenium painter Worthington Whittredge (McShine 1976) European civilization had been carved out of wrote about the poverty of true landscape in such an ecologically benign region. Biblical America; we had too much wilderness. "I was and classical traditions had already explained in despair...The forest was mass of decaying paradise in pastoral and agrarian terms (Glac- logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to ken 1967). Later, in America, Crevecoeur and pick up every vestige of fallen sticks to burn Jefferson would heap praises upon the yeoman in their miserable huts, no well-ordered for- farmer, identified as the typical American. ests, nothing but the primitive woods with He cleared out the wilderness, established the their solemn silence reigning everywhere" (fig. rural landscape, and ordered the land. Early 1).* travellers like William Bartram and Timothy Dwight informed Americans of the virtues of The landscapes invented in these paintings, the domestic landscape. This would be turned as well as popular travel narratives, taught into a visual aesthetic by transcendentalists the prospective tourist what he wanted to see, like Emerson, Thoreau, Cole and Durand (Huth and where to see it. The tourist was encouraged 1957, Conron 1974, Marx 1964). by idealized paintings and topographical pic- tures to seek out the same picturesque materials Hence, in the early nineteenth century, in the landscape itself. This packaging of the when the American traveller began to visit his visual experience may have reached a self-cari- own land, he did not seek out rugged and un- cature with the picturesque, literally the cleared places. The dominant biblical tradi- scenery framed into pictures. William Gilpin tion told him that wilderness areas, notably turned Americans to a search for visual effects desert regions, were places of primeval chaos. in pictorial places. These included rustic The cursed place, Sinai, had to be avoided and bridges, old oak trees, classic ruins, rugged the promised land, Israel, entered. Desert rocks and the strong interplay of light and was the dreaded zone of evil, meaninglessness shade (Conron 1974). and the victory of nature over man. Instead the early tourist looked for satisfaction in cul- The artist and writer, and after 1850 the tivated land, where man could be seen as "the photographer, selected significant details of immortal co-worker with God" (Shepard 1967). the environment and out of them synthesized a By the 1920's, the European visitor, Count highly-interpreted panorama. Looking at the Keyserling, described a Kansas landscape as desert and looking at a painting of the desert near-perfect because it was the most fully-ex- involved a feedback system, "a circle of con- ploited place he had ever seen. The farmland stant comparison, discovery, and modification." of fabled Middle America stood out as the ideal The test of the traveller's vista was its suc- visual image (Schmitt 1969). cess as a work of art. Today's traveller in his automobile comes upon the scenic turnout The difference would not only be between or viewpoint, already chosen for his benefit. loamy farmland and the western desert, but also between landscape and wilderness. Wilderness Eventually the barren desert did gain was defined as any place unhabitable, impene- traveller's interest (Powell 1379). The route trable, barren and unfarmable, such as ocean, was somewhat circuituous. American vacationers forest, mountain and desert. Landscape was any place habitable, fruitful, civilized, ar- ranged and shaped by man, such as an oasis-like *See color illustration on page 387. meadow or pasture, symbolizing harmony, serenity

103 soon sought novelty in their scenery. Natural American wilderness that inspired a Cole or historians like Bartram and Jefferson had al- a Church"(McShine 1976). ready imagined a kind of wild garden, divinely maintained, in a forest or mountain valley. Paradise moved westward with the discovery of natural or wilderness parks. According to Gil- pin, a park included scattered trees in a grass- land lawn, with winding streams connecting al- pine lakes (Conron 1974, Fine 1972). In Can- yonlands today an oasis of green is called, significantly, Chesler Park. Soon interpreters made a distinction between the traditional eastern rural landscape and wilderness parks; the former were merely beautiful while the lat- ter were sublime. Americans tested potentially sublime places by Burke's 1756 features: power, obscurity, privation, vastness, sense of infin- ity, difficulty of access and magnificence. Far-off untamed places, beginning with Niagara Falls and later with Yosemite and Yellowstone, became the new shrines of the American tourist; the parks blended together personal, national, historic, primitive and religious needs. A visit to a wilderness park made "marks on the - Figure 2--Physiographic map of Canyonlands mind" (Nash 1973, Worster 1977). (Reisz 1957)

Under these changing circumstances, curio- Among the inaccessible desert regions sity arose about America's western desert re- of America, the least reachable until recently gions. The traditional "forbidden ground" be- was Canyonlands, covering large areas of came visually accessible through paintings and southeast Utah and northern Arizona. Even narratives long before it was physically acces- today a place called "the Maze" seems to de- sible to the public. The earlier image of a fy investigation (Brooks 1964). The first hostile zone was now covered over with an alter- reports heard in the east about this region nate biblical tradition of retreat into the were not favorable. By the 1830's the occa- desert for spiritual renewal. Desert became sional trapper or trader spoke of mountains the "environment of revelation," the archetype "heaped together in the greatest disorder," of "sacred space" (Eliade 1957, Douglas 1973). or he crossed the area but didn't find any- Symbolizing purity and timelessness, the western thing worthwhile to say (Huth 1957). But by desert became America's Holy Land. Today the 1858 a Lieutenant Ives, leading his expedi- landscape historian, John Brinkerhoff Jackson, tion along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, describes "an existential landscape--without was captivated by the "strange sublimity of absolutes, without prototypes, devoted to the region." He wrote of "wondering delight, change and mobility" for modern technological surveying the stupendous formation... till man. In contrast, Paul Shepard speaks of a the deep azure blue faded into light of ceru- multipath desert awareness, involving "power lean tint that blended with the dome of the and omniscience of an ultimate and final pre- Heavens"(Huth 1957). Ive's words indicated sence," and "a sudden, aweful awareness of clearly identifiable and sophisticated visual self in space and time" (Shepard 1967). In appreciation. John Wesley Powell provoked this light, zones of absolutes and prototypes more interest by his remarkable journeys in as Americans search for certainty in a world 1871 down the Colorado River entirely through of flux and change. In 1928 the painter John Canyonlands, and his equally spectacular re- Marin wrote: "Seems to me the true artist must ports in 1874 and 1875 to Scribner's Maga- perforce go from time to time to the elemental zine (Stegner 1954). Powell's popularity de- big forms--Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain,--...to pended upon his satisfying specific public sort of nature himself up, to recharge the expectations about natural beauty and scenic battery. For these big forms have every- value, and his purple prose fulfilled these thing". (McShine 1976). And Robert Rosenblum expectations. "Stand at some point on the in 1976 argued that the new generation of brink of the Grand Canyon where you can over- painters "would have to leave the realm of look the river, and the details of the struc- paint and canvas and move to the land itself, ture, the vast labyrinth of gorges of which precisely to what is left of those remote, it is composed, are scarcely noticed; the still pristine regions of Nevada, Arizona, elements are lost in the grand effect, and a Utah, or California, which for the 1960's and broad, deep, flaring gorge of many colors is 1970's are the equivalent of the unspoiled seen. But stand down among these gorges and

104 the landscape seems to be composed of huge in nature--the sense of freedom, pure air and vertical elements of wonderful form. Above, light, the magic of distance, and the saturated it is an open, sunny gorge; below, it is deep beauty of color" (Gussow n.d., McShine 1976). and gloomy. Above it is a chasm; below, it is a stairway from gloom to heaven: (Powell 1957, Sky (aspect of VRVA space/scale). In 1835 Conron 1974). The region was not physically Thomas Cole spoke of the sky as "the soul of all accessible to the traveller until the Santa Fe scenery... the fountain of light, and shade and railroad reached the South Rim in 1901 and the color. Whatever expression the sky takes, the Union Pacific snaked into southern Utah in features of the landscape are affected in uni- the 1920's (Hollon 1966). It can also be son." In 1843 Emerson wrote, "The sky is the argued that Canyonlands came into its own as daily bread of the eyes." And in 1852 Thoreau a visual experience with the invention of described different skies in terms of different Kodachrome color film in the mid-1930's. kinds of wine (McShine 1976). Eastern visitors find the desert sky almost an exaggeration. John Wesley Powell in particular used The eastern sky is perceived, if at all, through words to spin a visual web which even today a jumble of branches and leaves, filtered by dominates the visitor's perspective on the the perpetual haze of high moisture (and pollu- canyon region. He was unabashedly romantic tion) and often heavy with clouds. It forms and quasi-religious, portraying a mix of an indistinct and distant background to close- reality and unreality in the area (Krutch and middle-distance objects. It may not be 1958). Powell's writings also epitomized seen at all, a matter of indifference. In con- the American traditional quest for concrete trast, the illumination, weather conditions, representations of ephemeral ideals. "The clouds and figure-ground relationships of des- reflected heat from the glaring surface pro- ert sky make it pre-eminent. It is seen unob- duces a curious motion of the atmosphere; structed and becomes an experience both encir- little currents are generated, and the whole cling and infinite. In 1962 Barnett Newman, a seems to be trembling and moving about in painter, wrote, "For me space is where I can many directions .... Plains, hills, and cliffs feel all four horizons, not just the horizon and distant mountains seem vaguely to be in front of me and in back of me because then floating about in a trembling wave-rocked the experience of space exists only in volume" sea, and patches of landscape will seem to (McShine 1976). Sun, clouds, moon and stars float away, and be lost, and then reappear" seem more ideal than real. Landfords, trees (Powell 1957, Conron 1974). Simultaneously, and human beings seem to contract as the field Thomas Moran's canvases incarnated Powell's of view expands. Not framed by windows, leaves, prose (Figure 3*). or branches, the objects of the desert are ob- served in the open and seem reduced in size Later, in the 1960's, Eliot Porter's classic and importance. Powell writes, "The heavens requiem for the dam-drowned region, The Place constitute a portion of the facade and mount No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (Por- into a vast dome from wall to wall.... clouds ter 1967) would claim a similar perspective. creep out of canyons and wind into other can- This would be followed in 1971 by the text yons. The heavens seem to be alive, not moving of Edward Abbey and photographs of Philip as move the heavens over a plain, in one direc- Hyde in Slickrock (Abbey & Hyde 1971), which tion with the wind, but following the multiplied was a conscious attempt to influence public courses of these gorges.... In the imagination perceptions of the area. A very similar view the clouds belong to the sky, and when they was adopted by the Japanese photographer, Yoshi- are in the canyon the skies come down into kazu Shiradawa, whose Eternal America in 1975 the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift is dominated by Canyonlands. Shirakawa's ex- them up to immeasureable heights ... Thus perience involved his "rediscovery of the they lend infinity to the walls" (Conron earth"(Shirakawa 1975). 1974).

What are distinctive visual components of Landforms. In 1976 Georgia O'Keefe this desert experience (Smardon 1977)? Most said, "The black rocks from the road to the of this essay has centered on the visual stereo- Glen Canyon dam seem to have become a symbol types which desert observers carry with them. to me--of the wideness and wonder of the sky And we have looked at the controlling power and the world. They have lain there for a these stereotypes can have over us. It is long time with the sun and wind and the blow- equally important to look at the external forces ing sand making them into something that is which contribute to the visual experience. In precious to the eye and hand--to find with 1935 the artist Maxfield Parrish wrote, "What excitement, to treasure and love." (Figure 4*) is meant is ... those qualities which delight us Bold angular shapes of erosion form the scenery of Canyonlands for visitors. It

*See color illustration on page 387.

105 is profoundly a world not made by man, a meta- Soil-less/Lack of Vegetation. For most physical stage set for superhuman events. In American travellers, important visual signals Colorado an old tourist site is called Garden are missing in the psychologically alien desert-- of the Gods. The experience is like being a hazy horizon and sky forming a background to present at a primeval moment before the crea- the close maze of branches and leaves along the tion. One stands under the encircling sky, Appalachian Trail in the Blue Ridge or Great in a bold, empty, simple, silent, and yet Smokies, grassy loamy soil underfoot and soft real terrain, at the center of a theophany air. It is difficult to use the old visual (Eliade 1975). The shapes are aesthetically habits and old sense of perspective here; the abstract and lend themselves to human interpre- desert is sensorily austere. Here is a region tation. Canyonlands landfords have been, which flaunts its lack of vegetation. Georgia from the earliest days, interpreted as monu- O'Keeffe uses bones and skulls as metaphors mental architecture akin to the pyramids of for the soilless, treeless land; both are down Egypt, Stonehenge, or the figures of Easter to irreducible basics. (Figure 5*) The masks and Island. Powell took to temples, and named costumes are off. She once said, "Dirt resists you. sites Isis, Buddha, Brahma, Zoroaster, Walhalla It's very hard to make the earth your own" and Deva. For Americans, without a classical (O'Keeffe 1976, McShine 1976). In 1965 past, but hankering for one, the forms became Andrew Wyeth wrote, "I prefer ... when you feel America's ancient ruins out of a legendary the bone structure in the landscape--the lonli- past. In the 1830's, Thomas Cole had written, ness of it.... Something waits beneath it--the "We feel the want of associations such as whole story doesn't show" (McShine 1976, Gussow cling to scenes in the old world. Simple n.d.). In Canyonlands prosaic ground cover nature is not quite sufficient. We want human is removed as nowhere else, and one is allowed interest, incident, and action, to render the to see the real stuff of eternal America. It effect of the landscape complete" (Zevi 1957, is as if we suddenly know too much, as in a Shepard 1967). Much attention was given to religious revelation. We do not expect the discovery of natural "ruins." clarification from a place so boundless and empty, devoid of comforting visual signals. Color. Powell's journal entry for June 7, Life is intensely acute when it is experienced 1869, concludes: "This evening, as I write, without any mediation or gradual awareness. the sun is going down, and the shadows are The desert, lacking a mediating cover, is a settling in the canyon. The vermilion gleams place of purgation, chastity and discipline. and roseate hues, blending with the green and gray tints, are slowly changing to somber Geology. The French historian, Fernand brown above and black shadows are creeping Braudel, when he looked for the long-range over them below; and now it is a dark portal forces controlling human affairs, spoke of to a region of gloom--the gateway through historical "structures" (Braudel 1966, 1972). which we are to enter on our voyage of explora- These structures included climate and terrain tion tomorrow. What shall we find?" (Powell as Braudel sought to emphasize the power of 1957), The most unanticipated feature of Can- natural forces upon man. American history yonlands may be the extraordinary colors. New is said to be too brief to include Braudel's meaning is given to terms like color feeling, structures, but their presence appears in color weight, color intensity. After living the desert, a virtual embodiment of the geo- with the shadings of greens, browns, blacks logical roots of American existence. Even of a world filled with plants and soils, the the history of tourism, and its dependence strong reds, oranges, yellows, together with upon the garden-park visual experience, in- blue and azure in the sky, are new experiences. volves the appropriation of geological know- It is as if the age and varnish were removed, ledge. In the middle of the last century, as when apparently gloomy Dutch masterpieces fixed biblical time was replaced by primordial are brightly revived by the restorer's hand, time. In the desert this geological world is and the original vivid colors the artist in- unburdened by soil or ground cover, the struc- tended are recovered. It is an ontological turalist world of unbelievably slow rhythms discovery. We say, "So that's what the world is open to view. The dimension of space is is really like!" Eastern fecund scenery was penetrated by the dimension of time. As appreciated at the same time of the appearance Braudel argues, fleeting human events, even of the Claude Glass--low-toned pocket mirrors the spans of civilizations, are a temporary which not only were used to frame a scene, but efflorescence compared to the tempo of the to darken it to look like a dirty, heavily- rocks. In Canyonlands, one has a sense of varnished Rembrandt before the vivid colors being "present at the creation," and at the end were recovered (Shepard 1967). Color vision of time, and all ages in between. Powell com- and color memory have also been greatly en- bines biblical and geological imagery in his hanced by the invention of color film in the description of canyon rock formations: "Let 1930's. The impact of this new medium has not us call this formation the variegated quart- been adequately explored. *See color illustration on page 387.

106 site...Let this formation be called the cliff responses to new scenery are largely naive sandstone... .Let it be called the red wall and unconscious. One must admit the virtues limestone..." (Conron 1974). Canyonlands of spontaneity and yet management of the visual becomes a metaphor for the eternal and the landscape implies teaching the visitor not only infinite. This is a rare experience in our content but technique. abbreviated national history. We are enquiring into the question of In the above, attention to Canyonlands human access to the physical facts of a land- features has hardly been tapped. Space does scape. Simultaneously, the landscape is the not allow a further extension of this narrative. concrete embodiment of a person's (nation's) habits, needs, values and ideals. Georgia Tourism, beginning with ancient and medi- O'Keeffe said that the world of shapes and eval origins, is a pilgrimage into the extra- colors makes more definite and enduring state- ordinary, away from ordinary visual experiences ments than does the world of words (O'Keeffe (Shepard 1967). Historically, the common 1976). The landscape historian John Conron foundation for tourism in America was learning argues that when a traveller encounters an ex- natural history and exploring strange places, traordinary place, "we are awed, not informed with the hope of renewal or healing. The idea ....we settle for celebrating the sheer amazing of the vacation as a general restorative from fact that this wondrous thing is self-suffici- mundane and hectic daily existence drew in- ently there before us"(Conron 1974). Space, creasing numbers to nature, which was under- more than time, roots the American experience; stood to be therapeutic. Soon, as conveniences space is the central fact of American history. arose, travel in and of itself was supposed to be pleasureable. Tourism was an ideal way to use the new leisure time because of its educa- LITERATURE CITED tional and redeeming qualities. Abbey, Edward Yet the naturalist-interpreter of a park 1968. Desert solitaire. 303 p. or monument finds himself repeatedly responding Ballantine Books, New York. to the boredom of the tourist, who begins to see his vacation as publicly expensive and Abbey, Edward privately monotonous. Today's tourist has 1977. The journey home. Some words in trouble keeping busy, and seeks to keep his defense of the American west. 242 p. days filled with entertainments and recreation E.P. Dutton, New York. likely to be unconnected with the visual poten- tial around him. His awareness is clogged by Abbey, Edward, and Philip Hyde anticipation and anxiety, and he is disappointed. 1971. Slickrock. 144 p. Sierra Club, The visitor's disappointment may be the result San Francisco. of limited, scanty, or inappropriate anticipa- tion. I suspect the vacationer seeks one parti- Arnheim, Rudolph cular phenomenon as part of a holiday fantasy-- 1969. Visual thinking. 345 p. University to experience a kind of rapture, arousal of of California Press, Berkeley. primeval feelings and transports of the imagina- tion. The desert is a region off the map for Brandel, Fernad most tourists, with their visual baggage tied 1966, 1972. The Mediterranean and the to the garden park. This absence of recognize- Mediterranean World in the age of Philip able landmarks means encounter with a truly II. Second revised edition. Two volumes. alien wilderness. This getting lost involves Translated by Sian Reynolds. 1375 p. an acute visual disorientation leading to the Harper and Row, New York. experience of being out-of-control. The poten- tial rapture or transports which result is a Brooks, Paul major these of Edward Abbey's narratives about 1964. Roadless areas. 242 p. Ballantine the desert (Abbey 1960, 1977). Books, New York.

We habitually bind ourselves to routine Conron, John, ed. visual. patterns. We are in danger of seeing 1974. The American landscape. 625 p. only a world of labels which stereotype our Oxford University Press, New York. visual worlds. We repeatedly invent the same landscapes (Lowenthal & Bowden 1976, Watts Douglas, Mary 1975). We have also looked at the visual inno- 1973. Natural symbols. 219 p. Vintage cence of the American traveller in the sense Books, New York. that he does not recognize his visual traditions. We have also looked at his lack of conscious visual techniques to the extent that his visual

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