On the Edge A Novel Read Online Free Page A

met. I don’t think I could bear to have two friends in the same place who weren’t in touch.’

 
    2
    Crystal couldn’t sleep. Interrupted on the plane, and by her arrival at Brooke’s, her thoughts returned compulsively to Utah and to the events which seemed to have tipped Jean-Paul into madness. They had talked in almost hallucinatory detail about that trip.
    He had told her afterwards that he had found the landscape of Canyonlands overwhelmingly strange even before they had taken the psychedelics. Everything had been all right at first, driving through a semi-arid landscape of rolling hills and Ponderoso pines familiar to Jean-Paul from the countless Western movies he had devoured as a child.
    It was only when he got out of the Cherokee and walked to the edge of the canyons that he was thrown by the complete strangeness of his surroundings. His first reaction was incomprehension and nervous laughter. From that height the wind seemed to have caressed the pink and yellow sandstone into sinuous and elliptical shapes, flying saucers and waves and mushroom caps. More than the vast scale and the exotic colour, he was overwhelmed by the fact that he had never seen or imagined such a landscape before. Without the consolations of history or analogy he was unable to make anything of it and so he resisted letting it make anything of him.
    He realized that he had come in a predatory frame of mind. Like the trappers and the miners after whom the West was so often named, he had come to pillage. He was looking for echoes of the American codes he had already deciphered, fresh troops of imagery to enforce his arguments and observations, and ‘typical’ American experiences, such as the cult of the wilderness, which he could deconstruct, exhume and subvert with his tireless intellectual audacity. Ideally, he would have written the book in Paris, as Fredric Prokosch had written The Asiatics in Chicago, but Crystal had persuaded him to get a pair of hiking boots.
    Every millimetre of Europe had been drained, ploughed, terraced, built on, fought on, named, hedged or written about, but this American ‘wilderness’ was the site of irony and scandal. To begin with, it was inaccessibly expensive. By the time planes had been caught, a Cherokee, tents and sleeping bags hired, permits acquired, new clothes bought, three hotel rooms taken at the Ramada Inn on the way in and the way out, and a guide engaged at three hundred dollars a day, he worked out that they could have stayed in the Plaza Hotel in New York for the same number of nights. Instead of sleeping in stinking clothes under a swirl of snow in the company of Robert, the would-be extinct Native American white boy, they could have been channel-surfing in matching dressing gowns, searching for the Westerns whose Oedipal substructure he had written about in some of his most magisterially impertinent paragraphs.
    Jets and smaller planes flew over constantly. The ‘wilderness’, he reflected, had no vertical extension, it was only a thin layer of the biosphere, a symbol of freedom subject to more prohibitions and regulations than Parisian traffic. The most ordinary acts – cooking, drinking, excreting – were subject to detailed methodologies enforced by a special bureaucracy of rangers. Walking around freely was fiercely discouraged. A trail scarred the canyon and along it they must trudge.
    When they had gone to collect their permits, the rangers at the station, immigration officers for this land of harrowing novelty, had warned them not to walk on the ‘kryptobiotic soil’, a living soil which took eighty years to grow and could be destroyed by the brush of a boot. The true lover of the wilderness would avoid visiting it altogether. Once wilderness turned into ‘The Wilderness’ it became the most officious and fragile aspect of nature. Even Robert referred to his business as the ‘wilderness industry’.
    On the third day of camping in this controversial landscape, they’d