Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West by Rebecca Solnit (review)

Reviews 299 Balsamroot. ByMaryClearman Blew. (New York: Viking, 1994. 211 pages, $20.95.) Among the West’sfirstchroniclerswere the memoirists, women speaking their days into books because the unwritten code was that one never spoke aloud that which was deeply felt. Back then, memoirists wrote of babies and horses and long roads. Now Mary Clearman Blewhasdusted offthe genre ofwestern memoir andgiven usasecondvolume ofher life story. Her book, Balsamroot, carries on the tradition, telling ofhorses and births and the long highways that separate family members in the West. Blew tells the story of a midwife who lived on the edges of the frontier society of Lewiston, Montana. When she lay dying, her lover, an Indian, brought her balsamroot, because the yellow blossoms had been her favorite. Blew’s book cherishes the lifesustaining moments and relationships, circles them, and comes back to pick them, over and over. Balsamrootismost concerned with Blew’s relationship with her aunt Imogen, a schoolteacher who has lived alone all her life. To Blew, who unabashedly celebrates the strength of women, Imogen’s life had seemed strong and independent. As the book unfolds, and it unfolds like a mystery, readers learn that Imogen’s once-clear mind is failing, and that her facade of strength has been cobbled together by necessity. ‘The livesofhorses run parallel to ours,”Blewwrites, tryingto discover, in her aunt’s memories, her own younger self. In chronicling the lives of long-dead horses, she recovers her relationship with her father, who raised horses, and discovers that Imogen’s mare, Dolly, had been given to her aunt by a lover. Horses carried women away from home the same way the automobile later bridged the 600 miles between western towns. Blew uses her aunt’sdementia as a pattern for her own storytelling; as memories in her aunt’s mind collapse into one another, so Blew writes her memoir, moving effort­ lessly between her aunt’s past and her own; between current and turn of the century western history. Blew’s lyrical prose is compelling and gentle: readers will want to ride with her wherever she leads. CATHYDOWNS University ofNorth Carolina SavageDreams:AJourneyIntotheHidden WarsoftheAmerican West. ByRebecca Solnit. (San Francisco: Sierra ClvibPress, 1994. 416 pages, $22.00.) This is an eclectic and personal account of travel into two of the most important federallymanaged landscapes in the West—Yosemite National Park and the NevadaTest Site. The author, an art historian and environmental activist, examines “what it means to be living in the American West, learning as much from encounters with landscape and people as from reading.” Solnit begins by describing a “large scale action”—nearly 1000 people arrested, including Solnit—against the testing of nuclear bombs. The first half of the book concerns the Nevada Test Site, with topics ranging from Thoreau’s act of civil disobedi­ ence, the economic ramifications oftestingfor local workers, the historyofnuclear bomb development and testing, accounts of residents killed or displaced by testing, the Shoshone anti-nuclear activists and actions, descriptions of tests, and descriptions of the landscape. Musing on the history of quantum physics, Solnit describes the physicistswho 300 WesternAmerican Literature at a particular point “left their pastoral and entered a genesis, a time of creation that in their case included a fall into history,”and she elaborates on the nature of the bomb’s ability to obliterate cultural notions of containment and separation. The second half of the book explores the landscape and history of Yosemite National Park. Threaded through Solnit’s history of the area—accounts of explorers, soldiers, Native Americans, settlers—is her personal experience of the landscape and literary digressions on philosophical and cultural views of wilderness. Particularly valu­ able because ofcontinuing debate on the nature ofNature is her account and discussion of Native Americans for whom the Park is home and workplace as well as ancestral land. For some readers, the personal accounting and the eclectic spirit of the book may detractfrom the arguments ofthe book; for many thesewill be sources ofpleasure. Solnit succeeds in her intention to describe a West omitted from popular historical accounts, from painting, literature, official accountings of its Parks and landmarks, and she suc­ ceeds in describing personal relationships—historical and contemporary—to the...