Oh, Give Me a Home: Western Contemplations by Ann Ronald (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 211 Oh, (jive M e a Home: Western Contemplations. By Ann Ronald. Norm an: University of O klahom a Press, 2006. 269 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Mary Clearm an Blew University of Idaho, Moscow My father, that old dryland Montana rancher, disliked the song “Home on the Range” and in particular its line, “where the skies are not cloudy all day,” which, after a lifetime of praying for rain, really set him off. “Who’d want to live in a place where the sky is never cloudy?” he used to demand, and as I read Ann Ronald’s meditation on the nature of the West and western living, I thought of my father’s exasperated question, which mirrors the contradictions and complexities that intrigue Ronald. Finding in the famous ballad written by Dr. Brewster M. Higley in Kansas in 1873 a “bountiful innocence [that] foreshadows the way Westerners still tend to view the land,” Ronald develops her theme of the West as a habit of mind by organizing her chapters around the succession of verses from “Home on the Range” (14). Thus, in the first chapter, Ronald considers a historical home on the range by reading Grace Jordan’s memoir, Home Below Hell’s Canyon (1954), visiting the home Grace built in 1933 with her husband and future governor of Idaho, Len B. Jordan, and pondering the impulse to create domestic space and neighborliness in the most remote places. Through this structure, Ronald finds a way to unify a wide set of inquiries into, arguably, every topic of significance in the twenty-first-century West. In subsequent chapters, she explores her contrast between the imagined West and its realities by observing increasing urbanization (“I would not exchange my home on the range / For all the cities so bright” [45]); the prehistoric and current settlements of Native Americans (“The red man was pressed from this part of the West” [76]); air pollution and congestion (“How often at night when the heavens are bright” [109]); threatened animal and plant species (“Oh I love these wild flowers in this dear land of ours” [139]); water issues (“Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sand / Flows leisurely down the stream” [171]); and tourism (“Then I would not exchange my home on the range” [198]). Along the way, she examines the nature of place, the power of memory, and the desire for community, along with its contradictions (e.g., how can we be said to treat our neighbors if those neighbors are giant condors or black-footed ferrets). Ronald’s West is multifaceted, complicated, simultaneously abused and sub­ lime. Above all, her West is transitory, from the bulldozing of her grandmother’s Seattle garden to make way for a parking lot to the redefined landscape created by the damming of the Colorado River. Oh, Give Me a Home is not a lamenta­ tion for an imagined past or a celebration of that past, but a journey through today’s West in all its damaged and changing grandeur with an insightful and generous companion. Relaxed, informed, humorous, Oh, Give Me a Home is almost as good as a long conversation with Ann Ronald in person. ...