(Sierra Club Books, 1995, $22.00) reviewed by Joe Eaton
In Savage Dreams, art historian and antinuclear activist Rebecca Solnit takes a fresh look at two emblematic Western places: Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site. This may seem a strange and arbitrary pairing at first; what, after all, does hyperscenic Yosemite have in common with the Test Site's bombed-out wastes? Solnit, in finding the parallels and connections, reframes the reader's view of both these landscapes.
After reading Savage Dreams, I will find it harder to dismiss Nevada as a featureless expanse of kitty litter or to accept the myth of pre-tourist Yosemite as pristine wilderness. The book's subtitle may also seem a little skewed.
You might think that there is nothing particularly hidden about the us government's 50-year assault on the land and people of Nevada. Here, at least, the government has acted like the rapacious hydra-headed beast of the militias' apocalyptic fantasies, seizing land, harassing residents, treating the "atomic veterans" and "downwinders" no better than the experimental pigs dressed in military uniforms and penned near the site of a 1957 bomb test to measure the protective effect (if any) of the clothing. As if the nuclear tests were insufficient insult, Nevada was also to have housed that grandiose shell game, the mx missile system.
The area remains a candidate for radioactive waste storage facilities (Ward Valley receives passing mention as another designated sacrifice area in another expendable desert). However, Solnit reveals another, less publicized face of the war in the official persecution of Western Shoshone land rights activists who refuse to conveniently disappear. Yosemite's war, in contrast, is truly hidden, part of society's collective amnesia about the destruction of the native Californians.
The area remains a candidate for radioactive waste storage facilities (Ward Valley receives passing mention as another designated sacrifice area in another expendable desert). However, Solnit reveals another, less publicized face of the war in the official persecution of Western Shoshone land rights activists who refuse to conveniently disappear. Yosemite's war, in contrast, is truly hidden, part of society's collective amnesia about the destruction of the native Californians.
As part of the "Mariposa War" of 1851, white soldiers and adventurers, including the Gold Rush freebooter James D.Savage, attempted to expel the Ahwahneechee, a Miwok-speaking people, from their homeland in what later became the national park. As a sort of consolation prize, the victors renamed Tenaya Lake after the chief (the Ahwahneechee, of course, had their own perfectly serviceable name for the lake, Pyweack).
I had encountered pieces of the Ahwahneechee story before but had not known until reading Savage Dreams that they subsequently returned to Yosemite and maintained a presence in the Valley until 1969, when the National Park Service razed the last in a series of Native American villages, deemed too unsightly for tourist sensibilities, at a time when the us government was destroying villages on a much more ambitious scale elsewhere in the world. Long before their final physical banishment from the park, the Ahwahneechee had already been expunged from its received history, with Park Service exhibits characterizing them as an extinct race.
Ironically, the open, parklike nature of Yosemite Valley that fit so well with the 19th-century Euro-American landscape aesthetic is only now being recognized, thanks to the work of ethnobotanists like Kat Anderson, as an artifact of indigenous horticultural practice, including controlled burning. What whites from Muir and Bierstadt on saw as an untouched natural paradise was in its own way as much a product of human effort as the hedgerows of England or the terraced ricefields of Java, even though its authors have been edited out of the picture.
Solnit weaves an extraordinary range of material into her accounts of Yosemite and the Test Site. Savage Dreams mixes political reportage, personal memoir, history, travel essay, philosophical speculation. The author trepasses on the Test Site's periphery as a participant in a civil disobedience action and is escorted to Ground Zero as a journalist. She helps a polyglot group of activists ("Edward Abbey would've never dared to make this up," she remarks to a co-worker) defend Shoshone ranchers Mary and Carrie Dann against a Bureau of Land Management raid. She connects with a long-lost cousin who has her own history of antinuclear commitment with Women Strike for Peace in the 1950s, discovers an austere beauty in the Great Basin desert with its macabre placenames (the Specter Range, the Funeral Mountains), and develops a taste for country/western music.
n California, Solnit meets contemporary Ahwahneechee, Park Service functionaries, and tourists who in a properly ordered world would be bear chow. (Solnit's Yosemite National Park, like the Ceylon of the old missionary hymn, seems to be one of those places where every prospect pleases but man alone, or Homo touristicus at least, is vile.) Near a shrinking reservoir in the foothills she locates the twice-moved grave of James Savage, whose brief but gaudy career as land baron reminds her of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (although Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" would also work) if you want to give Conrad a rest. Illuminating parallels and contrasts keep turning up: Richard Misrach, photographic chronicler of the trashed desert, is here along with Ansel Adams, celebrator of a Yosemite free of distracting human figures
I Thoreau, from the safe domesticity of Concord, dreams of the West; Twain meets the real West and its indigenous peoples with baffled contempt. The cast of characters ranges from Werner Heisenberg to the Donner Party. Arcadians and utopians, physicists and protestors, nature and culture, landscape and land rights all figure in the narrative, along with the politics of naming, the esthetics of the highway, and walking as intellectual exercise. When the art historian in Solnit threatens to take over, she generally redeems herself with a grittily realistic account of camping in the sage flats or a lyrical evocation of place. I have only a couple of quibbles with the book. Solnit refers to the former San Joaquin valley wetland as Tule Lake rather than Tulare Lake, and I would like to see at least a 20-year moratorium on all references to the wealth of Inuit terms for snow (a notion challenged by some linguists, anyway). These are minor annoyances in comparison with the strengths of a work that helped me see familiar pieces of the West in new and instructive ways.