Savage dreams : a journey into the hidden wars of the American West

426 Pages·2014·2.57 MB·English

by  Solnit

REBECCA SOLNIT
S A V A G E
D R E A M S
A JOURNEY
INTO THE
HIDDEN WARS
OF THE
AMERICAN
WEST
Twentieth Anniversary Edition
With a New Preface
University of California Press
Contents

Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
DUST, OR ERASING THE FUTURE:
THE NEVADA TEST SITE
From Hell to Breakfast
Like Moths to a Candle
April Fool’s Day
Trees
Lise Meitner’s Walking Shoes
Golden Hours and Iron County
Ruby Valley and the Ranch
The War
Keeping Pace with the Tortoise
WATER, OR FORGETTING THE PAST:
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
The Rainbow
Spectators
Framing the View
Vanishing (Remaining)
Fire in the Garden
The Name of the Snake
Up the River of Mercy
Savage’s Grave
Full Circle
Afterword
Sources
Index
It is the innocence which constitutes
the crime.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
And he never was in Eden, because
coyotes live in the New World.
Driven forth by the angel with the
flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted
their sad heads and saw Coyote,
grinning.
Ursula K. LeGuin,
“A Non-Euclidean View of California
as a Cold Place to Be”

PREFACE TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
What the Landscape Taught
I
I was so lucky. Some people might read this book as an account
of labor or duty: in it, I do a lot of work as an activist and more
as a historian, getting arrested and getting into archives with
equal enthusiasm. But it was all a gift, all an opening up of the
world for the young woman I was then. And the archives,
stories, and historical context strengthened my commitment,
while the protests taught me things; they belonged together.
They made me. Those gifts are what this book endeavors to
pass on.
It is strange to meet the writer of this book twenty years
after I was her. She is both familiar and a little strange to me; I
agree with most of what she says and disagree with some of
how she says it.
The excitement of that formative era comes back like hot
desert wind when I read this book; I smell the dust and desert
creosote and sagebrush, see the faces of heroes now gone,
remember awkward moments and revelatory ones. With some
of the 1991 money I received for this book from its original
publisher, Sierra Club Books, I bought a used Chevy S10
pickup. That truck took me all across the West, from Texas to
Alberta, and to Nevada and New Mexico and the Mojave over
and over, through the 1990s. I hauled friends and camping
gear and books and printers and often slept in the back of it.
With it, and on foot after it was parked, I made my way to
the high country of the Sierra and the Rockies, the arid country
in between, and the deserts of southeastern California. I was
never so free before or since; I learned confidence and how to
move across vast expanses of space in ways I had not known
before. Afterward, that beast sometimes called success came
and clamped onto me and made me more and more busy with
contracts and obligations, schedules and expectations, and I
was never again quite so able to take up an invitation to go
west with a day’s notice or to take two weeks to get
somewhere. That lost, former self and that freedom are two
things I taste when I reread this book. Even more than that, the
people and the places return with delight.
This is a book about my education—or rather about the
remarkable things that were given to me after I was supposedly
educated but when I was just finding out who and where I was
and what I might do and say about it. I wrote Savage Dreams so
that it could be everyone’s education, because the people I
listened to and the histories I dug into, the adventures I had
and the heroes I found, were not and, twenty years later, still
are not so well known.
And they matter: the Nevada Test Site’s Peace Camp; the
eastern Nevada ranch of the Western Shoshone matriarchs
who were more or less at war with the federal government; and
the secret recesses and archives of one of the most visible
places on earth, Yosemite National Park. In those places, I
found the other American histories: of the Columbian invasion
that had never ended, because the indigenous people here had
never been entirely conquered or erased; of the scale of the
mistakes Europeans had made about nature and time when
they imagined this hemisphere as pristine, static, waiting to
begin when they arrived; and of the real shape of the nuclear
wars, which were not a terrible eventuality, as even most
antinuclear activists then believed, but included this low-
intensity domestic war that was pursued at the rate of about a
nuclear detonation a month in Nevada between 1951 and 1991
and that looms over us still.
The Indian war that began in Yosemite and never ended, the
nuclear war that started not so very far away as the crow flies
a century later and will end when the last radiation from the
bombs fades from the landscape—these were not the world as