Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains

Rating:
Summary: Rich, return-to prose
Review: Believe Jim Harrison's endorsement: this is outstanding prose. It is probably the best I, too, have yet read, and I plan to read it again. In an age of so many one-read books, I find this a comfort.

I bought CHOKECHERRY PLACES specifically to read on a recent train trip around the country; I pulled it out only when we were crossing those bowed sky-span spaces of the plains, and relished the reading. I could gaze out the window to the North Dakota buttes that on one of Gilfillan's visits "were taking on that homesick evening-sun look, and I was thinking, I suppose, of erosion and atrophy and wash-away and large, charged events vanishing."

This book reminded me of the potential that lies within words; it is elegantly crafted writing that rests in the mind like a heartfully prepared, home-cooked meal rests in the belly. Gilfillan writes with such detail and grace you'd think that nature itself, his subject, was italicized.

Rating:
Summary: Spirit of place gone missing.....
Review: CHOKECHERRY PLACES by Merrill Gilfillan did not sweep me away as as one critic on the backcover suggested it might. Nor did I find Gilfillan particularly poetic. I found the book mildly interesting in places, and the sort of thing one might throw into a back pack when traveling the high plains area north-east-west of Denver--which I have done. In fact, I read it slowly, one essay per night, thinking it might bring back some of the wonderous feeling I experienced in this lonesome land.

Gilfillan's narrative is one step up from a travelog, the reader is conscious of a narrator, but he is no Charles Kuralt nor Paul Theroux. Some essays are better than others, but something is missing from all of them. I did not obtain a sense of Gilfillan's spirtual or moral bearing, though I think he might have one.

My own experience in these wild and natural places has been the great sense of awe the Transcendentalists described. I will never forget the first time I saw the buttes, those wonderous islands leftover from the withdrawal of a prehistoric sea. I don't recall Gilfillan contemplating their ontological connections, though he does note their beauty in the late afternoon sun. His writing comes close to expressing appreciation of the scenes he surveys, but he never quite suceeds with words the way Georgia O'Keefe succeeded with paint.

I found some of his stories disturbing. Gilfillan apparently has no qualms about helping a man search for yellow feathers needed to round out a fan. And, no, the old man doesn't collect the feathers from the ground under trees where birds perched and preened themselves as Ben Nighthorse Campbell once suggested when describing how modern Indians make Eagle feather headdresses. The old man kills the little Finches with Gilfillan's help. The killing of these little birds doesn't register a blip on Gilfillan's ethics meter. When I read this essay, I was reminded of the many extinct birds that once lived in Hawaii. You can see their pretty little feathers in the dusty capes and helmets stored in musuem exhibit cases.

Nor does the digging of wild turnips seem a problem. Okay, if Gilfillan was the only person who ever dug them up what would it matter? But he isn't, and by advertising their existance, and the fact he felt no qualms about digging them up, he helps contribute to their extinction. It doesn't even occur to him that one reason the plants have evolved a mechanism for losing their above ground vegetation during the warmer months is for survival.

Gilfillan is not a Naturalist. He is the worst sort of exploiter who roams the high plains and follows a way of life which allows him to indulge his needs and wants and through his writing to encourage others to follow. This is no Pilgrim at Tinker Creek warning us of the extinction of the Monarch Butterfly.