Ghostwest: Reflections Past and Present

Rating:
Summary: Terrific read!
Review: Most of us enjoy ghost stories. We remember with nostalgia the ghost stories told to us in childhood. The seventeen ghost stories in Ann Ronald's latest book GhostWest: Reflections of Past and Present, however, harken back to an age when storytelling was an ancient art. Through an exploration of special regions of the western United States, Ronald's stories embody a multitude of cultural signifiers, traditions and values that are revealed through her critical examination of place and setting. These historical markers, some now only remnants of what they once were, like the American Bison, the Empire Builder railroad, ancient forests, or the family ranch are ghostlike reminders of the American past. Through the haze of history, Ronald's essays progress from the mid-19th century to the present using a multi-disciplined approach to scope out the particular elements that make each chosen landscape west of the Missouri unique.
In addition to her careful scholarship, and perhaps what makes her encounters with various aspects of place most enjoyable, is her gift of metaphor and ability to imagine and project the reader into the multiple aspects of place and setting. Ronald is fascinated with the heroic struggles of Native Americans, early emigrants, the 49'ers, and others who braved the Great Basin desert and the Sierra Nevada range to seek a new life in the West. But she does not concentrate solely on European American or Native American settings or landscapes. GhostWest is an attempt to capture the multilayered history that creates western American culture, from its geologic and biologic wonders to the flora and fauna of each region.
"The new settlers acknowledged few ghosts but, in truth, ghosts preceded them everywhere-ancestors of the American Indians, the dinosaurs that vanished, the glaciers that gave way to valleys filled with ancient trees. Ghosts pursued the pioneers too, for the miners and ranchers and shopkeepers and homemakers themselves were giving birth to their own ghosts with every footstep. I myself, in fact, am becoming my own ghost, even as I write this page."

Ann Ronald is a westerner. She grew up in Seattle, Washington in the Pacific Northwest. The natural surroundings and a childhood of hiking and camping instilled in this writer a sense of place. Her father, an amateur photographer influenced by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, taught Ann to visualize "scenery framed." Ronald thus credits her father with helping her develop an artist's eye for landscape. Her narratives of place reflect this ability to visualize and appreciate the multiple facets of the natural world. In addition, Ronald is both a scholar and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her university curriculum includes courses on Western American writers, Creative Nature Writing, Literary Nonfiction, Western Women Writers, studies of Major Environmental Texts and graduate seminars on writers such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Ronald is also a contributing faculty member in UNR's English Department Literature and Environment graduate program, the nation's first program in literature and environment studies, or, ecocriticism, that offers both the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees in English with emphasis in Literature and Environment.
Ronald's scholarly work reflects both her interest in the natural history and cultural traditions of the west. Her graduate thesis focused on nineteenth century British literature. Ronald reports that she was always interested in setting and a sense of place. She recalls her doctoral dissertation, Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens. "My thesis was a study of how 19th century British novelists changed, how setting was used as the century progressed-from Ann Radcliff, who used it for Gothic fright, to Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Bronte who used it more complexly for meaning, to Charles Dickens who used setting symbolically. "
Ronald is the author of seven books. Her first book, Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens was followed by a monograph on Zane Grey. She believes her book on Edward Abbey: The New West of Edward Abbey is perhaps the best known to date. She also edited a "totebook," Words for the Wild for the Sierra Club and wrote Earthtones: A Nevada Album, a book of creative essays accompanied by photos by nature photographer Stephen Trimble. Ronald describes Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature as a work of scholarly essays. Currently Ronald is working on a sequel to GhostWest that is to be called "Oh, Give Me a Home."
The narratives of Ronald's travels are informed by studies of archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, as well as oral histories, memoirs and biographies. As a naturalist, Ronald is equally able to transport the reader through the cycles of nature. It is with seeming ease that she describes the sounds and movements of animals, the different songs of a bird, or other manifestations of natural phenomena. Reading about Ronald's travel through distinctive lands of the Western States is an exhilarating albeit exhausting process. The preparation of the GhostWest manuscript led Ronald up mountains, through ancient forests, and across prairies. She appears to be haunted by the need to understand and portray the dreams and failures, violence and promise of the people emigrating to the West. Sometimes Ronald travels alone to understand and recreate in her writing the atmosphere of each setting. She appears unafraid of the ghosts that linger in place.
GhostWest is in a certain manner reminiscent of the legendary Ghost Dance of the Northern Nevada shaman Wovoka. In its all encompassing descriptions of place, ecology, and culture, GhostWest is a celebration of world renewal, bringing to life all those that preceded us. Like the Ghost Dance, Ronald's book uncovers the drama of western struggle and conquest. GhostWest is a ceremony honoring the natural and human forces that came before us, but also argues for careful management of the earth and its creatures. The powerful vision of world renewal and hope that the 19th century Ghost Dance inspired among Indian people spread far and wide. For many, its message is still a part of the West. On one of her solitary walks in the Sierra, Ronald pays tribute to its message:

"I thought I saw her shadow, ruffling the rye-grass meadow. I thought I saw a second silent shape, just ahead. I thought I heard a Ghost Dance drum, though the sound was probably only the wind brushing the pines. I thought I heard a rhythmic chant, soft and slow and sad."
Whether she is writing about the latest forensic discoveries of the Montana battle of Little Big Horn, uncovering the ancient civilization of aboriginal Paiute people in Nevada, or unveiling Willa Cather's Webster County in Nebraska, Ronald's narrative digs deep down below the surface of things. A synergy created from her active life of hiking, bird watching, and exploring spills over in the creative process and produces works alive with the chatter of birds, the sound of desert silence, and the stories never told, but imagined, of long dead pioneers.
Ronald's work is well argued, serious and also wonderfully imaginative. She is able to capture and reveal the many dimensions and moods that surround a place as well as the magical quality of nature in action, the fleeting movements that many of us less observant certainly miss. Ronald doesn't hesitate to quickly change writing styles, inserting bits of poetry, that bring images to life under a difference guise, metaphor or color, to the surprise and pleasure of her readers. Her ability to incorporate techniques from different art forms into her writing (the boldness of a painter's pallet or the sound and brightness of music) produces dynamic new effects and imagery. At times the reader swears she's hearing ghost-like laughter coming from the pages of Ronald's work. In her essay Colorado Savage Basins, she makes the most of traveling up a narrow grade with Colorado's Dave's Jeep Tours. Seeing the red shirted guide talking on phone, she remarks:
"To the left, an almost perpendicular rock wall stiffened upward. To the right, a drop of perhaps two thousand feet plunged toward emptiness. Sitting in the open-air back of the truck, dust blowing in my face, I couldn't decide where to look." ...Reminding myself that Dave would be out of business if he bounced customers into infinity, I nonetheless shuddered with the rock ruts in the road."
In Texas Cowboy Country Ronald's ability to create imagery and contrast is again awakened:
"... Standing on the narrow planks of a catwalk, looking down at the seething cows, I smell the sweet stench of a west Texas summer, of dust and drought and manure and sweat. I hear a jazz ensemble gone berserk, clarinet and tenor sax, alto sax and bass, all squawking out of tune. Calves separated from their mothers, cows search for their calves, bulls irate, steers just bawling on general principles, their off-key pitches riffing up and down in half-step dissonance. Gates slam like cymbals, whips snap an emphatic beat, percussion hooves drum the powdered dirt, as the unhappy animals mill in their enclosures." (page 34.)


GhostWest also expresses Ronald's concern for the future and the tragic nature of much of Western history. Her work is motivated by places that have been altered by forces of history, wars, and displacements of people and the conquests and upheavals of nature. One of her interests, although they are many and wide-ranging, is in describing regions where past lives and historic events inform the sense of place. In her travels in Kansas, as she watches the birth of a calf:
One cow is particularly restless, lying down, pacing, lying down, pacing. Are those hoofs emerging from beneath her tail, those tiny castanets of color? I climb out of the truck. In the thirty seconds or so while I have my back turned, fully formed buffalo calf oozes onto the ground. ..Within minutes, the tawney calf shakes its head, breaks out of the fetal sax, and peers at the world..."

And in perfect counterpoint, in the same essay on Buffalo Gounds, Ronald points to the casual decimation of herds of 60 million buffalo in the passage of a few years:
"We went north about thirty miles and made camp for about forty days. We killed 2400 buffaloes and a number of antelope. Then we went northwest ... Camped there about thirty days and killed about 800 buffaloes."

As the essays of GhostWest progress from the distant past through intimate memories of Ronald's childhood summer camp in the Olympic Peninsula, she continues in her quest to present a fair minded picture of diverse environmental issues. She recollects "wash[ing] down buckets of huckleberries and water dipped straight from the streams" and at age ten "hiding a whole unit of little girls-twenty-four of us-behind a single [massive] Douglas fir."
Logging at Camp Robbinswold, her childhood summer haven, Ronald relates, was simply a part of the Olympic experience. Without the logging roads, in fact, her summer camp would not exist. With the caveat from Aldo Leopold that one should never revisit a wilderness, Ronald nonetheless returns to the place of her beginnings. In her final chapter "Washington: Ancient Forests" and after thirty years of absence, she is prepared to evaluate the contradictions and tensions that beset the parks, environmental activists, commercial logging corporations and government regulatory agencies in the modern era.
It is on the very property of her former summer camp that Ronald encounters a modern day tree farmer, a "custodian of the land." "I try to imagine that I am looking at a field of corn," Ronald writes. "But I find it impossible to be dispassionate. I want my trees in a high-diversity forest, not in a monoculture..." With the clear knowledge that this sentiment is often scoffed at as `a naïve tree-hugging point of view' by modern forestry initiates, Ronald quips: "I, on the other hand, cannot make the translation from forest primeval to amber waves of grain."
Using modern science as her guide, Ronald goes on to analyze the pros and cons of clear cutting, selective logging and forest management undertaken gradually and over a longer duration of time. Ironically, she discovers that forestry techniques, at least in this instance, are greatly improved since the era of her childhood at Robbinswold camp. As much as she wishes to retrieve the purity of her childhood memories of massive trees in an undisturbed environment, Ronald is a realist. Forest management and environmental activism have to co-exist. As is her wont at times like this, Ronald's thoughts turn to nature and its amazing regenerative abilities.
A badger, the flight pattern of a hawk, the sight of castors at work, or even a flutter of leaves can set her trudging off again. In one essay she will integrate many perspectives, academic disciplines, aesthetics, and voices. This malleability and unbound enthusiasm for the natural world gives her narratives a freshness and multiplicity of feeling, colors, and ideas. A place, like nature, or the natural processes cannot be static, and neither can she.
* * * * * *


Works Cited:

*On-line interview with Ann Ronald, 11/3/04 and 11/15/04
*Thorsen, Jim, "Library Journal," North Carolina: Central North Carolina Library System, Burlington, 2002

Suggestions for Further Readings:

*Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire, New York: McGraw Hill, 1968
*Lawrence, R.D. A Natural History of Canada, Ontario: Key Porter Books, Ltd: 1988
*Lopez, Barry, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven, New York: Avon Books, 1976


Additional Books by Ann Ronald:

*Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens, New York: Arno Press, 1971.
*Zane Grey, Boise:Boise State University Press, 1975.
*The New West of Edward Abbey, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982; Reno, 1988, 2000.
*Words for the Wild: The Sierra Club Trailside Reader (ed.) San Francisco: 1987.
*Earthtones:A Nevada Album Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995.
*GhostWest: Reflections Past and Present, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
*Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003.





Rating:
Summary: Dim Reflections
Review: This book is the latest in a trend of overrated collections that seek to collect significant Western destinations and interpret them (Think Ian Frazier's "Great Plains" and Tim Egan's, "Lasso the Wind.") This book might have been recommendable twenty years ago but today it seems a bit behind the curve, as every professor with access to a rental car seems to be cranking these things out. Most of the topics within GhostWest have been covered more skillfully by other writers, and the author's own engagement seems distant at times. What is intended to seem like an insight-laden road trip instead reads like the measured transcript of a ford Aerostar full of Cather scholars on their way to the post-symposium bash at Applebee's.

It seems anyone who started backpacking when they were young is now a Western expert, and expertise consists of making insightless comments about the savage development boom in Colorado and the addled, uncurious nature of our tourist population. Discourse on the West demands more. And do we really need to hear what the author thinks about war? I'd rather hear what my crazy, tax protesting neighbor thinks about toe jam.

Ronald seeks to insert the element of ghosts in this book, which given the title, seems appropriate. However, sometimes it seems incongruous and inappropriate, and grasps for ghostly significance are inserted more frequently than ads for personal injury laywers in an episode of Jerry Springer. And if you are going to talk about Federal damlord Floyd Dominy, it might make sense to spell his name correctly (or at least consistently) throughout the book.

If you want to understand Man's uneasy relationship to the West, and how he wrestles with very palpable ghosts, go fish the Encampment River in Wyoming, or walk through the Badlands. Bring a copy of "Hole in the Sky" by William Kittredge, or "The NineMile Wolves" by Rick Bass. But leave this book on the shelf.