Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,65
us, and non-Western ideas of nature that were more about understanding patterns and relationships than making pictures out of it all. (On those first camping trips, I was still so haunted by street violence that lying out in the open seemed reckless and terrifying; it took me a long time to get used to how rural safety consists of distance from danger, not the barriers against it and the recourse from it that urban structures and systems provide. I still don’t camp alone, though I hike alone, generally with thoughts of danger not far away; access to nature is also contingent on your sense of safety, as people of color also know.) I steeped myself in images of and literature on landscape and began to focus on artists exploring ideas about place, landscape, nature, and travel.
The life I was looking for began taking root in the late 1980s. But it had many beginnings, as though I’d been planting many seeds, waiting and waiting while whatever secret germination and growth took place underground, before they burst into view. I began my first book, I made my first lasting friends, I found out how to go out into the larger world of the American West, I found, as they say, my voice.
I sometimes say that the Nevada Test Site taught me to write, because when I went there for the big spring antinuclear actions and campouts in 1988 and every year thereafter into the millennium, I met a place so stark and vast and, to me, strange, at which so many cultures and stories converged, that I had to bring together all the fragments of what I was doing into a new whole to have something that felt adequate to what I found there. Before then, I had accepted the pigeonholes into which writing fit. I had written criticism and reviews with a confident, objective-sounding tone, written journalistic reports that more or less colored within the lines of journalism. In those years, I had also written small, dense essays that were lyrical, personal, emotional, metaphorical, experimenting with form and tone, letting in what I was learning from poetry and the prophetic voice, doing all the things I was not supposed to do in criticism and journalism, letting wonder and melancholy and uncertainty in, giving rein to what language can do.
The Nevada Test Site was a place of convergence—of peoples, of histories, of values and ideas, of forces from the nuclear arms race to the Eurocentric reaction to deserts. To describe what it meant, I realized I needed all the modes of writing I’d learned and I needed them together, unsegregated. That was the major breakthrough of my writing, and Savage Dreams, the book that resulted, was the first exuberant experiment in bringing together the writing styles and voices and recognizing how they could be the same voice describing in terms historical, evocative, personal, analytical the complexity of a political situation and a historic moment.
It was a powerful place. I can feel what it was like to be there even now: the great expanses of dust-colored earth cobbled in stone, including shining pink quartz, fierce spiky plants here and there in the pale soil between stones, the dry air spectacularly clear (unless there was a dust storm or enough heat to make the air seethe and shimmer) so clear that you could see for dozens of miles to the fang-sharp ranges in the distance. Those immense spaces invited me to move freely and to feel the smallness of human bodies and concerns in a landscape where you could sometimes see a hundred miles, where you could drive half that without seeing a house, where you could, as I often did, wander toward the horizon feeling both liberated and fearful of what happens to a body that is two-thirds liquid in such an arid place. Just sitting still you could almost feel the water coming off your breath and out of your skin to disperse into the atmosphere where sometimes, rarely, in this driest part of the driest state in the union, clouds would gather and rain would evaporate as it fell or dash down only to dry up in minutes.
I had always been craving illimitable space. I found it earlier at Ocean Beach at the far end of the city and I found it as a child in the hills and sometimes lying on my back at night