Skunked

Louise Erdrich's "Skunk Dreams" I found to be very confusing at the start, but as it went on some themes began to reacure and rereading certain part helped the ideas to be more easily defined. I found that the prominent themes of this essay were:

1. Nature and her change of view as to what it is
2. The ability of dreams to leave people wondering what is real or what to believe
3. How to progress through obstacles and man's foolishness in confronting them

Growing up in the warm western plains of North Dakota, Erdrich's view of nature was of the agricultural advancements and the openness of the area. As she had internally grown up to know it, nature was the change induced by man, through "advancements" in marketing and roadways that left land barren of its origional growth and wildlife. But despite this had its own beauty of vastness, with the open sky and as she says the endless horizon stretching across the land. Older, she has the dramatice change of scenery to the colder forests of New Hampshire. The change can be tough and for her the claustrophobia of being trapped on the inside, without the freedom of openness, wanting to go outside. Yet after some time she found that this area had its own vastness in the expanse of the woods and the area they encompass and finally had the feeling of being outside. But she never forgot the horizon.

This idea of being outside continues into the dream theme. The concept of never knowing if you are in a dream, or not. Are you the man dreaming himself a skunk, or the skunk dreaming himself a man. The complex idea that we may be trapped inside our dreams. When she happens to have stumbled upon the fence she had seen years earlier hundreds of miles away, in a dream, she wonders if "I had dreamed of this place...or it had dreamed me." Though the answer is unknown, this example does show that there is a connection between dreams, and what is real, like a link between two worlds, one dream and one reality, and one thing I like about this essay is the unknowing if she dreams her trip into the park and the obstacle she must overcome.

Obstacles are a part of life that every being, be it human, animal, plant, or nature, must overcome. As she quotes Adam Phillips "'Whithout obstacles...the notion of development is inconceivable. There would be nothing to master.'" But mankind often thinks of itself as the master of obstacles. Always finding a way to advance by dodging around the boulder in front of instead of taking it on directly. As in agriculture where instead of going through the hard work of growing and harvesting with the help of nature to guide the growth, we use herbicides and pesticides with machinery that allow us to avoid these problems. The skunk, as Erdrich says, is ready to fearlessly face its obstacles bravely even if it may seem arrogant.  We take pride in our ability to think creatively to give other solutions while trying to hide our cowardess of confronting problem head-on like the skunk, but in doing so we neglect to notice the foolish consequences of our not-so-direct course of action. As with the example of skunks in New Hampshire, we applaude our ability to get them out by moving them into the nearby state, but fail to recognize the lack of accomplishment as people from the otherside just bring them back over. We overthink things and miss the simplicity of how a skunk takes on its life.

After taking some time to stop and think, thisk seemingly complex essay makes much more sense than I origionally noticed and the ideas become clear as it connects nature, and dreams to the obstacles that they present in our lives.