Skunk Dreams

"Skunk Dreams" is an essay from The Georgia Review and was written by Louise Erdrich.  This has to be one of the more interesting and unique works that I have read.


Erdrich starts the essay by telling the reader about when she slept on a football field one beautiful, spring night in North Dakota, and a skunk happened to climb on top of her and fall asleep.  At first she was terrified of the wild animal, but soon she started wondering if skunks can dream, and if so, what about?  Erdrich then mentions that perhaps they were dreaming each other's thoughts.  She then continues on to say how cheap, cold, run-down motels give her the best dreams and explains that she had dreamt of a fenced in place where trees ran for miles inside it -- she said it almost seemed to transport her into the future.


Eventually Erdrich left North Dakota and moved out to New Hampshire, where, in her words, she was "urbanized".  She stated that the outdoors there were unimpressive -- "the sun did not pop" and the land seemed to contain "undramatic loveliness" -- but over time she became used to it.  Although she misses her home in North Dakota, she finds solace in the wind.  She loves how "windy days were like sitting just out of sight of an ocean, the great magnetic ocean of wind."  Because of her newly acquired love of the wind, Erdrich starts walking in the woods every day, further and further in.  Soon she stumbles across a fenced in place that looks exactly like her dream; it was a hunting club.  She longs to get inside the fence and to run with the animals (at a safe distance of course) and sees the fence as an obstacle that she needs to overcome.  


Finally Erdrich finds a way into the fence, and since then, has been inside of the park through various means.  She also talks about the hunters and the animals but noticed that skunks are never hunted for fun, they're just trapped and moved, never bothered.  Erdrich then offers the readers one last bit of advice:
                         " We should take comfort from the skunk, an arrogant creature so pleased with its own devices 
                           that it never runs from harm, just turns its back in total confidence."


As I was reading this nice yet confusing essay, I found myself wondering what the theme of this actually was.  At first I thought I was reading a work that talked about how everything in the universe is connected in one way or another, but then Erdrich started writing about actually finding her dream and overcoming an obstacle to achieve her desire.  Then she ended the essay with the notion that we shouldn't run away from our fears, we should face them head on.  Don't get me wrong, I thought this was very well written, but I am just a little unsure of what the message or moral of the story is; it seems a little scatterbrained. 
Maybe I'm not exploring the essay deep enough and there is a point to it that I missed entirely.  


Regardless of my confusion, I liked this essay, and I think that this will prompt a good class discussion in the future!