Skunk Dreams

The first thought that crossed my mind as I was reading this essay was that it was very confusing. Louise Erdrich jumps around so much with her topics that it I found it very difficult to follow. One minute she is talking about sleeping in the middle of a football field at age fourteen, the next minute she is grown up and talking about how she slept in sketchy motels while she was working in North Dakota.

One of Erdrich's first topics revolves around her night in the football field. She is wondering whether or not skunks or other animals have dreams similar to humans. Can a skunk have a dream about becoming a stock broker? I think not. A skunk would have no idea what a stock broker is; you can't have a dream about something that has never even been introduced to your brain.

The author goes from talking about the dreams of animals to her thoughts on life after death. I think that the connection she was attempting to make between those two points is that she thinks that life after death might possibly feel like she is dreaming. However, I highly doubt that being in either Heaven or Hell feels like a dream.

One of the most puzzling dreams the author describes involves a lot of fenced in area. The fences have barbed wire and sound to be quite desolate. Inside the fences are trees. This might explain why later on in the essay, the Erdrich talks about how she found solace in trees when she was feeling so low and longing for the northeastern horizon. As Erdrich walks farther through the forest and the trees, she comes upon a place that is almost exactly as she had dreamt of it years earlier. She continues to visit this place, with the fenced in animals. However, as she visits the place more often, she realizes that it no longer satisfies her.

Erdrich feels like the animals inside of the fence. She can look at them from afar, but will always be on the outside looking in. Her insatiable desire to watch the animals overcomes her, and one day she goes through the fence into the game field. She walks for hours, and finds no animals. Finally, on her way back home, she stumbles (literally) upon a wild boar. The boar looks at her, and then seems to float away without disturbing anything around it.

To end the essay, Erdrich talks about how if she could be any animal, she would choose to be a skunk. She things that skunks have the utmost freedom; they aren't afraid of being captured, and live a fearless life. I think that there are several things in the author's life that are holding her back and feel as though she is captured and never able to get out. This is why she wishes she were a skunk, so that she could live her life freely and without hesitation.