EARTHTONES
Essayist Ann Ronald and
photographer Stephen Trimble want to redeem Nevada from John Muir’s
century-old slur that the state “seems one vast desert, all sage
and sand, hopelessly irredeemable now and forever.” Earthtones: A
Nevada Album takes readers beyond the Muir clichés, although
the authors admit that the Great Basin is an acquired taste. But
the wasteland is not out there, Ronald points out; it is inside the
minds of everyone “blankly staring through a car window” and not
stopping to appreciate a landscape of teal sky and purple sage, ice
cream-colored canyons and crimson masses of cactus
flowers.
“I picture Nevada’s real mother lode.
Not ore but the landscape itself,” she says. Surveying the farms
and mines of Nevada from horseback a century ago, Muir wrote
fervently in the same vein: “Nevada is beautiful in her wildness,
and if tillers of the soil can thus be brought to see that possibly
Nature may have other uses even for rich soils besides the feeding
of human beings, then will these foodless “deserts’ have taught a
fine lesson.”
University of Nevada Press, Mail
Stop 166, Reno, NV 89557-0076 (702/784-6573). Cloth: $39.95. 136
pages, 66 color photographs.
*Jon
Christensen
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Earthtones.
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