Book Reviews
Living in a Land
of Mythic Proportions
THE DESERT
is a surprising and startling place.
It is full of life in ways that are often hard to imagine.
The American Southwest desert,
best known for its red rock canyons and spires,
also has been the source
of a destructive power almost too terrifying to fathom.
In "The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest,"
Ellen Meloy takes us with her on an exploration
of the Colorado Plateau, a landscape both charismatic and challenging.
From her home in southern Utah near the San Juan River,
Meloy set out to
The result is an account that is eloquent, enlightening, full of irony and insight.
"My home,"
she says, "lay in ... the southeastern Utah portion of the Four Corners,where the borders of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet.
It is geography of infinite cycles....
Mesozoic rivers drown beneath rock and dune.
Red sand and prickly history fill your boots....
It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference,
lush textures and inscrutable tensions."
Her neighborhood is home
to some of the world's most physically fascinating geology.
This is the land that provided the raw material for America's nuclear arsenal.
"In a strange convergence of human time with geologic time,"
writes Meloy,"pieces of this valley had been deliberately unearthed, piled high
and exported to fuel an apocalypse."
Los Alamos and the White Sands Missile range are on the Colorado Plateau.
In its bedrock lies the
the uranium used in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Meloy deals with this disturbing reality with a wry sense of humanity.
From her we learn that just before dawn
of the first atom bomb test in the New Mexico desert:
the Journey of Death.
Puddles formed ... a scattered colony
of dormant spadefoot toads
detected the moisture ...
and in the darkness launched a scramble competition for mates,
a search made successful by ... the acoustic trigger of hundreds of toads,
whose muscular vocal cords filled the desert with a concert of sound."
With Meloy we experience the joy of coming upon a claret cup,
the translucent crimson bloom of an especially spiny cactus.
With her we share the wonder of imagining the lives
led by natives of the region whose remains are so carefully preserved
by the dry climate.
With her we wander parched riverbeds
and canyon corridors to observe elusive wildlife.
With her we learn the gratifying travails of building a house
in this remote country and getting to know the neighbors.
"The county,"
Meloy writes, "is nearly as large as Belize,and you will not find a single traffic light within its borders. ...
I inhabit a place where I must drive to another state for a screw,
and where ...
the predominant language in the laundromat is not English
but an ancient Athabaskan tongue."
With words as striking as what they describe,
and a sharp eye for the delightful contradictions
that comprise life in this remarkable landscape,
Meloy's account is witty and wise.
Meloy's community, like many others across the West,
struggles with the transition from a natural resource-based economy
into an uncertain future.
Here that resource was uranium.
"For this man and many of his contemporaries,"
says Meloy of a neighbor,
"the passing of that era was the region's great tragedy.
They clung to 1955 -- or to whichever year that life had last made any sense --
with all their might, to the hope that uranium's Second Coming
might rescue them from the New West's bed-and-breakfast economy
and other unmanly endeavors.
The uranium boom brought prosperity to their backwaters.
It elevated the self-made man and his sense of control over women,
children, and big-game animals.
It built roads, schools, utilities, and a colossal myth."
The Four Corners area is indeed a landscape of mythic proportions.
Every rock tells a story.
Each species that ekes out a living in this arid region
seems worthy of legend.
Lizards, toads and desert bighorn:
As Meloy describes them, we are there with her on a canyon rim.
"River-polished stones, broken cliffs,
skirts of talus clad in ricegrass and claret cup....
Sinuous red-rock canyons, sweet emerald jewels of springs,
arroyos flowing with nothing.
A sawed rib of uplifted sandstone,
mountains packed together on the horizon like islands of prayer."
"The Last Cheater's Waltz" is about mapping one's home,
learning its most intimate details and histories,
but understanding it will always be full of infinite mystery.
"I try to live here,"
concludes Meloy,"as if there is no other place and it must last forever.
It is the best we can do.
Everyone's home is the heartland of consequence."
Elizabeth Grossman
Elizabeth Grossman is co-editor of
"Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion,"
which will be published in April by Sasquatch Books.
The Sunday Oregonian
March 14, 1999
