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Show : THE ZEPHYR/ APRIL-MAY 2005 Ellen Meloy, in her 1999 book, “Last Cheater’’s Waltz,” tells us of a journey across the bounds of ownership (8 acres of desert land). It’s a horror story, beginning with Meloy’s accidentally pouring hot tea into a mug where a side-blotched lizard was snoozing, boiling it to death. That little act of inattentiveness brings to the surface a profound feeling of dislocation. “I had surrounded myself with a much-loved, familiar place, but lately it and I floated apart ... as if we shared a world in which gravity had vanished.” She suspects she’s. _ Exploring shrews and deer mice and side-blotched lizards, we are burdened/blessed consequences recognized, suppressed, celebrated, hidden in secret files. with And so, there is much more to a “sense of place” than scoring high on a quiz about the names of species on your lot or two lots or ten acres of earth your condo sits on. We are conscious beings. We can, if we put our minds and bodies into action, make journeys. The possibilities are there, to get out into the open, whether canyon country, polar snow or just” standing still, to tremendously expand that “sense of place” thing. Often, out there, I see something very like an invitation. not from the ownership society; we've been there, we are there. It’s more like an opening to Nature and its dislocations and uncertainties where we live with lizards and Tyranosaurus rex bones and bats, where 245-million-year rocks challenge our comprehension. Meloy’s book is like a poem, where images and thoughts hover around and about and away people and tirre... Journeys in the Canyon Lands of Utah and Arizona, 1914-1916 George C. Fraser Edited by Frederick H. Swanson George Corning Fraser, an easterner who loved to vacation on horseback “repressing a fury so terrible, it had rendered me catatonic.” She travels her beloved desert lands, finding and examining the ravages of the nuclear age; abandoned uranium diggings and the historic sites of scientific penetration into nature’s secrets, Alamagordo, White Sands, Los Alamos, Nevada test sites upwind of Salt Lake City. She notes that she is of the generation of school children who were taught to hide under their desks. The horror unfolds, she witnesses the complacency of Americans as they are herded through Los Alamos where there are little chocolates shaped as miniatures of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ultimate terror is the recognition that nucleotides now encircling the earth and hiding in wind-blown sands of the desert are as much integral to the nature of Nature as the Jurassic and Triassic rock that began their formations 245 million years prior to the Christian era. We created these new atomic and subatomic distributions, but that happened inside Nature, colluding with its powers. Nature is now “complicit.” One page before the book ends, this: “I look into my coffee cup before I pour, and I try to live here 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.” (My italics). That brought back a curious pair of sentences, way back at the beginning: “Had | forgotten the point of consciousness? Was there a point to consciousness?” Of course there is a point, and Meloy highlights a facet of it. We are animals, but, unlike place, in the American Southwest led the seld isited north of the Grand Canyon, the vast slickrock expanses of the Navajo Reservation, and sites suchas Zion Canyon and Capitol Reef before they became national parks. His journals are filled with impressions of the land that will fascinate modern readers who wonder what the canyon country was like before it became a popular tourist destination. 272 pp., 27 illus., $19.95s paper (2440-8) Miracle Hill The Story of a Navajo Boy Blackhorse Mitchell ; with a new Introduction by Paul Zolbrod “All through his book blow the scented winds of the Southwest, ‘making a tooting sound of musical hums’ all the way to the ranges where, as.a boy reaches one far mountain, another beckons.” —Chicago Tribune 248 pp., $16.95 paper Don't Let the Sun Step Over You ae A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975 Eva Tulene Waitt : with assistance from Keith H. Basso “A life story so authentic and compelling I thought I was listening to the eldersasa child eager to soak up everything I could about the old days. But this isa twentieth-century life, well lived and reflective, passing on experiences that will never be possible again.” —Vine Deloria Jr, author of Custer Died for Your Sins ae oe 340 pp., 63 illus., $50.00s cloth, $24.95 paper The University of Arizona Press from and return to, an amorphous subject. I have taken extracts from it, violating poetic Tucson, AZ 85712 Only when someone was in a sacred situation, at a sing or ceremonial, my friend said, was SUPPORT ZEPHYR ADVERTISERS The businesses and individuals who advertise in The Zephyr are the people who keep this publication alive. PLEASE let them know you appreciate their support. vibrations. In recompense, a slightly longer extraction: “I stood up and started to move in a slow, waltzing rhythm. A Navajo friend once told me that his people do not sin. Rather, they are ‘out of order.’ I liked the way that ‘out of order’ implied a sense of mechanical failure as well as a misalignment with all of nature. harmony restored, and even then, residue remained outside the ceremonial membrane, usually in the form of ghosts, so you had to keep singing, all your life.” I hope Blarina is still alive out there under the snow, hunting. Small animals have high metabolisms. There is little margin between life and death. : © 1-800-426-3797 AND Invitations when | move. 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