Book: The Last Cheater's Waltz by Ellen Meloy

Ellen Meloy lives in the American Southwest, and this book is about what she worries about living where she does. Which is mostly nuclear fission. She makes a trip to Los Alamos; she finds a suspicious yellow rock (uranium?); she remembers her childhood and how communists and the bomb were very real. She talks about Hiroshima, Oppenheimer, Trinity, bomb tests, half-lives and nuclear waste sites.

She goes to the 50-year anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb (July 16, 1945) on the

White Sands Missile Range. She notices the person next to her. "He was Japanese. He stood very quietly, hands behind his back, posture ramrod straight but not rigid....When the fellow turned to me, it took all of my strength to lift and point with my chin to the nighthawks in the sky above us...."

As she frets about these things, she decides to explore what she calls her Known Universe--the geology, natural history, the flora and fauna, issues of water and fences and rivers, the Anasazi culture, her Navajo neighbors and the San Juan river on which she and her husband are building a home. And she writes of these, so one is immersed in the sunny and sere landscape of southern Utah...a great book to read as the interminable cold, gray, wet Michigan winter brought me to my knees.

"Am I the only one around here who is worried sick about these hot slabs of cold war detritus?...Few could return to hate amorphous dread of nuclear anxiety, so absorbed are we in dreads with seemingly greater odds: cancer, heart disease, cerebral hemorrhage, bombs placed on airplanes for ideological purposes. Locust plagues and dire loneliness. Leaky breast implants..Fascists with Web sites...Planetary decline not by a couple of H-bombs but by the slow-cook of greenhouse gases and shredding ozone layers."

She admits to a nearly incapacitating malaise and Weltschmerz at the beginning of the book. She decides the land she lives on has the power to heal and comfort her (her Known Universe), and this book details the journey as she explores the land around her. She writes lyrically, often beautifully, with occasional segues into despair and hopelessness.

This book is another memoir by a young woman who desperately yearns for something to uphold her as she lives her life. She does not dwell on relationships, which seem not to be the problem, and is free to seek solace in an acceptance of place, both in the present and historically.

"Ricegrass, primrose, joint-fir and other greenery sprouted from the coral sand. I heard sheep bells, and soon the flock itself made its way down the dune. A Navajo herder followed, singing a prayer."