The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

Constant exposure to beauty, Ellen Meloy warns, can be a dangerous thing. Which is to say the river runner and natural-history writer found herself not long ago estranged from the rugged red-rock Colorado Plateau country in which she had lived for years. "As if by instinct," she writes, "I had long ago embraced the desert with the full knowledge that neither passion nor beauty comes without risk and that these conditions of being might well burn me right up." To regain her sense of self and place, Meloy embarked on a mission to travel through the cold war Southwest of her youth, its deserts studded with atomic-testing facilities and missile silos, confronting midlife crisis with the strangely comforting thought that Armageddon had once loomed in this dry place and had somehow failed to materialize. Along the way she stops in at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed and the Trinity site at which it was first exploded, contrasting the scientific world-view with that of the ancient Anasazi people whose ruins dot the Southwest. Meloy writes with a fine poetic sensibility of the desert's captivating strangeness and of the surreal quality of life at ground zero; her essays touch on biology, physics, literature, spirituality, and psychology in a humane dialogue that readers will find enchanting. --Gregory McNamee