A Journey of the Mind Across the Southwestern Desert

The publisher of this rather strange but engaging book says that its author, whose previous book was “Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River,” has embarked here “on a search for home that is historical, scientific and spiritual.”

That is a bit of a stretch. “The Last Cheater’s Waltz” is more of a grab bag of nature writing, some personal reflections and a good deal of musing on the atom bomb and its origins in New Mexico--and some observations on oil drilling and the Pueblo Indians’ ancestors thrown in for good measure.

But since the subject is the austerely beautiful and vast landscape of the Southwest, with some of its present and past inhabitants, Ellen Meloy carries her reader pleasantly along on her various inquiries. “Some people,” she accurately writes, “find New Mexico’s famous lucent air unnerving and severe. Living in such clarity, they imply, is like living at the edge of the universe.”

Meloy also nicely describes the history and physical geography of Los Alamos, the laboratory town created on a New Mexico mesa 7,300 feet above sea level where the atom bomb was developed. “Los Alamos and its industrial complex sit atop narrow fingers of land separated by deep canyons,” she writes. “From Santa Fe, at night, the lights of Los Alamos appear to hover in a middle world, tenuously affixed to the mountains’ ethereal darkness.

“When the Manhattan Project scientists set up quarters here in 1943, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, whose preferred habitat was a hotel lobby, proclaimed, ‘Nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everyone who goes there will go crazy.’ ”

Most of them didn’t, of course. Meloy quotes physicist Freeman Dyson, who described the scientists as “a brilliant group of city slickers suddenly dumped into the remotest corner of the Wild West and having the time of their lives building bombs.”

Meloy’s preoccupation with the atom bomb’s history in this place extends to the way she spends a lot of time discussing White Sands, the desert 200 miles south of Los Alamos, which the Spanish named the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) and which is where the bomb was first tested. To what end this discussion is aimed, however, is never clear.

Her attempts to find meaning and pattern in flashes of violence in the desert Southwest is the weakest part of her book. She seems to be looking for a Deeper Meaning, even when all there is to be found is coincidence.

“The Last Cheater’s Waltz” is strongest in its writing about the land and the things people do to wring a living from it.

Meloy is eloquent on the now-faded postwar uranium mining boom that brought employment to one of the poorest parts of the nation, and whose disappearance is still lamented by some old-timers.

The mining and the consequent disposal of toxic uranium waste made Four Corners, in the Utah corner of which the author lives, “an abused, outback colony of the Cold War,” she memorably writes.

Meloy’s description of the drilling of a well for the house she and her husband built on eight acres on the San Juan River is especially fine. When the well-diggers first hit water, it gushed out the color of tomato juice, dyed by the iron oxide that gives the Southwestern red rock its distinctive color.

But the next morning, in a sentence that conveys the deliciousness of water in the dry Southwest, Meloy writes that “the spring sun shone with gentle somnolence, the cottonwood leaves could not be rushed, and out of the pipe flowed cool clear water with the unwavering purity of ice.”

A visit to the local dump brings to mind the middens of the prehistoric people who inhabited her neighborhood. There they disposed not only their unneeded household utensils but also, sometimes, the bodies of their departed relatives. Some other burial grounds, recently discovered, show signs of death by great violence. This is a cause of anxiety for their descendants, the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande and the Hopis.

Meloy is at her best when with her sharp eye and keen pen she takes us on tours of the still so empty, still so intriguing desert Southwest. Her reflections on the meaning of The Bomb, though, add little to what we already know and feel.