PROLOGUE
Everything about Great Salt Lake is exaggerated--the heat,
the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal
one can never know what it is for certain.
In the past seven
years, Great Salt Lake has advanced and retreated. The
Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, devastated by the flood,
now begins to heal. Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct
the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life. I
sit
on the floor of my study with journals all around me. I open
them and feathers fall from their pages, sand cracks their
spines, and sprigs of sage pressed between passages of pain
heighten my sense of smell--and I remember the country I
come from and how it informs my life.
Most of the women in
my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the
matriarch of my family. The losses I encountered
at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake
was rising helped me to face the losses within my family.
When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds
were
gone, I was drawn further into its essence. In the same way
that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay.
Last night, I dreamed I was walking along the shores of
Great Salt Lake. I noticed a purple bird floating in the
waters,
the waves rocking it gently. I entered the lake and, with
cupped hands, picked up the bird and returned it to shore.
The purple
bird turned gold, dropped its tail, and began digging a burrow
in the white sand, where it retreated and sealed itself inside
with salt. I walked away. It was dusk. The next day, I returned
to the lake shore. A wooden door frame, freestanding, became
an arch I had to walk through. Suddenly, it was transformed
into Athene's Temple. The bird was gone. I was left standing
with my own memory. In the next segment of the dream,
I was in a doctor's office. He said, "You have cancer
in your blood and you have nine months to heal yourself." I
awoke puzzled and frightened.
Perhaps, I am telling this
story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do
not know, to create a path for myself
with the idea that "memory is the only way home."
I
have been in retreat. This story is my return.
TTW July 4, 1990
