The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin by William L. Fox, and: All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys in a Desert Landscape by Lawrence Hogue (review)

B o o k R eviews 123 her loss as she recounts the tears she shed over the “firsts” she experienced without her husband— the first trip alone, the first birthday, snow, picnic— most poignant is her regret that she could not save him in the end. We are cog­ nizant, too, of her determination to endure. She has channeled her energy into the creative process of writing her memoir, and her work with the Frank Waters Foundation, of which she is president, has clearly imbued her widow­ hood with a sense of purpose. As it fosters and supports artists and writers, that foundation is an important tribute to Frank Waters’s creativity and to Barbara Waters’s support for her husband. Most significant, through the memoir we come to recognize that Frank and Barbara Waters continue to inhabit the same sacred space and sacred time. Whether interpreting a fallen eagle feather as a caress from her husband or describing the visions of his spirit she has had since his death, she reminds us how strongly they are in touch. Celebrating the Coyote is enhanced by John Nichols’s brief but insightful foreword and by the appended bibliography. The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. By W illiam L. Fox. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. 227 pages, $21.95. A ll the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys in a Desert Landscape. By Lawrence Hogue. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000. 272 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jonathan Cook Ridgefield, Connecticut In a typically enigmatic pronouncement on the cosmic structure of cre­ ation, the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart once wrote that God does not tolerate an empty place. His implicit reminder of how we tend to project interior landscapes (like loneliness) onto the external world is worth consider­ ing in light of the desert: a traditional place to receive our fantasies and fears about emptiness and its flipside, possibility. In the American desert, our cul­ tural love affair with wide-open spaces collides with feelings of transience and insignificance. Despite the supposed triumph of Manifest Destiny, deserts have remained blanks on the map, realms of silence and power— what Barry Lopez has called, in another context, “crucibles of mystery.” Two recent literary tra­ jectories through American drylands are Lawrence Hogue’s All the Wild and Lonely Places and William Fox’s The Void, the Grid, and the Sign. While the authors share a general fondness for arid landscapes, they give us different per­ spectives on the personal and cultural confrontations with emptiness that these landscapes evoke. Fox offers a creative and penetrating look at Nevada’s Great Basin that combines first-person travel narrative with ruminations on topics ranging from 124 WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 mapping to archaeology. Compared with America’s other arid places, this sparsely populated bowl lying between the Rockies and the Sierras seems freighted with a minimum of human history. Surveyed by the government and struggled through by emigrants, its vast expanses now seem to host mostly open-pit mines, secret military bases, and UFO enthusiasts. “The major void in our continental imagination,” the Great Basin is particularly conducive to an examination of our ambivalent relationship with desert emptiness (4). Comparing, for instance, the region’s abundant trove of ancient rock art with other, more modern attempts to inscribe permanence onto the landscape, Fox believes they are equally “evidence of the need to control our ancestral fright of the dark and the empty” (211). But for him, the perceptual displacement borne of confronting the desertas -void challenges our experience and expands our perspective as humans: only there, in “a disorienting space we conceive of as being vacant and thus a landscape of open possibilities, can we imagine ourselves to step outside the boundaries of what we know and receive intelligence from some other place” (4). In this context, Fox discusses the sculptor Michael Heizer, who is con­ structing his controversial work City in a remote Nevada valley. An enormous complex influenced by the ancient pyramids, it is Heizer’s latest experiment in shaping negative space, where “the art [is] the displacement of the place itself” (16). Fox believes...