Brooke Williams has spent the last forty years advocating for wilderness. He is the author of four books, including Open Midnight, Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jeffries, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams. His journalistic pieces have appeared in Outside, Huffington Post, Orion, and Saltfront. He and his wife, Terry Tempest Williams, divide their time between Utah and Cambridge, MA.
Work
Excerpt from Open Midnight
Assuming it’s not too late, I find a rock, longer than wide and light-colored. I tilt it upright, pressing it into the soft ground until it will stand on its own. It becomes a stone.
A few feet away, I find a good spot to sit on the ground against a downed tree. I have a clear view of the wide plain and the stone I’ve just placed upright. I’m too low to see the river, but from where I sit it sounds like a huge snake moving across dry land. Here with the sun warming me at a perfect angle, a nap seems nearby. Rio’s nose leads him around trotting and intent as if he’s on an assignment. I watch the clouds and I wonder what birds rustle in the bush behind me. I try dissolving a small pain in my left hip by attacking it with my full attention.
I doze and then wake up mid-dream in which ghostlike Mormons surround me and oxen pulling wagons still dripping from crossing the Sweetwater River move silently past. Their clothes are worn and ragged. Some walk barefooted. Many limp. They are thin and listless. Transparent children and dogs move past me, silent. A woman turns toward me, nodding acknowledgment through her dark, vacant eyes. William is buried nearby.
Of the thousands of weary Saints that passed by here, I’ll bet that not one turned to the next and said, “Too bad we weren’t born one hundred years from now—we could have flown.”
No one imagined flying. (p. 193)
Bibliography
- MaryJane Wild, Homebound Press, Scheduled for Dec. 2020.
- Open Midnight, Trinity University Press, 2017.
- The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jefferies, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams & Terry Tempest Williams, Torrey House Press, 2014.
- Escalante: The Best Kind of Nothing, University of Arizona Press, 2006.
- Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, Island Press, 1999.
- Utah: Centennial Celebration, Westcliffe, 1995.
- Utah Ski Country, Utah Geographic Series, 1984.
