Page 147 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

SUSAN CERULEAN

Becoming Earth: Essays by Eva Saulitis (Boreal Books, Pasadena,

California) 2016

Essayist, poet and marine biologist Eva Salinas studied killer whales in Alaska's Prince

William Sound for nearly thirty years. She was drawn deeply into the lives of a single

extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound, and

in 2014, published Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among

Vanishing Orcas. At age forty-five she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.

Five years later she died, leaving this last brilliant volume of essays for the still living to

ponder.

What was I looking for so eagerly in Becoming Earth that I hadn't already enjoyed in the

vivid prose and poetry that emerged from her braided life as a whale scientist, a woman,

and lover of wild Alaska? Or more specifically: that I hadn't already read in a long line of

cancer memoirs, including Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World, Terry Tempest

Williams’ Refuge, Deena Metzger's Tree, Marion Woodman’s Bone, Kelly Corrigan’s The

Middle Place?

Before the robust evolution of the modern nature memoir, Rachel Carson's magnificent

Silent Spring was the best we had to help us understand the corporate-sponsored killing

of our bright and beautiful world. What Carson did not share with us was her own cancer

story. She died too young, a private person known for her scientific brilliance, her

courage as a spokeswoman against DDT, and perhaps most of all, for her exquisite

prose. But the confessional aspects of contemporary memoir would not have interested

the reclusive Carson.

In Becoming Earth, Saulitis draws from the wisdom traditions of Carson and many other

writers and poets including Stanley Kunitz, Christopher Hitchens, Anna Kamienska,and

Sogyal Rinpoche. Yet Eva’s stories remind us that just like the whales, the human body

dwells within the body of the Earth, and shares her fate: “My personal cancer

trauma...like eveyone’s—was bounded by trauma in the larger world: the Deepwater