Augury

WhileWhile? celebrating Mexico's Independence Day as skyrockets blaze, Garrison contemplates his relationship with his father, who recently died of cancer. Joining Huichol Indians on a peyote pilgrimage through a Mexican desert, he finds all his senses sharpened: ``The spider bears a particular value, rather like that of a musical note.'' Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, these 15 often profound essays, set mainly in Mexico, transform a physical landscape into a mindscape of odd discoveries, haunting juxtapositions and shifting perceptual boundaries. One meditation on ritual and superstition likens Illinois folk beliefs to ``a kind of communal ongoing artwork.'' Other essays deal with the Rio Grande as border between want and affluence; a defiant, elderly Walt Whitman; the Grand Coulee Dam; and the clash of Spanish and Aztec world views. Garrison, an English professor at Central Washington State University, is in perfect control of his medium. (July)