Storytellers at the Columbia River by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall

Still, while so many viewpoints grapple, many people bond in new friendships and two in a quixotic love affair. But still more students and ranchers are drawn into confrontations. A Wanapum elder and a cynical anthropologist each try to coax the players toward a common goal: the healing, both physical and political, of the Columbia. The nuclear plant managers get involved and even the desert's wildlife.

When they chance on young protesters plotting a nighttime event at the plant, the action grows more complex. Also on the bus are Suki, a Japanese American grad student with a task from her family, and Elena, a Siberian shaman who tries to heal toxic rivers. When Ike, a Wanapum Indian bus driver distressed over shrinking salmon runs, drives people upriver to the area that was once green orchards, Bruce is outraged at the scene of devastation. Bruce, a Middle-East wars vet, there to present his great uncle's memoir, is harassed by an angry ex-rancher. Three of the newcomers disrupt the scene with their own urgent missions. Others are more worried about the radioactive waste seeping from the nuclear plant. The settler families normally gather for a calm time of nostalgic storytelling, though several still nurse anger over their eviction in 1943 for the bomb site. Not far away looms the defunct Hanford Nuclear Plant that secretly produced the plutonium for the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII. Includes some wonderfully evocative writing about how globally significant events can affect the lives of everyday people.' Steve Olson, author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age In 1998, five newcomers arrive at the annual Settlers' Reunion at the Columbia River. An intriguing novel about a little-known episode in American history.

Storytellers at the Columbia River by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall