Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

Many write gorgeously about deserts and mountains, but few inject self-conscious weirdness, of the absurdist variety, into their lyricism. Ellen Meloy does. In Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, she describes her obsession with a band of desert bighorn sheep near her home in a small town on the Colorado Plateau and her wider explorations of the species in Baja California, on Navy bombing ranges, and around uranium-mining ghost towns. Readers can loll about in rhythmic, biblical prose, in sentences like, "The late afternoon light comes from the bedrock, from within the mountains themselves, pouring amber from granite and dust, wicking up through the trunks and out the branches of the foxtail pines." Then Meloy exclaims, "The next time you buff up the Hummer with an auto-detailing cloth that came from the skin of a petite rupicaprid, bond with the ungulates that share with us a molecular past." Meloy welcomes the reader without pretension, so her bizarro sallies seem flirtatious. They tease, tantalize, and keep us alert even as they run the risk of annoying us. For my part, I enjoyed the jarring mysteries. It was like finding Dali touches in the corners of a grand Bierstadt landscape. For Meloy, the road along the Hoover dam becomes the "hair-thin rim of a giant potato chip." A diorama of bighorns in a museum "sounds as if its grinding up fresh loads of zirconium monkeys." She casts "a Giacometti shadow," invoking the uncanny yet familiar weirdness of those elongated statues. Like other nature writers, she exhorts us to wake up and pay attention, but she does so with these curious injunctions: "Admire the male midwife toad," "Master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians" and "Quit badgering your tax attorney." She observes a poodle's entrance into a small church in Baja California and then declares, "I am too snobby to share a church with a poodle." Meloy seeks to mirror the strangeness of the world and of the mind. The very randomness and uncertainty are the point. As she finds herself in intimate contact with the desert and the sheep, her response is flailing, voracious, bewildered. She wants "to rise up and bite the desert to bits." Like Virginia Woolf, Meloy finds meaning in "moments of being." She seeks "the occasions when jolts from the universe fly open. This jolt, in this desert with these animals, is a belonging so overwhelming, it can put deep cracks in your heart." At the moment when she finally belongs, when she comes home, the experience breaks her. The wilderness makes her whole as it accepts her discontinuities. Perhaps this is the meaning of the subtitle, "Imagination and the loss of the wild." Wilderness embodies and welcomes chaos, the chaos that gives rise to imagination and spirit. In the wild, Meloy feels at home in the wildness of her mind.

this is the story of Ellen Meloy's personal infatuation with desert bighorn ship and how she tracked a particular band over the course of a year. Her descriptions of the canyon country is without equal. Although an interesting read, the subject matter seemed to grow a bit tiring towards the end of the book.