EATING STONE: IMAGINATION AND THE LOSS OF THE WILD, by Ellen Meloy, Pantheon, 334 pages, $26.
Ellen Meloy's most notable contribution before "Eating Stone" was "The Anthropology of Turquoise," a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. A gifted writer and naturalist, she spent most of her time in remote places, analyzing and identifying with the land — especially the desert.
A resident of Bluff, Meloy died suddenly last year at the age of 58 — while reading in bed — but not before she finished writing "Eating Stone," another major contribution to an understanding of the land she had tried to share with her devoted readers.
While "The Anthropology of Turquoise" included a collection of stories about the Southwest and the Mojave Desert, "Eating Stone" is a record of four seasons Meloy spent with a group of about 80 desert bighorn sheep she called the Blue Door Band. These sheep, both rams and ewes, suffered regular attacks from wild predators and wild-sheep diseases.
After she ate ram, Meloy wrote, "The taste of meat lingers on my tongue. Rain and river. Bedrock to soil to plant to milk to bone, muscle, and sinew. I am eating my canyon. Eating stone."
Using Kenneth Brewer's evocative poem, "Sheep" which describes "mountain sheep who graze on stone," as a prologue, Meloy describes desert bighorns as "blocky, long-necked ungulates, grayish brown in color, sometimes more gray than brown, or pale beige, or with a russet cast. Their noses are moist and their rumps are white. They eat dry, abrasive plants, digesting them with four-chambered stomachs and the help of protozoa and bacteria."
If that sounds too much like a biology class to start, it soon progresses to a heartfelt, colorful description of the interaction of human beings with animals. "Being with these animals was like prayer, a meditation that ranged from dopey to dreamy to absorption so profound it stopped my blood. Their habits and motions formed a liturgy that mapped the prayer, liturgy as "the sanctification of time," a place where I was willing to wait in stillness, to count on natural rhythms to calm my messy ones."
As she watched the sheep, her mind sometimes wandered, or she looked elsewhere for just a few seconds, and the sheep disappeared somewhere in Utah's Canyonlands. This alarmed her, because she was fearful they could be easily and quickly decimated. She tried to figure out why this group of sheep had thus far escaped oblivion.
In the course of the book, Meloy argued persuasively that "The mind needs wild animals." She made a strong case for the reader to connect his/her senses with that of animals — and realize that words such as "sun, stone, sierra, saltbush, desolation, dust, imagination, absolute clarity and extreme blue," reveal the connection. According to Meloy, the reader will eventually discover these words are all about himself/herself.
Meloy's approach is diverse. She combined her naturalistic philosophy with a number of personal anecdotes that sometimes seem to represent asides to her subject but really serve to strengthen her case. Meloy's gift was not just in mastering the intricacies and beauties of language but in working toward a believable climax. Her genius seems evident on every page of this thoughtful, impressionistic book.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com