2014 read #3: Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy.

Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy
256 pages
Published 1994
Read from January 6 to January 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Books on the canyon Southwest -- particularly beautiful, lovingly worded books -- beleaguer me with longing, a deep-channeled homesickness, equal parts wistful joy, frustrated anger, and heartbreak. I've seen little redrock country in person. Half a morning in the upper ledges of the Grand Canyon as a teen, a couple afternoons flitting through Arches and Moab in air-conditioned trucks supplied by Utah's state government. I've always felt at home in the Southwest, though, my imagination drawn there with the memory of years spent on I-40 through the cliffs near Gallup or the vanilla-spiced ponderosa plateaux around Flagstaff. And the canyonlands are like the Southwest concentrated, its spiritual-geographic essence condensed and bitten deep into the very topography.

Descriptions of redrock imbue the wistful joy, the interplay of light and stone, water and life. Histories of exploitation and despoilation supply the frustration and anger, the thought of mossy grottoes and evolutionary specialization inundated beneath cold slack water and the detritus of houseboating vacationers. Something less tangible informs the heartbreak, a confusion of might-have-beens and alternative pathways and dreams never realized.

Naturally, I adore books like this. I loved Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise, a more wide-ranging and unfocused but more brilliantly written collection of essays; this book is but an hors d'oeuvre by comparison, intimating some of the themes, imagery, and specific anecdotes of Turquoise without as much fading-years fatalism or descriptive urgency. That book was driven by a need to make you see and feel and understand, before the chance to describe these things faded away. This book is more a rumination on early middle age. Something similar can be said of the times when each book was written, Raven's Exile in the cautious but still optimistic '90s, Turquoise after many more battles had been lost, many more hopes dismantled and sold away.