Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild by Ellen Meloy
330 pages
Published 2005
Read from May 1 to May 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The most moving passage in Eating Stone is on the back flap of the dust jacket, which states that Ellen Meloy died three months after finishing it. Awareness of her demise (amplified by Googled obituaries, which add the information that she died suddenly in the night, possibly of an aneurism) percolated and condensed throughout my experience of the book, like uranium ore in Shinarump deposits. Her musings on age, death, loss in both personal and natural contexts, her thoughts and plans for upcoming winters, were weighted by the thought that her frayed neurons would soon cease firing, her sun-frazzled hair would no longer dry thick with San Juan River silt, the home she and her husband built would be half empty, her beloved totemic bighorns would carry on their annual rhythms -- or not -- without her observation. Cliche it may well be, but I feel as if I lost a friend.
Meloy has been one of my favorite authors ever since I picked up The Anthropology of Turquoise quite by chance last August. None of her other works equaled Turquoise's abrasive yet sensual absorption, but now that I've reached the last of her books, I feel a bit poorer knowing there won't be another. It's hard to critique Eating Stone on its own merits, rather than as an inadvertent eulogy. Her thesis that human imagination (an inclusive term sweeping up spirituality, identity, and awareness of cosmic place) requires brushing up against animals truly wild is entirely anecdotal, but finds no rebuttal from me. Rather I wish I could take Jonny and baptize him in red silt rivers and have him wake up to predawn birdsong deep in slickrock country the rest of his formative years. The beauty of Meloy's descriptions, as usual, left me aching, a tender bruise of want sharpened by the loss of her voice forever.
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