What do You think about Eating Stone: Imagination And The Loss Of The Wild (2006)?
I find sheep to be dull creatures. I say this as a dedicated conservationist, and one who firmly believes that all organisms have an innate right to exist, or at least to exist for as long as they can in the bloodthirsty battlefield of natural selection.But Meloy writes about her bighorns with such unstinting love, and such poetry, that it becomes impossible not to fall in love with them yourself. Her avowed adoration of wild things is apparent in the way she describes a group of bighorns dozing lazily in the sunshine, and in tautly written action scenes where she deliberately upsets an Edenic scene of resting Canada geese to keep them away from (or at least give them a fighting chance against) early morning hunters.I am sad that we lost Meloy so early, and with so many of her books unwritten. If this an The Anthropology of Turquoise are anything to judge by, she was a gift to the world of nature writing. As it is, I will think of her, and the sheep now every time I look at the hoofstock at the National Zoo. And I will feel more warmly towards them, because she loved them and shared that love with me.
—Brittany
Slow, undulating prose about the author's time following, watching, and trying to understand bighorn sheep in the deserts of the US... Melloy's book has the rhythms of a measured, thoughtful process, and a delivery somewhere between an observational study and an inward gaze, and seems to be suggesting that we need whatever wildness is left in the world as a foil to our urbanised, technological lives, or as an essential mode of contemplative therapy that keeps us functioning as human. She seems to want to blur lines between categories of being while still employing them, and that's one of the book's problems - Melloy never really defines anything, she waffles around it in pseudo-spiritual terms, or moves from science (which she admits she does not fully grasp) to painterly vistas, to social history, to what it feels like to sit on a rock for hours. I'm not sure what the intended effect is supposed to be - but it feels somehow saggy. It's overlong. It's repetitive. It's vague. If that's life, fine, she's written about that. But if Melloy is positing the idea that space is animal, that the human is animal, that all is space, that these are process - she does so in a way that does not announce it. I'm not sure if this is a strength. Perhaps for some readers it will be. Perhaps she's preaching to the choir by writing this book this way. It works, it doesn't work. I grew impatient. One for those whose lives need some slowness, I think.
—N.J. Ramsden
"Where is the water? I describe a confluence of rivers hidden in folds of stone, a spring on the side of the mountain in land so holy, you must sing every footstep you place on it."The concept for this book was a month-by-month collection of musings and discoveries over a year of observing the desert bighorn sheep of the U.S. and Baja, Mexico. Meloy begins the year in November with sheep sex. While I do find it remarkable that the rams' testicles expand to the size of cantaloupes during the mating season, I wasn't sure if I wanted to tackle an entire book devoted to that intimate gonadal level of sharing. Fortunately for me, Ellen Meloy was a generalist when it came to her love of the Southwest. The bighorns were her purpose for wandering, but along the way she shares healthy helpings of anthropology, archaeology, Native American lore, botany, history, environmental concerns, and a wit as dry as the desert she called home. Meloy has a lot in common with Ed Abbey in her love for the desert and her distress over man's encroachment, but she takes a softer approach. She presents her concerns with a little more hope and a lot less misanthropy than that venerable curmudgeon. Our deserts lost a redrock angel when Ellen Meloy died suddenly in November of 2004.
—Jeanette "Astute Crabbist"
