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Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

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Author: Ellen Meloy
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$26.00~~
Buy Used: $3.33
You Save: $22.67 (87%)

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Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3

ISBN: 0375422161
Dewey Decimal Number: 599.64970979
EAN: 9780375422164
ASIN: 0375422161

Publication Date: September 13, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
An inspired reflection on the bond between wild creatures and the human imagination, told as a chronicle of four seasons with a band of rare desert bighorn sheep.brbrAmong the steep cliffs of Utah#8217;s canyonlands a band of rare desert bighorn sheep simply vanished. Although the word #8220;extinct#8221; was bandied about, their passing seemed to fit the downward spiral of native wildlife in the Southwest that began in the early twentieth century. Remote, isolated, and elusive, this band slipped through the cracks. The bighorns were gone. Then they came back.brbrWe have allowed ourselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world, Ellen Meloy writes, an estrangement that has left us lonely and spiritually hungry. Now, with generous empathy and wry humor, the award-winning author of The Anthropology of Turquoise describes the mystery of the bighorns#8217; self-rescue. In the role of an #8220;amiable, nosy neighbor,#8221; Meloy matches her seasonal geography to theirs, observing cycles of breeding and birth, predators and death, the exquisite match of animal to place, of blood and bone to a magnificent redrock canyon.brbrOn backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels to Mexico, the Great Basin, and the Chihuahuan Desert, Meloy roams the rugged habitat of these intriguing and precarious natives. Throughout, we revel with her in the air, light, and dazzling colors of the high desert. Most of all, we come to understand why she finds that watching wild animals intensely is very much like prayer.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Prehistory Come to Life July 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Ellen Meloy was a patient woman, judging from this book. How many of us could spend a whole year tromping around desert slickrock in not-too-close pursuit of an illusive animal? Until the 1990s, she tells us, no one knew that ancient long-horned desert sheep near her home had survived modernity. But they had, and Meloy hung out for a year, tracking them.br /br /The book begins with wild sex--a rut which will produce the next year's crop of ewes and rams. Then it follows what she calls the Blue Door Band as it disperses across the rocky landscape and fills us in on all kinds of sheep facts.br /br /Like the best nature writers, Meloy has an almost unending store of fresh metaphors that help us see through her trained eyes what we otherwise might overlook. And we learn enough about her to understand her thirst for this quest--a childhood spent partly in England, where a big game-hunting relative's trophy of a tiger skin fired her imagination and an ancestral background of California ranching, among other things.br /br /It's not until she has enticed us to see the profound meaning of these magnificent animals' survival that we get to the nitty-gritty facts of all the work required to preserve them. Her argument for its continuation is highly convincing.

5 out of 5 stars

Quirky Nature Writing October 14, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

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." br /br /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." br /br /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.

4 out of 5 stars

Eating Stone - an interesting read November 6, 2006
0 out of 4 found this review helpful

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.

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