Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild by Ellen Melloy

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, such as, "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." Come again? Whence this aggression and language delirium? Why does she refrain from explaining?

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."

There are plenty of reasons to adopt a self-consciously weird voice in nature writing. First, it relieves the monotony of reverence. Variation in tone can make it easier to engage the reader. Some purists like Mary Oliver, Barry Lopez, Loren Eiseley and John Muir refuse to dilute their awe. Why would a believer fart in church? They count on the perennial allure of the sacred, which should draw readers over and over as a lake draws swimmers on a hot day. Other writers like to vary their tone, and they often interject irreverent, informal, humorous bits of mischief. We see the picaresque vein in nature writing in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and in all of Edward Abbey's work as well as in recent books like David Gessner's Sick of Nature and Susan Zakin's anthology Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth, with its inflammatory introduction.

Really, though, this mischief has been around in the genre as an undercurrent at least since Thoreau. Could we even recognize Thoreau without the gruffness, the defiance, the edge of humor? He makes fun of "the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates." He sees that "The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." He recounts his eating habits, too, with slyness and glee. "In cold weather it was no small pleasure to bake several small loaves of [bread] at once, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs." He boasts, "I could make a very good molasses of pumpkin or beets," and adds a little singsong, "We can make liquor to sweeten our lips // of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips."

Meloy likens the scent of the purple mustard plant to "stale washcloths." She says of mountain lion control, "Whenever eater and eatee came within drooling distance of each other, someone pushed the bad-kitty button and zapped the cat." She describes the oryx, an African transplant into New Mexico, as "antelope as rather beefy drag queens." Her beloved bighorns are more likely to burp "a froggy-sounding bleat" than to execute a graceful leap. She approaches nature with an interest in its frank physicality, including the crass details of sheep life. She peers at a dead sheep's rumen and declares, "The fermentation vat. The desert eaten." She admires "lovely rumps and eyelashes as delicate as fishbones." She has an oddly proprietary affection for the profanity of nature, including genitalia. "'Let's see you get that cantaloupe off the ground,'" she says "to the chocolate ram as he rises."

Any writer of personal narrative needs to counter charges of egotism, and self-mocking helps deflect mockery. Lone-seeker nature writers in particular have a tendency toward self-congratulation. Meloy flaunts her weirdness in part to make fun of herself. True, she sometimes hints at Abbeyesque "desert-girl swagger." She boasts, "The main roads of Baja California have been upgraded from bad to less bad. We avoid them and drive the old tracks of rocks and ruts, throwing up plumes of white dust behind us. When these roads are too civilized, we drive the euphemisms." Still, she enjoys undercutting her boasts even more. She begins a sentence, "A slow-moving glassy mirror of winter light, the river holds all of my attention..." and then observes, "This kind of strolling reverie usually ends up with me walking face-first into a bush." She makes fun of the myth of the ideal naturalist who can "spot the copulation of deranged pygmy badgers from several hundred yards away."

Meloy's weirdness hints at a private sense of shame and defiance as well as quirkiness. Weirdness can work as a defense mechanism for the kind of post-hippy white intellectuals who often become nature writers (I know whereof I speak). Defiant, aggressively geeky humor can transform the alienation of the nerd and the misfit into pride, as the cult of Monty Python demonstrates. Meloy advertises her strangeness with lines like, "I feel like my normally abnormal self as I shift into a fifth-gear cruise through Navajo land." When Meloy stumbles into a brothel one day in search of a pay phone, she identifies with the prostitutes' marginality even as she laughs at her own awkwardness: "They glare at me as if I were about the twenty-eighth extraterrestrial to drop by that day, like when was it ever going to end, Nevada being a state that could really grow sick and tired of space aliens." She admires their "scornful pride" and imagines a sisterly cup of tea, a conference of outsiders.

Meloy's weirdness is most interesting, however, when it implies a weirdness beyond the personal. Like the aesthetic movements that praise weirdness, from Surrealism to the Theater of the Absurd to Dada, her work seeks to mirror the strangeness of the world and of the mind. Like the clowning of Shakespeare's fools, her weirdness dances between sense and nonsense, opacity and clairvoyance. The very randomness and uncertainty are the point. Her passion for the desert and the sheep leads her toward entropy. 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." She wants to zero in on one thing but wants everything too. She pants, "A single Russian olive tree holds some of the [bluebirds] among its dried gold leaves, a Persian miniature I shall paint as soon as I study Persian miniatures for about ten years." It delights her when the exuberance of being and desire erupts the sheep too, in a rare deviation from survival mode. She observes them springing up in the air for no apparent reason and writes, "Toast pops spread throughout the band like a chain reaction... Here I am, broiling my brain amid a bunch of existentialist Caprini."

Partway through the book, Meloy complains of an undiagnosed neurological abnormality which has reduced her vocabulary and her memory. She sees her brain as a sort of natural history museum "curated by a pack of unruly imps... Imps in the language and memory sectors are gray-haired and decrept, shuffling along in orthopedic huaraches, wreaking havoc, turning the contents of my cranium into moon cheese." If she has lost words and stories, however, we certainly can't tell. We can tell that the condition reactivates her sense of helplessness and awe about the unpredictability of the brain.

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.



Additional Links:
The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers offers an annual scholarship
Tributes to Ellen Meloy and links to her radio interviews and commentaries
Verlyn Klinkenborg's article on Ellen Meloy in the New York Times

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

This classic defense of wolves never strays into preaching; it makes its points through slapstick adventure. A hapless young biologist named Farley Mowat gets shipped off into the bush by the Canadian government and instructed to conduct meticulous observations of wolves. He is to disembowel a lot of wolves and prove that the ravening beasts are decimating the caribou. Instead, the wolves disprove his assumptions at every turn. He becomes an ardent fan of their family life, sense of humor, restraint, and good nature. He decides to skip the disemboweling. An Eskimo named Ootek helps to illuminate wolf nature and plays the wise straight red man to Mowat's buffoon. Mowat hides under his canoe from wolves that turn out to be huskies; he ogles a she-wolf he has christened Angeline. Some of his antics could come right out of a Chaplin movie. Perhaps Chaplin should have done a movie in the far north not about Gold Rush prospectors who eat shoes, but about wildlife biologists who eat creamed mice to test their nutritional value. In one scene, Mowat jumps up naked from sunbathing to run off after a pack of wolves in hopes of observing a caribou hunt. When the wolves ignore the caribou, Mowat runs at the pack, swearing, in frustration. An Eskimo lad tells his mother, who never speaks to the mad white nudist again.

This nature writing does not sing. It is not meant to. When Mowat mentions the tundra plains around him, he calls them dreary. Nor does he praise the wolves' appearance much. What's more, enough experts have questioned the veracity of his observations that Barry Lopez labels Never Cry Wolf a "fictionalized account" in his book Of Wolves and Men. Yet Lopez still recommends Never Cry Wolf as an introduction to the species. The truth is that the book doesn't need beauty or literal truth to draw us closer to nature. Through Mowat's stories, we come to share his affinity for wolves, and we understand the hunger for connection that propels his scientific curiosity.

Is nature a kind of language? Home Ground, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape combines two of my obsessions, nature and words. I am drawn to words as individuals, as auditory and sensual entities in the mouth and ears. I also like to see them as artifacts of culture that march in formation with other words. At the same time, I am drawn to the peculiarities of landscape. I run my hands over the cliff wall of layered pebbles and mud by the creek near my house and wonder how the stream erodes it and how much it presses down on the sediment beneath.

At a reading, I asked Barry Lopez if he thought there was a relationship between Home Ground authors' love for words and their love for the elements of landscape. He thought there was. As I remember, he said that nature presents us with a kind of language. I am still wondering what it is that links the webs of language with the webs of the natural world. Is there a kind of ghostly mirror between the two? Saussure told us that words only exist in relation to each other: the word "chair" occupies a certain territory only because "sofa" encroaches on it from one side and "recliner" from another. So, in a way, does "muskeg," or at least the word "muskeg," exist only in relation to "bog" or "swamp."

Writers and poets have long tried to tease out the relation between nature and language. Rimbaud's poem "Vowels" enlists nature to describe language instead of the other way around. He treats vowels as entities independent of their function in words and constructs a rather arbitrary set of connotations for them. He begins with colors, "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue," and graduates to elements of nature like glaciers, wrinkles, and flies.

Rimbaud's contemporary, Baudelaire saw a different mystical and obscure relationship between language and nature. His poem, "Correspondences" begins with this stanza:

Nature is a temple where living pillars
release vague or jumbled words.
Man passes through forests of symbols
which observe him with familiar glances.

"Perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond to each other" in "a shadowy and profound unity." (My quick translations -- here's the French and here's an expert English version. The French has addictive, luxurious, sonorous lines that I never tire of reciting. They're often the only nature poems I know by heart, so they have to serve for all occasions when I'm out on a hike.)

Words usually rub up against other words, and rocks rub up against water, dirt, or other rocks. In this age, humans usually define their lives in relation to other humans and human-created artifacts. What happens when human rub against words that rub against rocks? What happens is Home Ground.

Home Ground's project is to bring the fading boundaries between terms into focus, so the particularity of each type of terrain can come into focus as well. Thus, we relearn both the differences between terrains and the intricacies of our own historical and literary relations with terrains. We find out that a "coulee" derives from the French Canadian trappers' term for a "sluggish stream" or seasonal water in a ravine, and that it now refers to a dry, "high-walled valley cut into a hill or escarpment" west of the Missouri. A "buckbrush coulee" refers to a coulee filled with "the browse frequented by deer," perhaps "the height of a buck."

It's tantalizing to think that something as sacred and mysterious as a word could sidle up and kiss or interrogate something as sacred and mysterious as a petrified forest. Home Ground, you might say, gives us a (literally) grounded version of Baudelaire's murky vision. Baudelaire yearns to interpret the "words" we dream that nature is speaking to us. Home Ground examines nature through the accumulated scientific observation and cultural and poetic connotations. It looks at landscape features by looking at the words we've addressed to them through the centuries. Thus, we get a chance to see them as beings with their own existence. It becomes possible for us to address them in the kind of respectful "I-Thou" dynamic the philosopher Martin Buber describes.

This is heady stuff! I am off to read David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensuous, which sets out to describe the original link between early humans' words and sensual interactions with the world.

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

First, a caveat: my friend Debra Gwartney served as the managing editor for this book, so I have reason for bias. But I'd still like you to trust my praise. I cart this book around and crow over it to friends and family, something I would not do merely out of loyalty. Home Ground has enchanted me. Unlike any reference work I've encountered, it seems at once original and inevitable. It's sui generis: who has done a dictionary of local landscape terms before? Certainly, no one has recruited creative writers to craft precise, often lyrical or humorous definitions, embroidered with quotations from all over American literature. But why not? Once you have such a book, you need and want to consult it.

I saw Barry Lopez present the book in Marin in October. In his grave, kindly way, he proclaimed over and over that it was not really his. His name helps promote it, of course, but Home Ground is neither a single person's brainchild nor an anthology of diverse voices. Rather, it's that odd anomaly, a literary text produced through collaboration. I imagine that a posse of nature writers warmed to this idea because they already wrote to connect with a larger whole, both in human and environmental terms. Of course, they were still writers, and someone had to herd the cats. Debra Gwartney has a lively essay on managing the project and mediating between writers and scientists. She had to judge just how to convey the poetry of the landform without distorting its precise characteristics. Now, even though the book is out, the task of mapping the landscape in words continues. The Home Ground Project is looking for more volunteers of all stripes to compile and edit new definitions.

After the reading, I took Home Ground home and set it on the dining room table. For two weeks, I opened it over breakfast and felt a visceral pleasure--the robin's egg blue sky on the cover, the ample space on each page, the quotes lining the margins, the sketches of landforms. But the sensual reality of the book wouldn't do much for me if the definitions were boring. They were exquisite and often playful. I could read just for pleasure, or I could read to learn those words I'd always glossed over, the words I vaguely knew but which I thought belonged to the experts, words like "playa," "swale," "gooseneck," and "glade." The more technical phrases appeared too, in lucid, simple terms. And then there were the ones that were pure fun, like "thank you ma'am," "looking-glass prairie," "hoodoo," "painted desert," "milk gap," and "chickenhead."

The definitions made me want to get out and notice the country. They conjured memories of long-ago road trips. When was the last time I saw a mesa? Would I ever investigate a "racetrack valley," where rocks leave tracks in the clay where they slide across a dry lakebed? The gathering of definitions made me believe in the beauty and specificity and continuing power of the American landscape. I felt a sense of loss for all the local folk knowledge that is now obscure. But it also heartened me to think that Americans have not only been looters; we've known the ins and outs of the land, paid attention, made it come to life in our words. And we can still reach for those words and for that clear-eyed, delighted way of seeing the land around us. In fact, we must if we are going to save some fraction of it.

This is a book to give and a book to keep in the family. On impulse, I presented it to the child of an old friend. I wrote an inscription to newborn Ansel, who hasn't quite shown his appreciation yet. I wished him joy in both landscape and language throughout his life.

I may not take Home Ground off my dining room table for a while. It links me to my country and to others who find the land essential enough to observe and name in its particulars. Home Ground makes a good companion.