She kept returning to desert bighorn sheep, which she personalized and immortalized in Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (2005). Like the critters and plants Meloy cherished, nothing was too commonplace to escape her laser-beam attention. Go to the town dump, but pay attention 'If your Tevas melt, it's probably not a good day to scavenge.' In the essay's final scene, she flips the perspective, seeing herself through the eyes of gyre-borne vultures: a speck in the landscape, a 'two-legged smudge on a plywood platter.'Īmong countless other things, Seasons' 26 one-to-two-page vignettes portray quotidian acts: birding, fishing, boating, listening, voting, herding lizards, chauffeuring dough and-yes-watching TV. Stapled between her gables, she contemplates the view rippling concentrically outward from the house to include the San Juan River, Diné Bikéyah (the Navajo heartland), the Colorado Plateau, Earth and the universe-a mirror of this writer's bio-centric orientation. The 'Roof' story in particular showcases Meloy's structural genius. Seasons' gems all originated as radio pieces. Such light-handedness has been lacking in too-often dour and preachy 'nature writing' ever since Edward Abbey rowed into the back-of-beyond, followed all too soon by this Bluff, Utah, philosopher-clown. It threads through all of her books, even The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest, her 1999 account of a nuclear road trip. Meloy's eloquent levity, however, was no mere parlor trick the humor sugar coats the pills we'll have to swallow if our planet is to heal.

Outspoken and passionate, Meloy skewers grandstanding, mindless consumption, militarism, patriarchy: 'In pioneer times, while the men mumbled about posses and punched each other's lights out, the grandmothers of my Anglo neighbors simply got off their horses and took care of business.' She makes an absolute gas out of much that is ghastly. Seasons' opening salvo, the thoughtful but hilarious 'I Stapled My Hair to the Roof,' encapsulates her approach. But for those who haven't yet discovered Meloy, they can serve as a gateway drug to her profound, sometimes deceptively breezy work. The sketches gathered in Seasons predate her untimely 2004 death by up to 10 years and are not, strictly speaking, last words. Who hasn't wondered what a favorite writer might still have bestowed on the world if not silenced too soon? What fan doesn't long for more-letters, journals, unpublished fragments, even an annotated grocery list?ĭevotees of the late Southern Utah essayist Ellen Meloy need no longer wait.

Raven's Exile by Ellen Meloy