Sensual Essays That Explore the Grandeur of Nature

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TURQUOISE

Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit

By Ellen Meloy

Pantheon

326 pages, $24

“The craving for turquoise is universal,” suggests essayist and nature writer Ellen Meloy. “Turquoise is capricious, it is alluring, no one leaves the Southwest without it, although its life seems to flee from it when it is removed from the bare, blood-red sandstone of its native land.”

In “The Anthropology of Turquoise,” her exquisitely rendered meditation, Meloy considers all that might be linked to the spirit of turquoise: the gem-like mineral itself, the myriad stops on the spectrum that comprise the color’s amplitude, and the metaphors she finds in this blue-green color--metaphors of place, of peace, of the restfulness of the ocean, the silence of the desert, the life-giving waters of the rivers, even the respite of suburban swimming pools.

In this compilation of 15 densely written, highly poetic essays, Meloy takes readers on a sensual travel narrative. On the Colorado Plateau, exploring light and color, she tries to recapture, through crayons and watercolors, a sense of her deceased brother’s existence. In Sequoia, she ponders family ties to a piece of land. The Bahamas serve as backdrop for her investigation into the landscape and slave history of the islands. Throughout, her writing is steeped in color, nearly squawking with life.

One essay, “Azul Maya,” recounts a vacation to the Yucatan wilds, where Meloy delves wide-eyed into the extraordinary flora and fauna. Her poetic language runs freely among exceptional colors and species, including birds she finds filling the trees like outrageous fruits, looking “like pink chiffon prom dresses standing in little ashtrays.” The landscape’s thick cover of green, she tells us, stretches “far into the horizon like giant broccoli gone berserk.”

“A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry” explores the erotics of the natural world, “the great flood of vegetable sexuality that surrounds us,” while “The Silk That Hurls Us Down Its Spine” is the harrowing adventure of Meloy’s solo river-rafting trip in which the raft took off downstream without her. The grandeur of the Colorado River Basin pays no attention as she fights to regain the raft and survive.

Her essays are slow moving, as quiet as a wide, torpid river, requiring readers to stop the ongoing chatter of contemporary life and pay close attention to the details of nature, of silence, of solitude. The sense-based writing often meanders without story line, but readers will seldom turn pages to find out what happens. Running through her words is a magic spell that can soothe us into letting go of conventions like plot, so immersed are we in the sacredness of the moment, the wonder she shares of the natural world.

Readers who prefer stories to unfold or details to be offered into personal relationships will not find many of those elements, as Meloy steers clear of much autobiography--we never learn, for example, how the brother died--in favor of artistic impressions that remain rooted in the physical, rather than the social or emotional, world.

Her writing regularly reveals humor and lightness. “A cricket takes up residence in my husband’s closet. At night it sings love songs to his hiking boots.” And describing a scene on the Colorado Plateau: “Do not think of a cactus acting like a cactus, with its apple-green paddles and white spines. In winter the prickly pear hallucinates. Its spines glow red-gold in the angled sun, like an electrocuted aura.”

“Swimming the Mojave” is a funny, odd essay, recounting Meloy’s road-trip version of John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer,” in which she swims in motel pools from Los Angeles to Colorado. She describes the magnificence of the desert, the seediness of tiny towns with rundown hotels, and the lurid desertscape of Las Vegas, where, lounging at a pool, she notices the other bathers. “The skimpy bathing attire of most women was not meant to be wet; it was made from strawberry fruit rolls instead of fabric,” she writes.

Her essays remind us of the riches at stake in preserving the natural world, and are quite serious in this regard. “The Angry Lunch Cafe,” the most polemical of the essays, lists Meloy’s gripes with “recreationists” and their approach to nature. As the West fills with people and their rabid appetite for playgrounds, she tells us, “time is running out for the ‘wild preservatives’ who remember solitude instead of crowds ... backcountry without tire tracks every forty steps.”

Taken as a whole, Meloy’s gem-studded collection calls us to be mindful of the physical world, to see it--really see it--with fresh eyes. “(P)erhaps this is all that a person can try to put into each of her days: attention to the radiance, a rise to the full chase of beauty.”