Eating Stone: Book Review

by Rebecca Lawton

Book Review: Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

By Ellen Meloy

Vintage, ISBN 978-1-4000-3177-1 (paperback) $14.00

Who could eat stone? I wondered, years ago, as I pondered the title of Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild. And who would want to, willingly anyway? Plenty of times I’d swallowed sand in my meals while camping; I’d witnessed many geologists including myself run silt and clay under our tongues and teeth to taste the relative grit of lithified sedimentary particles; I’d kissed the earth after surviving a particularly hairy rapids run or airplane flight. But I’d never ingested a bit of rock willingly, or tried to swallow one whole. And I couldn’t imagine anyone who could, and so I decided: I had to read this book if only to understand its name.

Ellen’s Eating Stone, published posthumously by her husband Mark in 2005, first caught my eye as an excerpt in Orion magazine after Ellen’s death in November 2004. The illustrations accompanying the piece showed desert bighorn sheep under cloud-swept skies, the rams’ curls looking majestic and impressive even in black-and-white prints. Wildlife framed against rock and sky had been part of my life as a Southwest river guide and river ranger in the 1970s and 1980s. No writing I’d read, however, had captured the desert bighorn’s tenuous existence as eloquently as Ellen’s chapter from Eating Stone offered in Orion.

Eating Stone, the book, traces a year in which Ellen follows a band of southern Utah desert bighorn through remote gorges of its homeland. Like the human natives who preceded European settlement and later made their last stands in rocky Western canyons, the sheep have been whittled to a tiny herd with a depleted genetic pool. Although their companion bands throughout the West have been intensely followed by scientists, government agencies, and hunters, Ellen’s “Blue Door Band” near Bluff, Utah, is barely known. She turns her highly trained naturalist’s eye and eloquent pen to note the decline of this particular band of sheep:

Elsewhere in the Southwest, attentive shepherds—wildlife managers and advocates—nudged desert bighorns along through recovery and protection programs. But this band, as remote and as isolated as if stuck on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific, slipped through the cracks, their numbers likely fallen to a point of no return. They slid into a spectacular crash. Year after year, the river cliffs held their absence, air empty of blood and breath.

With notebook in hand, she gets to know the sheep as individuals, a band, a family, and a species. She finds them, loses them, joins efforts to relocate some of them for diversity’s sake, and enjoys their occasional amusement—engaged in, she decides, to let off steam.

Instigated mostly by the yearlings, the sheep fill their stone world with feisty play. One butts a companion off a shrub and is then butted off the shrub by another sheep. Soon everyone is butting everyone else off their shrubs. A gang of yearlings begins to butt everything in sight. They butt rocks, yucca plants, a prickly pear cactus, the air, one another. Two yearling rams put themselves in reverse, then charge each other with a loud clonk of horns.

A sleek young ewe with a small face and dark cape jumps straight up in the air like a piece of toast. Toast pops spread throughout the band like a chain reaction. There are chases and leaps and races along knife-edged ledges above sixty-foot drops.

In observing them through the year, Ellen and her sly humor and humanity become part of the landscape, and part of the sheep’s survival. As she writes in the book’s Prologue:

After so many days among the bighorns, in the end it seemed best to quiet the mind and act like a rock. I am simply here, I thought, here at the periphery of several hundred pounds of Ovis with lovely rumps and eyelashes as delicate as fish bones.

I then became the first rock in history to be overcome with feeling, a serene aching aimed at nothing in particular, only a cobalt sky with no edge but winter’s cold and a river beside us that shook out its light in full dazzle, a river rimmed with ice and a band of rare mammals whose own biology and history could have lost them to the world.

This lovely, deeply felt book became linked to my own writing in an unforeseen way. Ellen’s 2005 Orion excerpt was accompanied by a biographical sketch that mentioned a fund to be set up in her memory to support writers who also wrote about the desert. It announced the first annual Ellen Meloy Memorial Fund Desert Writer’s Award and called for submissions. I wondered if I could, even in some small way, help carry forward Ellen’s mantle of speaking through her pen for beloved wild places. I proposed a work of prose to the fund, a long-imagined book set in the Green River basin, northeast Utah. I mailed in short stories, published pieces, and mere slips of ideas. Through some lucky break, I won the inaugural award. With the funds I traveled to Utah to research and write a manuscript that developed into a novel, Junction, Utah.

The Ellen Meloy Fund website carried news of my progress on the book, even as years passed before it seemed finished and found a publisher. My life required balancing motherhood, marriage, my job as a scientist, and writing in early morning sessions in which I could barely stay awake. At times I despaired of ever shaping a final version of Junction. Fortunately, in 2009 I was accepted for a writer’s residency at Hedgebrook Retreat on Whidbey Island in the state of Washington. While preparing for three weeks on the island, I packed Ellen's Eating Stone as a reference. My sense was the love and fire in her words would nurture my own.

My journal notes from the early days of the residency explored what to do with the time. I’d proposed to write a book about geology and world change. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d revise the novel, again. I felt I’d exhausted my ability to focus on it, that I needed a new project: “What do I need to know about how to spend my writing time here? How can I best delve deeply into my work? What writing will be the most powerful gift to the world?” The night I scribbled these particular questions, I dreamed vividly: a dark-haired literary agent called me in tears from her office in New York. She’d loved the “scene with the doctor” in my novel; it had moved her to tears. She told me in no uncertain terms that I should revise the rest of the novel and get it to her. “Now.”

I didn’t remember a scene with a doctor, but as I read through the latest e-file of the manuscript I re-discovered one. The dream-agent’s instructions became my marching orders. By day at the residency I revised deeply and wrote new scenes; in the evenings I read Ellen; at night, inspired by her words and immersed in imagination, I dreamed the scenes and sentences I'd write the next day. I spent the remaining two and one-half weeks revising my novel, which I hadn’t been sure I’d work on again, ever. I wrote six hours a day minimum. In the early mornings and afternoons I’d walk in the woods, looking for the barred owls who called at night, or I’d bicycle to the shore to watch osprey catch and carry fish to far treetops. Each day I found a connection to the wild; each night I asked my dreams for guidance on the next day’s work. The answers always came.

Eating Stone would be brilliant enough if it were simply an account of the Blue Door Band and its comeback, but the book goes farther. Ellen also muses about the connection between human imagination and the untamed outdoors. She transforms that inchoate idea to a thread that connects and resonates: something is lost, she writes, when we lose a species forever from the planet, or when we fail to know wildlife and its sheer difference from human experience.

Each time I look into the eye of an animal, one as “wild” as I can find in its own element—or maybe peering through zoo bars will have to do—and if I get over the mess of “Do I eat it, or vice versa?” and overcome any problems I might have with an animal’s animality, or, for that matter, my own, I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily, unmercifully confused.

There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come. The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.

There is no return to ignorance, Ellen suggests, once one has known the Other. Whether one follows a band of wild sheep or hikes an untrodden canyon, opening to an expanded intelligence joins us to the more-than-human web. Ellen’s sheep, a species that perfected the art of making a living grazing rock—or eating stone—touched her visions, the imaginations of countless readers, and my dreams in ways that continue to ripple out from her final, unforgettable book.

(Review first published by Torrey House Press, website original reviews, February 2011.)