Eyes Wide Open

A Review of The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy

By Jonathan Callard

Anne Lamott once wrote that becoming a writer is “ultimately about asking yourself . . . how alive am I willing to be?” Writer Ellen Meloy, a former technical illustrator, has chosen to live life with eyes wide open. Her book The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Vintage 2002) is one long prayer of the senses, celebrating and mourning humanity through nature's mirror.

Leading us from the Mojave to the Sierras to the Yucatan, to the Bahamas and back to her home canyon country in southern Utah, Meloy can sound as if she is tiptoeing through a great cathedral, full of reverence and awe. For this Episcopalian, however, God is in churches of sandstone rock, in riverbed altars, in an amulet of turquoise whose color can “draw a person right down to the skin of the world.” With a clear, exacting eye and dry wit, Meloy opens her hands to nature, jumping into the river for a solo raft trip. “The river is always in charge,” she reminds herself ruefully after the strong current pulls her beached boat downstream, forcing her to swim after it.

The author's trip to her shrink to clear her head sounds commonplace until she introduces us to the two “psychiatrists” who chew cud and look very much like mules. She does her therapy outside, her over-the-fence medication found in tongues and hot breath on her hands. If one of those mules were to die, she confesses, she could not bear the heartbreak of seeing the survivor “looking, always looking, toward the place he last saw his brother.”

Meloy pulls us out of our cars and calls us off-road to hear the land's stories – from the secrets of the fierce frontier woman who bought her Navajo lover a two-year supply of blue jeans, to the hand-woven basket given to her grandmother in the High Sierras by a Yokuit woman whose own narrative was “displaced and unraveling.”

Meloy pulls us out of our cars and calls us off-road to hear the land's stories – from the secrets of the fierce frontier woman who bought her Navajo lover a two-year supply of blue jeans, to the hand-woven basket given to her grandmother in the High Sierras by a Yokuit woman whose own narrative was “displaced and unraveling.” The author even ventures to the Bahamas on a genealogical “forced march” to put color on the codicils and land deeds of her own forebears. Her family's past, like the overgrown site of its colonial homestead, is twisted and confusing, tangled with whispered tales of a mysterious suicide and plantation slaves. Her quest to square the round edges of her own blood's human desires, their sins and saving graces, largely comes for naught. It is only in front of the turquoise ocean, the same “color of yearning” that her ancestors gazed at daily, that she feels a physical connection to her past, a pull deep in her soul.

At first I found Meloy's writing almost too lush, too descriptive. The book felt heavy in my hands, my mind ached for simpler narrative, for fast-moving dialogue. But as I got into her chapters, I realized that like many fellow Homo sapiens I had learned to ignore the details of things around me, because then I would have to feel. And feel not only the abundance of the birds to be found in the Yucatan Peninsula, but to feel the desolation, the steady scraping away of mountains for gravel, the “crushing, industrial love of paradise.”

Meloy sees nature as it is – a chaotic place, not a place of order – a place where there is much copulation and killing and birthing, ceaselessly. No wonder that we want to anesthetize ourselves from our surroundings, she says, when flora and fauna remind us of . . . us. Not to worry, Meloy adds – it will take another million years for our senses to go the way of the prehensile tail.

And what of the rest of us, those who do not live in the desert and sleep with sheep? Meloy does not forget us, but unsparingly reveals her social awkwardness with convention. She raises an eyebrow during an outdoor jaunt with women seeking the goddess within, offering good-natured criticism about an ecofeminist movement that seeks to commodify, through language, that which is best experienced individually through wordless wonder. She emerges dripping from a river to shock a gaggle of gun-toting men spouting Bible phrases, on the lookout for naked people.

Hearing the anger in their voice for the other, be it the gay or the woman or the hedonist or the environmentalist, Meloy brings the conflict back to the simple and sensual. She wonders whether their hatred for those who are different does not come from their feet being pinched in their hard boots. She imagines them taking off their boots and joining her to squish toes in the sand by the river. A woman who joyfully shows up for a dress-up meal in bare feet, who does not presume to know what the ginko “balboa” self-help herb is, admits to a “fatal naivete: to believe that if you simply look at this wild desert, use all your senses to respond to it, you would reflexively love it, save it, care for it, behave yourself in it.”

Meloy's grief is also personal, a bittersweet meditation over a life passage that has shed “the husks of fate and fiercer desires.” When she drives across the Mojave, stopping at motels with swimming pools to right a childhood aquatic deprivation, Meloy admits that she once dreamed of having her own children in her own pool in her own yard in Southern California. She confesses to assuming that her beloved late brother, an artist who died in the wilderness with his paints, would grow old with her.

The senses can save us when language, culture, history, even death divide us. For those wondering where they can start to conserve “this fragile earth, our island home,” Ellen Meloy offers the simple but most difficult solution – to take a deep breath, open our eyes.

For the author, survival has always meant an “intense study of details.” The senses can save us when language, culture, history, even death divide us. For those wondering where they can start to conserve “this fragile earth, our island home,” Ellen Meloy offers the simple but most difficult solution – to take a deep breath, open our eyes. To poke around, learn about those who came before. And to prepare for those who are to follow, leave a story and a land for them to dig in.   Her turquoise earring, she notes, carries a rule of life – the daily, instinctual attention to the beautiful, however small.

Jonathan Callard is a writer living in Oakland, Calif. He is an editorial assistant at The Witness magazine and program coordinator for the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. Jonathan edits the web log content for Every Voice Network's “From the Lists” section, and has his own blog .   He may be reached by email at jonathancallard@hotmail.com .