Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, by Ellen Meloy
When Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep for a year in Utah’s Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns’ exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels “the power and purity of first wonder.” Meloy’s writing is scientifically learned—beautifully so—but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams’ colliding horns echoing off the red rock. — Ross Andersen
The One Book Everyone Should Read – The Atlantic
I was surprised it was on this list. I had not heard of it. Has anyone here?
It’s been on my list a long time, but I have not yet gotten to it.