I'll admit, it took a bit of time to get fully immersed in Ellen Meloy's book, but once I was in, I was hooked. Her writing style can kindly be described as meandering, and she might have benefitted from a touch more editing (especially when describing childhood moments of imagining invisible road-trip friends, which lasted a couple of pages). But outside of this very minor complaint, and I was in love. I devoured her passion for the desert, the world, environments, and mankind's stewardship within those environments. She tells disconnected tales and experiences from within her own life, and interweaves them with a theme of color, stone, ocean, blueness--the turquoise essence which she distills. There are many truths in her words, many very personal feelings that resonated with Amy and me as we read this together. It prompted many a discussion regarding land conservation, river nudity, Mexican paradise, and so on. I look forward to reading her Eating Stone soon.

--- ---

"Every nature girl and boy should be prepared to defend the places they love. Otherwise we have not earned them." (159)

"We must exalt the biocentric paradigm, speak for the creatures that have no voice, staunch the lunatic hemorrhage of wild lands from the face of the planet." (159)

"the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors ... our perceptions, as someone once said, are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away." (210)

"The desert gives an unsettling sense of the largeness of the universe in relation to the self." (288)

"Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for us to truly measure up to this land, for this land to not be a battlefield of anger and greed. When these two opposing conditions, elation and despair, follow one another too quickly, the universe seems careless and precipitate. I soar, I crash, a squall of heat let loose in the ethos." (293)