The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

by Ellen Meloy

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.

From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Art, Essays, Travel, Memoir, Anthropology

336 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2002

About the author

Ellen Meloy was an American nature writer. Among the awards she garnered are the Whiting Writer's Award (1997) and the John Burroughs Medal (2007); in 2003 she was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, for The Anthropology of Turquoise Meditations on Landscape, Art & Spirit.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellen was a close friend of my family's for many years--in fact, my father had lunch with her only a few weeks before her sudden passing in 2004 at the age of 58. Needless to say, her death hit us rather hard--hard enough that, though she gave me The Anthropology of Turquoise on my birthday in 2003, it took me until mid-2007 to begin reading it. Journeying through these pages was thus a very intimate experience for me: full of sadness at the memory of a lost friend; laughter at the ridiculousness of Ellen's quirky passages; joy at the opportunity to hear her voice once again; and wonder at the beauty of her writing.

If you've never read any of Ellen's work before, you're in for a real treat. She writes about the southwest U.S. with passion and ferocity--a welcome change from many such environmental works which are as dry as the deserts they describe. It's odd to think that a series of essays that work to subtly build an environmental ethic could be enjoyable, but in fact I quite often found myself laughing out loud. How could you not enjoy a book with essay titles such as "A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry," and chapter-opening sentences like, "I have just stapled my hair to the roof"?

Ellen's work is not just about humor, however; there are also long passages decrying the destruction of the natural world, an entire essay on the horridness of Los Angeles, and beautiful lover's notes to the red sands that shift through open doors at dusk. I can't say that Anthropology is the best environmental work I've ever read, but it's certainly one of the best-written.

If you've ever tried to get through A Sand County Almanac or Walden and found the style and writing too austere, pick up one of Ellen's books. She's just as deep, in her own way, but far more readable.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of fifteen essays, this is a book meant to be savored. I didn't plan on spending nine months with Meloy, but my book club meeting came and went. And I was only one-third of the way through.

If your idea of enjoying nature is checking birds off of a list, or achieving a personal best in mountaineering, this book will be too meditative for your liking. If, however, you prefer to listen and discover what nature can teach, especially over time, you're in for a treat.

Some critics dislike Meloy's descriptive writing. It can make for a sometimes challenging read. But I appreciate her words, and the time I can share with them, because she can no longer add to the conversation. She passed away in her sleep, just two years after writing this book.

When I first visited New Mexico, I felt something that is difficult to describe. Perhaps everyone feels this pull. I have returned repeatedly, although it is never enough. In light of this, I'll share a favorite passage from "Heron Bay" (p. 210):

"Of all the things I wondered about on this island, I wondered the hardest about the paradoxical contrast and affinity of redrock desert and turquoise ocean, the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How 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. How you can fall in love with the light."

Unexpectedly, Meloy infuses her essays with humor. In "Swimming the Mojave", she recounts an experience with the police in an upscale neighborhood. Her offense? Walking. This was an obvious example of her feeling otherness -- something many of us experience in life, and combat by heading into nature.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! The Anthropology of Turquoise is lyrical and exquisite, containing Meloy's meditations on everything from the childhood euphoria of spending long hours in swimming pools to the visceral beauty of colour. It'll make you want to immerse yourself in nature (esp. the United States' desert Southwest).

On the desert horizon at dusk, where red rock meets lapis sky, at the seam of the union, runs a band of turquoise, recumbent upon the land's great darkness...Before night falls, blue-green is the last quantum of visible light to pass through the atmosphere without scattering. It can draw a person right down to the skin of the world. The tidal pull of light can shape an entire life. Every heart-warmed pulse of blood and breath.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

After finishing this book I found, to my absolute delight, that Ellen Meloy lived in Mexican Hat! That was it. I was set. On my way down there to show up on her door step and sit at her feet...or at the foot of her raft, either way. Then I found out she was dead.
I've been robbed. you have too, though you may not know it. The fact that no matter how long I wait...there won't be any more books by Ellen just plain sucks.

I have felt that most of my life has been a struggle between my academically trained, degree seeking, order wanting brain and my body/heart that screams and laughs and sighs and runs around outside wanting to make love (yes really) to rivers and rocks and trees. Ellen Meloy had two PhDs and an MA...biology, art history, and painting. She lived in one of thh smallest towns in Utah where she floated rivers with her husband (BLM river ranger), worked in her Salsa garden, and consulted with her lamas. She writes about sitting quietly on the Green river, watching the desert bleed in bursts of flash floods,bringing the world down to sound. In her essays, she rages and dreams about turning into ivy and trees. She researches plant origins and visits the Navajo who live across the river. She is my teacher for how to blend my passions, for how to bring them together peacably.

[Dayna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me quite a long time to plow through. Her imagery is dense and her thought process is not like mine, so I found myself having to very deliberately read. She and I share a love of the outdoors (and for some of the same places, actually), so it made it worth it. I did not read every single essay, quickly exiting those that were either too focused on anthropology or places I didn't care as much about.

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am officially in love with this book! It is an exquisite, delicious journey through the blue haze of life.

Its about stopping to take it all in, about nature, animals, the sea, the river, its about everything and nothing.

I feel as if Ellen Meloy came over for cake and coffee and we got talking about life in aquamarine bliss.

A beautifully written book by someone who sounds as though they had a genuine, earthbound soul.

A treat that I've most definitely savoured.

[Kate]

I wanted to love this book, its meditations on nature and dessert and animals and Mexico and my favorite color blue, but her writing style felt so encumbered that I plodded along, skipping over parts hoping in vain to find some language that would open up and breathe.

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our lives are compressed by change. It took centuries for the symbol zero to migrate from India to Italy. Even then, the idea did not immediately take hold. It took half a century for the westward expansion to change forever the face of the American west. Was it only a generation ago, Meloy asks, when you could find a vantage point on the Colorado Plateau and see for a hundred miles? Today, forget to update your GPS and the new houses and roads you see will appear on your screen as a vast swathe of blankness. The calibration of change has shrunk too quickly to even process: “It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet, already, my own history sounds like another country.” (Essay #3: “Waiting Its Occasions,” p.74)

Unlike Edward Abbey, Meloy is not an enraged purist. She simply asks us to step back from this disorienting myopic pace. Not all of us crave the life of outdoors solitude she cherishes. Instead, she generously lends us her painter's eye and invites us to share her vision. It's an organic vision comprised of layers: history, personal memory, family lore, myth, and above all, sight. As she describes the constantly changing hues of the rock, sky and river, she reminds us that colors excite powerful emotions. She summons eloquent quotes from Jorge Luis Borges, Pliny the Elder, Goethe, Kandinsky, the Persian scholar Muhammed ibn Mansur, Loren Eisley and ecologist E.O. Wilson to expand her vision.

She also permits the reader to glimpse how this landscape may have looked to others. The Mojave were travelers, walking as much as 200 miles from the desert to the ocean. Their geography was localized. Their place names recorded not just appearance, but history and emotion: fear slough, duck water, whispering place. Still, history and archaeology cannot permit us to see the world through Mojave eyes. “When we forage for stories, we may end up telling our own. When we cannot possess the thoughts of past cultures, we possess their things”. (Essay #4: “Aha Makav Walkabout,” p.94) Even the geography John Wesley Powell saw no longer exists. “I bore no delusions that the river beside me [the Colorado] still flowed through Powell's terra incognita. From Rocky Mountain headwaters to the Sea of Cortez, the Colorado shoulders the weight of our needs, the thirsts of our farms and cities, and the affection of thousands of recreationists who ply its waters.” (Essay #9: “The Silk That Hurls Us Down Its Spine,” p.214. This is writing that will unleash the imagination of even the most cosseted reader.

Meloy finds occasional moments of subtle humor. She battles a flicker bent on pulverizing a stucco wall of her modest Utah desert dwelling. She turns to two mules for calming therapy when her mind remains stuck on the future. Inspired by the basket-weaving Yokut, she roasts griddle cakes from ground acorns. “The cakes were bitter and needed a throat wash of cold Dos Equis. I had not known to leach the tannin from the ground meal. In the night a masked raccoon picked up the left over cakes in its tiny child's hands and carried them off.” (Essay #3: “Waiting Its Occasions,” p.65). For much of her professional life Elroy was a technical illustrator, and she includes some delightful drawings of desert plant life. “Prickly Pear” shows the whimsical outline of the Thumbelina-sized author languorously reclining in the cupped petals of the cactus flower. (Essay #10: “A Field Guide to Harlotry,” p.236)

This book was published in 2002 but speaks with uncanny prescience to today's fear-saturated culture: “Scarier than the ...lack of sensory intimacy with nature, or perhaps a direct result of this estrangement, is a dark side, an undercurrent of escalating hostility verging on violence. It is as if disagreement — over lifestyles and land use, politics and technology — is no longer enough. The argument must also become personal to the point where resentment is so concentrated against someone, usually the wrong someone or someone amorphous and “different,” it becomes dangerous and obsessive.” (Essay #13: “The Angry Lunch Café,” p.291)

Like a riverbed, these essays meander over a wide terrain. Even the title is misleading. Desert, water and stone lead the author to free-associate into stories about her childhood, genealogy, anthropology, the significance of turquoise across cultures, and variations in color taxonomies. I have tried to indicate some of the connecting themes of these essays. Some of my favorites were the ones that referenced Navajo myth, Yokut basketry, and the Topcock Maze, a geoglyph believed to have been built by the Mojave Indians. According to one myth, the spirits of the dead traversed it in order to confound evil spirits pursuing them. Another story explains them as a purification path for returning warriors on their path home. I loved the specificity of the geological terms she uses to describe the landscape of the Colorado Plateau: slickrock, talus, alluvial fan, bajadas and pediments. Take the time to look up some of these terms and you will be treated to some spectacular photos. I loved her contemplations on the emotional content of color. She stretches blue into a circular continuum flowing from turquoise into jade, from cerulean into violet, from pearlescence into gray and from indigo into iridescent blue-black. However, she also meanders into long stories about past generations of her extended family and a road trip from Santa Monica to Monument Valley which reminds her of John Cheever's short story, “The Swimmer.” This is not a book for the impatient reader. It is not meant to be read quickly in a few consecutive sittings. It is, however, lyrical, though-provoking, and enlightening.

NOTES:
The author died two years after this book was published. The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers was founded in her honor, and is a good starting point for discovering a new generation of environmental writers.

The sense of the desert as a breathing organism conveyed in one of Meloy's passages reminded me of Hari Kunzru's very different fictional book set in the Mojave Desert, GODS WITHOUT MEN

Meloy mentions passages from Alfred Kroeber's book, HANDBOOK OF THE INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA. Kroeber's wife Theodora also wrote a book, a biography of the last Yahi Indian, ISHI OF TWO WORLDS

[Yaaresse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Exquisite. Captivating.

For the record, Ellen Meloy and I have almost nothing in common – except perhaps our disdain for Las Vegas and a preference for solitude. She was an outdoorswoman who thought nothing of sleeping under the stars with only a sleeping bag or spending a week alone canoeing a canyon river; my idea of camping involves room service. She would spend hours marveling at whatever moths, centipedes, snakes, and bats found their way into her house or across her path; I, as she so aptly put it, move through life with a can of Raid in my hand.

No matter. I can appreciate her writing, the almost synesthetic way she described her surroundings, her self-deprecating humor when she knew something she did was absurd (like stapling her hair to the roof), the melodramatic daydreams she indulged in sometimes. (The one about the well-meaning redneck warehouse worker and the orange swimsuit screw-up made me laugh out loud.) The essay “A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry” is half-erotica, half a psychedelic trip. Who knew prickly pears and globemallow led such lurid lives?

I read this collection of essays the way some people read psalms each evening, as a way of centering myself with something evocative and meditative. Meloy penned canticles to her beloved red rock canyons, hymns to the phenomenon of color and visual texture, and even eulogies to the solitary, open spaces and animals that are becoming ever more extinct. She managed to do this in a way that was not pretentious or preachy, but simply appreciative, reverent, and even humorous.

This is a book I will read over and over.

[Feisty Harriet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book, but it took me almost a month to finish it. The cover touts it’s place as a finalist for the Pulitzer, and perhaps my disliking whole chapters of it makes me considerably less literary than I like to assume. But. Despite Meloy talking about her life in and love of Utah’s red rock canyon country and her obsession with all things turquoise–river, sea, jewelry, sky–I found her writing a bit too angry and ranty and her emotions a little too far detached for me to ever become completely invested. I felt this way about parts of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as well. It’s hard for me to really relate to someone who so fiercely loves the wild desert places, loves to explore them on their own, loves to describe them in beautiful detail and metaphor, but absolutely abhors the idea of anyone else being able to see or visit those places and have their same experience. It seems elitist and snobbish and I don’t like it.

[chiara_librofilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Io non lo so se mi capiterà mai di visitare il deserto del Mojave, i canyon dello Utah o le coste dello Yucatàn e tutti gli altri luoghi di cui parla Ellen Meloy nel suo libro, di una cosa però sono certa ovvero che ciò di cui parla è declinabile a qualsiasi latitudine e longitudine geografica.
Si parla di paesaggio ma soprattutto si parla di attrazione verso la luce, di colore e di come esso sia il fondamento primario per riconoscere un luogo, di come influenzi la nostra percezione e di come sia capace di celare una storia e si sa che più storie sono capaci di fare una cultura.
È difficile riassumere tutto quello che è possibile trovare dentro questo libro, tra l'altro difficilmente classificabile poiché possiede una natura totalmente ibrida (tra saggio, romanzo e memoir) ma sono certa che piacerà moltissimo a tutti quelli che hanno sempre avvertito una certa inspiegabile attrazione verso alcuni luoghi del mondo e senza mai capirne il perché.

[R.G. Ziemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding book of reflections, as the subtitle explains, on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. Ellen Meloy was an excellent writer, that much is apparent - every chapter here is a joy to read, the prose just savory. But she was also clearly a student not only of the Desert Southwest, but a well-read scholar of words written on the subject as well. I found myself reacting to the epigrams as little semi-precious nuggets with their own value. Here are a couple:

"I used to wonder why the sea was blue at a distance and green close up and colorless for that matter in your hands. A lot of life is like that. A lot of life is just a matter of learning to like blue."
-- Miriam Pollard, The Listening God.

"There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrua Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth."
-- Earl Shorris, The Last Word.

Meloy comments that much modern nature writing is either an angry declamation or sorrowful lamentation over a tragic loss. Her own book here absorbs the emotions and makes them personal, so that the reader can relate to the author with an intimacy I've never felt for an essayist or observer of the natural world. Edward Abbey, for example, though a passionate writer, never made me want to put my arm around him and sit with him to watch the river flow. I wish I'd known Ellen Meloy -- and I feel like I have, to a great extent. I can picture her lean and bronzed on the green San Juan River, rowing solo through a burning desert afternoon; I can see her still as a lizard on slickrock, watching wasps buzzing among sego lillies and desert paintbrush.

She is sensual - describing the "brazen harlotry" of the desert flora, she unabashedly (well, she professes SOME abashment) describes the short spring on the Colorado Plateau as "a passion of flowers so accelerated, you feel their demands on your heart, the mounting pleasure, the sweet exhaustion... warm and soft, already engaged in rampant foreplay."

Meloy relates so much to her own life, her background in the "human paella that is greater Los Angeles" where "the desert is scraped away in a naked shriek until time and trees soften it." (I can see the hillside next to our grandmother's little house, the sandstone gouged by steel fangs of a backhoe).

Perhaps an attraction for me was the way Meloy wove in her own family stories -- like her father's Depression-era upbringing and economic sense creating in her an unquenchable thirst for the turquoise swimming pools of the Southern California lifestyle. Or the history of settlers like her Scots-born grandfather in the Sierra Nevadas, where a Yokuts Indian woman created a basket that the author prized. OR farther back, surrounded by Bahamian turquoise waters, she travels deep into the slave-holding history of her ancestors on an island neighboring Nassau.

As the title explains, it's an Anthropology, so what matters is the human element as it relates to the blue mineral, the color, the sky, and everything it suggests. Meloy is wonderful describing the Azul Maya of the Yucatan, and quotes everyone from Goethe on color ("...we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it") to Shakespeare on the stone's properties: (Shylock learns that his daughter has traded the cherished memento of his turquoise ring: "I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys."

But Meloy is at her best describing her home in the desert, where the "menagerie of wildlife surrounds our house" and they "live in compatible anarchy." She brings the reader along through red dust to a Navaho Fair where, because she is one horseback, she is asked to escort Miss Many Farms, a princess on her white horse, and Miss Navajo Nation, a princess on the hood of a Chevy. We read spellbound as Meloy sits motionless, the rising sun coloring her campsite and revealing a small band of desert bighorn sheep -- the "brides of place" who have internalized their devotion to the range of desert where they forage, mate, and raise their young.

Since this precious little book is ultimately about people, we can sympathize with Meloy in her visit to the "Angry Lunch Cafe" and her encounters with a few of the human denizens of the desert: a glaring cafe waitress and her sorrowful mother; friends who over dinner idly plan guerilla protests; and the camo-clad jeep posse armed with rifles, sidearms and GPS units who suspiciously confronted her on the river: "Each of us had a comfortable cluelessness. I was lost but knew where I was. They were not lost but did not know where they were."

That describes the attitude - Meloy knew where she was, all right, but she was far from clueless. This book offers clues for all of us. I recommend it to any and all of my paddling friends as well as desert rats, other lovers of the Southwest culture, and anyone who enjoys fine writing.

[John-Nathan]

I'm reminded of a college professor, and friend, who said of Joyce's Ulysses, "I didn't know you could do that with words," upon his first read of the book and his thoughts therein. Similarly, I feel toward The Anthropology of Turquoise. The parsimonious use of colourful (please forgive the pun), phrases, lyrical and vivid words paint pictures easily in the readers mind.

Maybe it's the Southern-Utah whore in me that is drooling for her words that describe her life, landscapes, and essays about her past. She writes as an artist talking about the virtues and symbolism, for example, of one shade of blue with respect another--romanticized, self effacing, witty, and intelligent.

What colour would my life be?

I'm on page 44, I'm slowly soaking this book in, it's succulent. Orange cantelope, olives, sticky red raspberries, and chocolate, in the desert, sunsetting, with wine and a friend; this is how I feel when I enjoy this book. I'm doubting that the rest of the read will fail to dissapoint, as I'm a complete and total sucker for succinct, vivid, accurate writing. I'm seriously reminded of looking at artwork in a museum when my eyes fall over her letters; she speaks to more than one of my senses and I find that I have sensations of being tickled and am experiencing Joy. John Irving's Garp was the last author to make me feel connected to a story like this, not that anything about their writing styles are even remotely similar, but they're both wonderful.

[Alyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This rating should be 3.5 stars. I developed a love-hate relationship with this book: the flowery, hyper-adjective language inlaid in run-on sentences inspired hair pulling. To the contrary, select passages struck a chord in my core and provided deep contemplation on my own home nestled in Idaho's wilderness. I sincerely appreciate the author's honesty about her role as a nature writer. Her admittance of being a mere footnote in the vast natural history of her beloved lands was refreshing, albeit somewhat expected. I will recommend this book, and may re-read it in upcoming years. For now however, her abundant, topsy-turvy words need to sink in, and I need to recover from an ego-centric book....

[Lara · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I came across this book, I had been hoping that she would focus more on how things actually connected through turquoise in different cultures. I was hoping that she would spend more time actually focusing on the actual idea of turquoise. I found that the book was more about her than turquoise. I didn't actually finish the book, mostly because it didn't maintain my interest enough to continue. I may try to pick it up again later. She spent so much time focusing on her own travels to research it that it bothered me.

[Bronson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book over a decade ago and recently decided to revisit it. I think it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time. Her love of nature and desert landscapes is deep and personal. She should be compensated by the Monument Valley tourism department.
Its deep and personal and deserves some time. It's best enjoyed if you have a chance to visit this part of the country.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am on the fence about whether this gets 4 or 5 stars, I am still so blown away by Meloy's writing. I haven't given many books 5 stars. I have a feeling that this book deserves another reading, but I borrowed it on ILL so it has to go back to the library.

Almost every day I get an email called Shelf Awareness. It is written for independent booksellers, but anyone who loves books would enjoy it. Awhile back, Philip Connors mentioned Ellen Meloy as an author he is an evangelist for. I don't know why I felt compelled to find one of Meloy's books, but I did. I am so grateful to Connors - I know it was serendipity, but this was a wonderful book.

Melroy reminds me of all the authors I have read (Annie Dillard, Gretchen Erhlich, Terry Tempest Williams, etc.) who know their place in the world. They know the landscape, the animals, the air that they breathe. They make me want to move to wherever they are because they have described the place so well. Ellen Meloy has done this for the US southwest.

Her writing seems effortless and is beautiful. Meloy has taught me about turquoise, the land around western rivers, burros and other aspects of life that I never knew that I wanted to know. Now that I have read this book, I am amazed that I was living without this information. My life definitely was not complete.

I am so sad that Ellen Meloy has died. However, her presence will live on for a long, long time.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, dense, rewarding of a slow read. These essays use a rich and self-consciously literary voice - not what I expected of a book set primarily in the severe desert southwest (of the US), with excursions to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the islands of Barbados. Meloy writes with lush and devout love for her chosen place, and a clear-eyed awareness of the ways we have used the environment and one another unsustainably. Yet, she also writes with a lighter touch than some of the region's better known nature writers - Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams. Meloy invokes a rainbow of precisely identified colors. If you can summon colors to the mind's eye by name, the book dances with them.

Some of the essays are especially poignant - for example, 'The Silk That Hurls Us Down Its Spine', describing a life-threatening circumstance during a solo trip down the Colorado River - when you know that Meloy died, relatively young and unexpectedly, just two years after this book was published. It's impossible to read these deeply personal essays without feeling that loss, but I'm grateful for images and insights she shares here.

[Laura Hoffman Brauman]

Meloy's writing about nature is beautiful. Most of these essays are set in the Southwest and speak to the way that the desert calls to her and it's beauty. Color and it's impact on our thoughts and perceptions is a part of many of the selections and I appreciated the way that she slowed down and focused on the details.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept wanting to like this book more than I did. Very possible I was not in the proper headspace for Meloy’s ruminating. I did quite enjoy Swimming the Mojave, A Wilderness of Monkeys, Azul Maya and My Animal Life.

[Olivia Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful book 💙 Ellen Meloy is such a vivid, descriptive, and poetic writer. If you live/have been/love the desert, I would definitely recommend her work- she is able to make the desert come to life so beautifully and magically. While it took me a bit to get into this book (I loved the descriptions most of the time, but sometimes there was so much that I felt like it bogged down the narrative a bit for me), I ended up really enjoying it, especially where we see Meloy’s personal reflections on the environment, her relationship with it, and how she sees humanity connected to it. And I really admired her use of humor as well. I appreciated her trying to carry turquoise through the book, but at some points it felt like a bit of a stretch and I don’t think I could quite get the through line connecting theme she was going for. To me, this read a bit more as a series of essays that could be loosely bundled together, which isn’t a bad thing. My favorite chapters came in the later half of the book, particularly “Tilano’s Jeans”, “A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry”, and “My Animal Life.” I’ll end this review with a quote from “Tilano’s Jeans”, which I particularly liked:

“When we March in from the starry nights and dazzling rivers, we must argue on their behalf, pressure politicians and other moronic invertebrates to wean themselves from their unsightly addiction to corporate blubber and for once act in favor of things that matter, like air to breathe, water to drink, and space to roam. We must exalt the bio centric paradigm, speak for the creatures that have no voice, staunch the lunatic hemorrhage of wild lands from the face of the planet.” 🌎🌍🌏

For any nature writers or fans of nature writing, lovers of the desert landscape, and lovers of the planet, would recommend this book/Ellen Meloy in general!

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book. I did not want it to end. I took my sweet time; a requirement in my opinion. Sometimes I dove in deep, taking in whole chapters, but usually it was a paragraph or two at a time, leaving space for reflection. The book itself has become symbolic- a silent companion on hikes, vacations, long drives and other adventures. It's the kind of book best enjoyed in a setting and I've taken it to beaches so I could observe the varying shades of blue beautifully described within its pages. I packed it in my backpack while hiking through red rocks so I could both read and take in the austere beauty of the desert she so aptly illuminates. I have a whole list of new places I need to see.

Reading Meloy's words are like seeing my own deep thoughts and feelings splashed out across the page in sans serif. It can be unsettling, your innermost self laid bare, yet at the same time comforting. You are not the only one who observes, who pauses, who treasures, who loves. She found a way to put it into words. And not just any words, the right words that evoke the exact sensation of longing and attachment found in natural landscapes. I could not help but underline and write short notes in the margins. The favorite phrases and moments are on daily mental repeat. Someone really ought to start a jewelry line of Ellen Meloy turquoise. After reading, you want to possess some form of it. A tangible portion of this type of beauty, as if you can capture it and hold it safely within your hands.

This book is exquisite. A treasure to me, both in object and representation. I loved it wholeheartedly and will carry it with me, wherever I go.

[Nelliamoci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antropologia del turchese è una ricetta speciale: è nuotare fra le dune del deserto, è respirare granelli di sabbia per viaggiare nel tempo. La magia della prefazione di questo libro, scritta col cuore in mano dalla traduttrice Sara Reggiani, è un antipasto delizioso per affrontare le grandi portate di questo menu americano dove la natura è il sale della vita che condisce ogni momento felice di Ellen Meloy. Scrittrice ma soprattutto ricercatrice del vero concetto di casa, Antropologia del turchese è una serie di riflessioni su cosa significhi appartenere a un territorio e di conseguenza a una storia più grande di noi. È un inno ai colori, dal cielo azzurro al turchese delle pietre preziose che hanno affascinato persino gli antichi Egizi; è un mix di luci e colori che abbagliano il lettore lungo la strada per lasciarlo con la stessa sensazione di chi viaggia sul lato passeggero, quando i sensi non sono concentrati sulla strada ma su tutto ciò che gli sta attorno.

[Elly Sands · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so sorry this author's life was cut short. Her writing showed her vitality and insatiable curiosity for life. The detailed writing took awhile to get into but once I surrendered to it the flow of exquisite, brilliant words won me over. Her great sense of humor had me laughing out loud. Living in the southwest I've become somewhat tainted about the commercial side of turquoise. I now see it with new eyes since learning of it's history. This book is like a fun to read text book as the reader is continually learning something new and not just about turquoise. It's filled with her discoveries and explorations of the natural world. I love the southwest. It's in my blood and bones so this was a delicious book to read.

[David Doty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stegner will always be my favorite Western writer, but Ellen Meloy is now a close second. This collection of essays and personal stories about Meloy's life and travels in the West's wild places makes you want to get outside, explore off the beaten path, and slow down to take in the wonders of water, desert, canyons, Native American ruins, and wildlife. She even goes beyond the West to include some compelling descriptions of landscapes and people in Mexico and the Bahamas. Meloy writes some absolutely beautiful prose, and her command of the language, together with her keen sense of observation and sharp sense of humor, leave you wanting much more when you get to the last page.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this compilation of essays on a theme had some really really beautiful parts, some hilarious parts, and some really insightful parts. Even so, there were a lot of chapters that were a total slog. This was an extremely slow read for me, and sometimes it didn't feel worth it. If I were to recommend the book to someone, I would probably pick out specific chapters. But, of course, that might compromise the experience of the read. Needless to say, I'm torn because I'm so glad that I've read the parts of this book that stood out as points of excellence, but I'm also soooo glad I'm finally done.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A love letter to the desert and the color turquoise. Meloy brings together these concepts to illustrate the complexity and liminal nature of each. This was meant to be a desert read for me. Even though I finished it long after I left the desert, I could still feel the awe I felt gazing at red rocks and a brilliant blue sky. Meloy writes the most unique comparisons I have ever read. Her writing kept me on my toes. 10/10 would recommend for an intellectual read

[Lisa Aboudan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am happy other reviewers thought the book rambled. It’s been a month picking it up and carrying it around because I didn’t enjoy it. Many paragraphs were richly written but then it would skip like a scratched vinyl record and it would be off in La La land. I didn’t finish. I need to put it to rest. Time to take a break and start something enjoyable.
Picked the book back up and read almost to the end. Not changing my opinion. Not for me.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A map, it is said, organizes wonder.

Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel…

Ah, aaah, ooh, ohhh, all the exclamations of wonder. Anything, any book, any words, that span the space between the desert and the ocean is my song, and this was beautiful. A map. Organizes wonder. Wonder is the word. To be filled with awe. How often does one feel that way? Is that a religion, or can someone start it? When you are filled with wonder, you are filled. Whole, made whole. I promise. You love more, you love better, you love big. People, places, pets, animals, the stars. So grateful for this author's words, and rest in wonder, always.

I hope to make pictures like I walk in the desert—under a spell, an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways.

Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.

The true heart of a place does not come in a week’s vacation. To know it well, as Mary Austin wrote, one must ‘wait its occasions’—follow full seasons and cycles, a retreating snowpack, a six year drought, a ponderosa pine eating up a porch. Wild mountains offer a promise of undomesticated life, even in so over domesticated a place as California. . . . Memory . . . can still ignite a consuming longing for those Sierra days of witless youth and enflamed senses. I still carry the land so deep in my bones that I cannot bear to go back.”

Gaze out from the mesa, and you . . . will see eternity, a desert that like no other place exudes the timelessness of nature as the final arbiter. Scrape off our century, and you will find its usurper, pressed into a nugget of inorganic matter, the single greatest threat to the continuity of life

Colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… They are light waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity.

Colors challenge language to encompass them. (It cannot; there are more sensations than words for them. Our eyes are far ahead of our tongues.) Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress. They glow fluorescent on the flanks of a fish out of the water, then flee at its death. They mark the land of a woman deity who controls the soft desert rain. Flowers use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their surroundings and disappear. An octopus communicates by color; an octopus blush is language. Humans imbibe colors as antidotes to emotional monotony. Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel us to empathy with color.

In primitive life forms the eye began as a light-sensitive depression in the skin; the sense of sight likely evolved from the sense of touch.

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also — more so — for beauty. We have eyes refined by the evolution of predation. We use a predator’s eyes to marvel at the work of Titian or the Grand Canyon bathed in the copper light of a summer sunset.

When a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When a name for a color is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue… The Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava, and raven.

It has been shown that the words for colors enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white, and red, then yellow and green (in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes into itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green color. Despite the complexities of color names even in the same language, we somehow make sense of another person’s references. We know color as a perceptual “truth” that we imply and share without its direct experience, like feeling pain in a phantom limb or in another person’s body.

It seems as if the right words can come only out of the perfect space of a place you love. Between the senses and reason lies perception. At home or afield, that is where amazement resides, shunning explanation… Intoxication with color, sometimes subliminal, often fierce, may express itself as a profound attachment to landscape. It has been rightly said: Color is the first principle of Place.

Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.

Turquoise is ornament, jewel, talisman, tessera. It is religion. It is pawn. It is not favored for pinkie rings. It did not likely come from Turkey, its namesake, but took the name of the land it crossed on the old trade routes from Persia to Europe.

Turquoise occurs in limestone, batholithic and feldspathic granites, shale, and trachyte, rocks that are found nearly everywhere. Unless they are in an arid environment, however, they are not likely to bear turquoise. Although turquoise has more than one origin, most types formed million years ago, when groundwater seeped into alumina- and copper-rich mineralized fractures in zones of igneous rock. What has been said about gold can be said about turquoise: turquoise is the burden of waters.

Turquoise occurs in limestone, batholithic and feldspathic granites, shale, and trachyte, rocks that are found nearly everywhere. Unless they are in an arid environment, however, they are not likely to bear turquoise. Although turquoise has more than one origin, most types formed million years ago, when groundwater seeped into alumina- and copper-rich mineralized fractures in zones of igneous rock. What has been said about gold can be said about turquoise: turquoise is the burden of waters.

As a desert dweller, I believe that water is a truer entry to Place. In the West, aridity defines us. There is abundant water here in the Yucatán — ocean, marsh, lagoon, underground rivers, cenotes (natural wells where freshwater surfaces), a tropical forest swollen with transpiration. Storms bring a hurricane’s eyewall of torrents or nothing at all; even jungles have droughts. By invasion and sheer presence, the sea pushes itself into what is drinkable and what is heard, or what you miss hearing when you are distant from the surf. The sea holds an abundance of comfort and inspiration and danger, all that a person needs in order to rise to the full largesse of beauty. It seems that if you allow this beauty to become a blank, if you turn your back to the blues and deny your dependence on them, you might lose your place in the world, your actions would become small, your soul disengaged.

[Dlmrose · Rating 3 out of 5]

3+