the anthropology of turquoise by ellen meloy

It was her playful revenge for the family vacations of her childhood. Perhaps the best-known essay in the collection, “Swimming the Mojave,” recounts Meloy’s road trip from Los Angeles to Colorado and the motel pools where she swam. Of Mexico’s lush landscape of green vegetation, she wrote that it stretched “far into the horizon like giant broccoli gone berserk.” Meloy’s most recent book, “The Anthropology of Turquoise,” follows her travels from Sequoia in California to the Bahamas and the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Writing about it allowed her to “explore that paradox,” she said. “The most serene places in the Southwest are also the most egregious places in human history,” Meloy said in a 1999 interview with the Albuquerque Journal. That contrast of natural beauty and destructive human urges triggered the theme of the book, she later said.

“Los Alamos and its industrial complex sit atop narrow fingers of land separated by deep canyons,” she wrote, pointing out the beauty of the area in contrast to the bomb that was developed there in the 1940s. The book also examined the deadening effect nuclear testing and the atomic bomb had on the New Mexico desert. It began as a reflection on the history of the land and inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau and included an essay about building the house where she and her husband lived on eight acres near the San Juan River. Meloy’s second collection, “The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest,” was published five years later. “Raven’s Exile” won the Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award as well as the Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America. “My husband and I took a series of river trips, with lots of quiet time to observe.” “I had written a lot of notes on that beautiful and very wild canyon,” she told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City in 2000. The idea for the book came after she saw Desolation Canyon in eastern Utah as part of that trip. Bureau of Land Management who patrolled the river for a time. She explored it with her husband, Mark, a ranger with the U.S. “Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River” (1994) recounts her experiences traveling the river through Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.

The anthropology of turquoise by ellen meloy