There is a swim across the Mojave, a harrowing error on a solo trip down a wild river, and a birthday party with wild sheep. Meloy describes women held to the desert by sheer gravity, and she mourns the passing of her oldest neighbors, the Navajo velvet grandmothers whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland. With keen vision and sharp wit she introduces us to deserts, canyons, turquoise seas, and ancestral mountains, as well as to comedian plants, psychiatrist mules, and Persians who consider turquoise the equivalent of a bulletproof vest. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and in the deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through diverse habitats of supersensual light, through places of beauty and places of desecration. In this luminous mix of memoir, natural history, and eccentric adventure, Meloy uses turquoise?the color and the gem?as a metaphor for a way to make sense of the world from the clues of nature. Ellen Meloy (June 21, 1946, Pasadena, California ? November 4, 2004, Bluff, Utah) was an American nature writer. The true first printing of the first edition, with appropriate issue points quite scarce thus.
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