![]() ![]() But Ellen preferred the language of observation and laughter. Outrage, dread, impassioned sincerity - those are the native idioms of that terrain, often coming in manic succession. The flagrant ironies of those landscapes can whipsaw a writer back and forth. ![]() ![]() Every toxic combination of culture and delusion is available in that expanse. The American West is hard on writers, and particularly Ellen's stretch of the West, which runs from Utah across the Navajo Reservation, past Lake Mead and the Mojave Desert, over Mount Whitney and down onto the "chive-green" lawns of San Marino, Calif. "I dream hard," she wrote in "The Anthropology of Turquoise." Knowing her, I find it easy to imagine that on the night she died, Ellen came to a waterfall in her dreams - a stream pouring over the edge of the slickrock - and jumped and simply kept falling. She worried about "progressive lunacy" and was told by a Navajo acquaintance to "go ahead and stay crazy." That she did. ![]() Like many people who truly know the desert Southwest, Ellen spent a lot of time thinking about perception. Last week, a writer named Ellen Meloy died suddenly in her sleep beside her husband at their home in Bluff, Utah. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |