Photo by Astrid Turner
The Cosmic Nexus of Bluff
The story of a place and the woman who wrote it
By Greer K. Chesher
Roll through Bluff, Utah, and you’ll find an adventurous mix of caffeine-shunning ranchers, mocha latte-sipping misfits, holdover cowboys, Athabaskan-speaking Navajos, missionary Episcopalians, erstwhile artistes, and moon-eyed tourists—all regarding each other suspiciously while doing the wash down at the Cottonwood Laundromat.
Spectacular and idiosyncratic, Bluff is difficult to capture in words. Luckily, it was home to a writer who was sensually intoxicated with the place. If you want to experience Bluff’s enigmatic nature without the long drive, read Ellen Meloy. Perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-nominated book The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit, Meloy moved to Bluff with her river-ranger husband, Mark, in 1995. She died suddenly, nine years later, leaving four books, many essays, and radio commentaries—and an echoing memory of the unfathomable connection we can share with a place.
It was Bluff’s paradoxes that drew Meloy: access to the nearby faraway; the desert’s stripped-clean calm and blistering passion; its endless adventure and small embraces; the close community of “exhibitionist hermits.” And she fit right in. She was tall and slender, with mind-of-its-own red-blond hair awhirl on the slightest breeze, her sun-baked skin glowing the color of redrock. Following those long, brown legs up a steep canyon from the San Juan River was a trot for anyone altitudinally challenged.
But even at that pace, Meloy noticed the faintest pink blush of Indian paintbrush in bloom; spied the perfectly cryptic, thumbnail-sized baby toad popping away from moving feet. She knew the exact shade of the sky that day: turquoise, not azure. Summer’s intense light burned “the color of a sparkler’s core.” Meloy’s observations were always specific—detailed, accurate vignettes of this particular desert—her books’ language called a distinct vision of Bluff and her home desert into being.
Amidst the seemingly endless miles of tawny, cliff-edged desert, Bluff serves as portal—not only to the desert’s ancient imagination, but to our own. A walk in any direction earns the San Juan River’s soothing waters, the Bluff Sandstone’s wind-carved hoodoos, and glimpses of prehistoric dwellings where rock art still radiates enigmatic messages.
About 320 people claim to live in Bluff these days. Founded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ famous Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, it is now better known as the put-in for San Juan River trips—it was water that drew everyone here in the first place.
Bluff is a pocket whirled into cliffs by dust devils, where unfurling winds deposit an indiscriminate accumulation. Empty wooden storefronts and vintage trailer parks front the highway near a new timber sided mega-hotel. Under ancient, breezy cottonwoods, a beautiful, aged, hand-hewn-stone gas station stands abandoned.
In town, dusty, rutted side roads struggle to maintain their pioneer-grid dignity—while skirting mud wallows large enough to swallow a Hummer—and provide access to an assemblage of dwellings perhaps best described as “eclectic-historic chic.” Bluff is funky and backwoods creative, or maybe desert-rat eccentric.
It is also home to unconventional restaurants, miscellaneous poets and painters, a bona fide coffee shop, some of the most beautiful sandstone-block Victorian homes in Utah, and the increasingly rare roadside stretch of junkyard sculpture.
Bluff could be the accrued answers to a cosmic-scale, free-association quiz.
In the world’s abundance of perfect, magazine-spread landscaping and arbitrated adventure travel, Bluff’s surrounding desert—with its unnumbered canyons, golden mesas, hidden springs, its remoteness from rescue facilities, and even its accidental distinctiveness—is beginning to match roadside sculpture in its rarity.
Meloy sought what all writers seek—the chance to walk inside their subjects. She wanted redrock and solitude, home and community. On her daily rounds, she traversed river and canyon, garden and relationships, weaving everything into her own narrative of life and land, home and family. Meloy’s address and kin included slickrock and wandering bighorn, boiled lizards and the “brazen harlotry” of the desert in startling bloom.
For Meloy, a sojourn under a lone pinion atop a sandstone ridge inspired more than one book. “Ellen and Bluff were the perfect fit. She delighted in Bluff’s eccentricities,” says Ann Walka, a poet who splits her time between Flagstaff, Arizona, and Bluff.
“Bluff is a good place for artists,” Walka says. “There is a sense of endless space here, and the quiet spills from the canyons right into town. People notice nature’s work. Meeting on the road, people talk about last night’s moon or the
neighbor’s hollyhocks.” Meloy modeled and nurtured that careful attention. Her enthrallment burned from the page, and her language could send the reader not only from armchair to a full-body river dunking, but from specific to universal.
In her book Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, she wrote, “Behind a gravel bar, a dense grove of tamarisk has turned the color of ripe peaches. An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.”
Imagine a beauty that could cure all emptiness. An impossible vision? Many find it on a slow wander through this landscape’s austere profusion. Imagine meandering into Bluff’s lonely quarter on an inflatable raft’s sun-warmed pontoon, your only responsibility to watch clouds morph the indigo sky. Flat water’s languid current swirls the raft in gentle arcs as you trail fingers in water the color of liquid rock. As you drift by, cliffs seem to unroll, echoing wavelet lappings and reflecting water’s glitter in shaded overhangs. Or mold your body to a slickrock curve, hide from shoulder-slumping heat in cold-rock relief, nap, sleep, and dream of the mountain lion curled here last night.
But Bluff and its encompassing landscape is not Eden; it is instead quite real. There can be hardship here. Meloy’s book The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest details her realization that the human use and abuse of nature was as dangerous as sawing off the limb on which we sit. If we soil the ground with atomic fallout, she said, decimate the bighorn’s last stronghold, dam the last rivers—we damn ourselves.
Meloy loved the world, human and other-than-human. She mourned the loss of the smallest species and lamented the ecological impoverishment, and potential loss, of that one rather goofy species that thinks itself superior. She said these things in a way writer Rick Bass called “morbid, macabre, elegant, beautiful, and plain funny.”
Meloy always maintained that nature was funny. She wrote, in Turquoise, “As a communal defense against wolves, burly musk oxen stand shoulder-to-shoulder, looking like a cinder-block wall that overdosed on hair-growth stimulants.” She described dinosaurs as “Jurassic leaf-eaters with a pin head and body the size of a truck stop.” Of her own brain, she wrote, “My cortex had the wiring of a 1950s toaster.”
Ellen Meloy died on a November night while reading in bed. She slumped over her book, and though her husband Mark did everything possible to revive her, he said, “I just knew she was gone.”
Her sudden and unexpected death caught her friends completely off guard. It was as if she slipped around some desert bend, laughing, while their eyes were blinded by the sun. In the days following her death, many said, “Okay, Ellen, enough of the joke. You can come out now.” But Meloy, always a trickster coyote, didn’t respond. Walka began a poem about Meloy with the line, “And for her next trick … ” Somehow this death at home, suddenly and without fanfare, was very Ellen Meloy—and very Bluff.
As a tribute to Meloy and the place she loved, friends and family created The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers to encourage writing that illuminates new perspectives and deeper meanings in desert literature. She called attention to humankind’s tenuous and potentially disastrous place in this powerful yet fragile landscape, what she called “a geography of consequence.”
Amid uranium tailings, missile ranges, and atomic test sites, Meloy charted her “deep map of place,” contemplating a topography “where an act of creation can mean the complete absence of life.”
The Ellen Meloy fund offers a yearly $2,000 award to those with a passion and desire, like hers, to go to their deserts and write. During its three-year existence, the organization has funded diverse projects. One was a novel-in-progress set in the Uintah Basin. Another grant sent Lily Mabura of Missouri to a desert region of Kenya known locally as the “World's End.” The 2008 award winner, Joe Wilkins of Iowa, plans to write about the high desert country on the eastern edge of the Rockies.
What the Fund for Desert Writers hopes to provide is what Meloy sought and found in landscape’s abundance. Meloy wrote: “For me there is no distinction between dream and instinct. This place, and no other, is my desired land, where color and light, nutrients as essential as food, live in sublime balance, a tranquil ecstasy.”
Perhaps Bluff’s significance, its message, is that regardless of our hand-on-forehead human tribulations and dreadfully significant problems, unexpected, funky, irresponsible, glorious possibility exists by the bucket load. Beauty—healing, transformative beauty—still lives in the world. Go lie in the desert and dream yourself awake.
Greer Chesher's Heart of the Desert Wild: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument won the Utah Book Award for nonfiction. She has written several other books about Utah's wild country, including Zion: A Storied Land. She was a National Park Service ranger for 20 years and now travels the Southwest with her faithful companion, Bo, the border collie, in search of truth, vision, and a good cuppa coffee.
