The Solace of Open Spaces

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In the preface, she tells us that she “suffered a tragedy and made a drastic geographical and cultural move fairly baggageless,” but she wasn’t losing her grip. She added:

of a mad architect- tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into pure light.” Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.” In the Great Plains, the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing

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people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.” The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative… As with all major detours, all lessons of impermanence, what might have been a straight shot is full of bumps and bends. In The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich captures the incredible beauty and demanding harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the depth, tenderness and humour of the quirky souls who live there.

Author papers (1923–2005) at Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University For all of those reasons, I'm both proud of myself for powering through this one and disappointed I didn't trust my gut enough to put it aside early on.

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As the book continues, she writes of Wyoming’s history, the changes caused by fences and isolationist conservative people who believe that “honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.” She also tells us about hermits, madness, cabin fever, extended drunks, suicide, sheepherders as “outsiders,” and people so ornery that they’d “rather starve than agree on anything.” In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously, usually on behalf of an animal or another rider.” In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, National Geographic Society, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4262-0574-3

La caratteristica principale del paesaggio è quella che un imprenditore edile eufemisticamente descriverebbe come «robaccia indigena fin sotto la porta di casa», ossia un misto di assetati arbusti di pianta del sale, serpenti, lepri dalla coda nera, mosche dei cervi, polvere rossa ,ciuffi di fiori selvatici, greti di fiume e totale assenza di alberi. Se sulle Grandi Pianure il panorama è una sinfonia, un inno suonato dall’erba, il Wyoming sembra piuttosto scaturito dal delirio di un architetto: un gran ruzzolare e acciottolare di pietra infusa di colori tenui, esangui, un gigante di roccia che un rumore improvviso abba strappato un sonno profondo e gettato in piena luce.»A stunning rumination on life on Wyoming's High Plains . . . Ehrlich's gorgeous prose is as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning." — Newsday Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. This book falls into a genre of literature of which I am very fond --- personal observations and understandings of place. However, this book left me cold. I can't decide which aspect annoyed me more --- the fact that the book was clearly written by a tourist who chose to stay and now believes herself to be an expert, that the book has so little of both the author and the place in it, or the false claims of being a look at the "real" west and then providing only slight additions to the romanticized, Hollywood version of the west. Or maybe it was that the title led me to believe that the book would be filled with observations about healing and comfort found in open spaces of the American west, but aside from the fact that the author chose to live in the west after a personal tragedy, there is little in these essays that suggest that the open spaces provided the solace. a series of essays as she escapes her history and city living, with its tragedies and comforts for a stripped down, eked out living

She explains all this, and tells us about men, something other than the romanticized Marlboro man version: “If he’s ‘strong and silent’ it’s because there’s probably no one to talk to.” There is an effect of “geographical vastness,” on “emotional evolution” but also a “true vulnerability in evidence...” In 1991 Ehrlich was hit by lightning and was incapacitated for several years. She wrote a book about the experience, A Match to the Heart, which was published in 1994. Since 1993, she has traveled extensively, especially through Greenland [3] and western China. In the late 1970s, Ehrlich travels to Wyoming on a documentary assignment. Her then-lover ends up dying, and she just stays and stays. This book collects her writings about the wide-open, the west, the prairie, and the people who live there. I understand that she first wrote these as journal entries, then as letters, and eventually revised them into a publishable form. It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will always change.”And yet this cosmic perspective, this sublime invitation to unselfing (to borrow once again Iris Murdoch’s splendid notion), is readily available everywhere we look, right here on Earth, so long as we are actually looking. A century after Hermann Hesse observed that “whoever has learned how to listen to trees… wants to be nothing except what he is,”, Ehrlich writes: Born in 1946 in Santa Barbara, California, [2] she studied at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She began to write full-time in 1978 while living on a Wyoming ranch after the death of a loved one. Ehrlich debuted in 1985 with The Solace of Open Spaces, a collection of essays on rural life in Wyoming. Her first novel was also set in Wyoming, entitled Heart Mountain (1988), about a community being invaded by an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Ehrlich’s best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilisation.’ – San Francisco Chronicle In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind--the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, "We weren't born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.”