When I requested this title in NetGalley, I did not realize it was an older book of essays coming up for a reprinting. I actually have another book from the author on my "around the world" shelves at home - This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland. So she was on my vague periphery, but I was very happy to have had a chance to read this book, even if it isn't new.

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.

I loved them. I loved her insight into the sometimes elusive ranchers, sheepherders, farmhands, and cowboys. I loved her insight into herself. I loved her attention to details in nature, her ability to stop, slow down, and pay attention.

“To live and work on a ranch implicates me in new ways: I have blood on my hands and noises in my throat that aren’t human.” - Ehrlich

Escaping grief, embracing life writer Gretel Ehrlich arrived in Wyoming to make a series of documentaries when her partner died. She writes: “Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

She never left, she put down roots and lost and rediscovered herself on the plains of Wyoming. These essays, first published in 1984, now reissued in book form, describe life on the plains, far away from her previous home in California. There are essays about the land and those who live on it, from herding sheep, ranching, and the obituary of a ranch going under, about the men (and some women) who labour on the ranches, about grief, about getting married, rodeo cowboys, and more. This lunar land comes alive in Ehrlich’s poetic voice: “Walking to the ranch house from the shed, we saw the Northern Lights. They looked like talcum powder fallen from a woman’s face. Rouge and blue eyeshadow streaked the spires of white light which exploded, then pulsated, shaking the colors down— like lives— until they faded from sight.”

She opens a window on lives most of us could never imagine. Highlights included reading about the various lives of those who live on ranches in ‘Other Lives’, concluding that “Living well here has always been the art of making do in emotional as well as material ways. Traditionally, at least, ranch life has gone against materialism and has stood for the small achievements of the human conjoined with the animal, and the simpler pleasures- like listening to the radio at night or picking out constellations. The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.”

In ‘About Men’ Ehrlich examines the tough lives of cowboys, “For the most part his work is done on horseback and in a lifetime he sees and comes to know more animals than people.” Their toughness seems to mean that “emotional evolution” is impossible and Ehrlich quotes one cowboy confessing after opening up that, “I feel as if I’d sprained my heart”.

In the fascinating ‘Sheepherder’s Notebook: Three Days’ Ehrlich describes three days herding sheep – a job she had never done before, but the sheepherder had just quit and she was it. She’s given a mare a collie and told the sheep headed for the hills. It’s a time of “queasy fears”, sunburn and a curious sense of longing, and when she leaves she notes: “Dust rises like an evening gown behind his truck. It flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road— that bruised string which leads to and from my heart.”

The personal is intertwined very subtly and through these startling essays, but in ‘Just Married’, she writes candidly: “Here’s to the end of loneliness,” I toasted quietly, not believing such a thing could come true. But it did and nothing prepared me for the sense of peace I felt— of love gone deep into a friendship.”

In ‘Rules of the Game’ Ehrlich focuses on the sport of rodeo. At the start of their marriage she and her new husband spending their honeymoon in Oklahoma City attending the National Final Rodeo. Illuminating the tough sport, Ehrlich concludes that, “Rodeo is not a sport of opposition; there is no scrimmage line here. No one bears malice— neither the animals, the stock contractors, nor the contestants; no one wants to get hurt. In this match of equal talents, it is only acceptance, surrender, respect, and spiritedness that make for the mid-air union of cowboy and horse. Not a bad thought when starting out fresh in a marriage.”

''The Solace of Open Spaces," is Gretel Ehrlich's first major nonfiction work with its original inception taking the form of diary entries, posted to a friend way back in the last year of the seventies. Over a five-year period, Ehrlrich continued to write until we arrive at this, twelve chapters in chronological order.

In the preface, Ehrlrich writes that she “suffered a tragedy and made a drastic geographical and cultural move fairly baggage-less" then explains further, setting out her stall for the essays to follow: "What I had lost (at least for a while) was my appetite for the life I had left: city surroundings, old friends, familiar comforts. It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort, reference points, a disguise for what will always change...For the first time I was able to take up residence on earth with no alibis, no self-promoting schemes."

We read about the toughness of men, a necessary state of survival in harsh Wyoming. Toughing it out counts more than being tough and a cowboys essential nature is pushed deep into his skin, not written upon the sleeve. Ehrlrich is compassionate but dispassionate enough to see clearly, how things have become into being.

We read about the history of the state of Wyoming’ and how changes have been wrought by isolationist people who are profoundly conservative in nature. Hermits, cabin fever, the peculiar madness, suicide and drunkenness of the loner are explored in a place where "people so ornery that they’d “rather starve than agree on anything.” Fences distort ideas of freedom and as people push against a frontier, they come to disfigure and corral it, often turning it the very thing they escaped from in the first place.

Wyoming's essential nature has been distilled into words by Ehrlich. There's an elegant sparseness, an oral leanness akin to my own idea of cowboys and frontiers people, many of whom might be taciturn on account of there being few people to talk to, as opposed to ideas about their own natures. Ehrlich's own 'art of accommodation' is reflected in my own learning as I delved deeper and deeper into the landscape. Beautiful.

I finished The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Erlichs's essays about Wyoming. There are some wonderfully descriptive passages, but I wasn't completely satisfied. She mentions getting married (doesn't give her husband's name) and getting hit by lightening in a few sentences in the same essay. No follow up on either.

There is not much about Erlich's personal life that I could find anywhere, although there is a lot written about her books. Her recovery from being struck by lightening involved a lot of therapy, and in the process, it seems her marriage disintegrated. But a couple of sentences on each is all you get in Solace--although she did write A Match to the Heart about her painstaking recovery. Erlich's love for Wyoming is obvious, as is her adventurous spirit (her many other books cover a wide-range of locales and environmental issues), but her personal essays reveal little about her inner life.

"I came here four years ago. I had not planned to stay, but I couldn't make myself leave."

Achingly beautiful, emotionally charged prose essays with a distinctly lyrical style, written by a young woman as she initially pursues a work project on the ranches of the Wyoming plains, then can't seem to find a reason to leave, as she processes grief in this wild, open landscape of the plains.

In the late 1970s, Gretel Ehrlich was first sent to Wyoming for a work project along with the man she loved, a she puts it. Shortly before they were set to go, he learned that he was terminally ill. Ehrlich decides to continue with the project, and the resulting essays that she wrote about her time there, and her return to work as a sheepherder after wanderings elsewhere, are tinged with a melancholy that makes clear their descent from this loss. After her love's funeral, she writes simply but devastatingly: Then a wheel of emptiness turned inside me and churned there for a long time. I think so many of her thoughts and observations will speak to readers, like this one did to me.
But her stories are also upliftingly hopeful, maybe even surprisingly so. There's something calming and relaxing about her tone, describing from an outsider's perspective the nature and culture around her, her good-naturedness, willingness to move out of her comfort zone (she was a New Yorker, after all), and her sense of humor. As a writer, Ehrlich has a gift for metaphor and simile, which she uses to great effect especially in describing the scenery of this place that's actually quite insular, in so many beautiful passages that I had pages and pages of highlights when I was finished. Like this:

In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing 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 a pure light.

She has a knack for storytelling in addition to the richly evocative descriptions, and for tying what she observes in the microcosm of the Plains world into a greater picture of the rest of the world. I was struck by one such observation:

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as a filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but, being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build up against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

She mentions that Wyoming isn't a big tourist destination, and the population density is low, with wide swathes of the state uninhabited and open for cattle ranching and sheepherding. If a person isn't raised there, there's not a huge chance of seeing, much less knowing, the place. But Ehrlich pulls so much from what she calls the "planet of Wyoming", for an outsider she really throws herself in, seemingly without any pride, just humility and a willingness to learn and be taught.

And she paints such an evocative picture of the characters there: ranchers, sheepherders, cowboys and cowgirls, immigrants, others like her who got lost at some point in life and find their way here. It's delightfully eye-opening to have such a descriptive glimpse into this corner of the country. One of my favorite of such descriptions: "Her itinerant life read like the Old Testament: tragedy, revenge, and an on-going feeling of homelessness." That one sentence says so very much.

"True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere." Ehrlich wrote that in a letter to a friend, reflecting on her return to Wyoming. And despite some of the sadness she describes so poignantly as she experienced an unimaginably difficult life event, I constantly felt a strange sense of solace reading these essays. I could imagine so clearly what she was seeing, the range of emotions she was feeling, and I loved seeing this place and these events through her eyes. Reading it was a meaningful experience, I only regret that I never came across this book sooner.

Originally published in 1985, a new ebook edition is being released by Open Road Integrated Media this month.