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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
'Vivid, tough and funny. Wyoming has found its Whitman.'Annie Dillard'I suspect that my original motive for coming here was to "lose myself" in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up.'In 1976, Gretel Ehrlich travelled from her home in New York to Wyoming to shoot a film on sheep herders. While she was away, her partner died. Although she had never planned to stay, Ehrlich found herself unable to leave. What started out as a work trip became the beginning of a new life, as well as a long and deep attachment to place.Writing of sheep herding alone across Wyoming badlands, her experience of being struck by lightning, the true meaning of cowboys, and taking her new husband to the rodeo for their honeymoon, as well as the changing seasons, extreme winters and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this 'planet of Wyoming' she has come to call home.As tough as it is tender,The Solace of Open Spacesis travel memoir that is embedded in place, and nature writing with an unexpected bite. It is a bold testimony to how the landscape we live in affects who we are.
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‘Vivid, tough and funny. Wyoming has found its Whitman.’ Annie Dillard
‘Ehrlich tossed out her city clothes, cut off her hair, learned to ride and rope and punch cattle, to help deliver lambs and calves and to survive Wyoming’s 30-below-zero winters… She brings the long vistas into focus with the poise of an Ansel Adams.’ New York Times
‘Full of vivid details and gnarly anecdote. There are wild animals and lightning strikes, snake bites and broken bones. But, like the sheepherders Ehrlich portrays, there is delicacy as well as a toughness to her writing. The Solace of Open Spaces is a book I will give as a gift. It is slim, yet vast.’ Amy Liptrot, From the Introduction
Selected works by Gretel Ehrlich
A Match to the Heart
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold
Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
The Solace of Open Spaces
Gretel Ehrlich
With an introduction by Amy Liptrot
DAUNT BOOKS
For my parents, and for Press, with love
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
In between reading chapters of The Solace of Open Spaces, I fly over Wyoming on Google Maps, with Gretel Ehrlich’s descriptions in mind. It looks predominantly yellow – a dry state of plains and rocky mountains – but I know now that ‘the vastness has a sheltering look’. It was on this landscape that Ehrlich, on horseback and across huge ranches, drove sheep over ‘open country, with its hundred-mile views’. The terrain is quite different to the coastal places I have lived in and written about yet it shares the same elemental harshness, and I feel like Ehrlich is one of my kin, I understand her.
I did not discover Ehrlich’s work until recently but as soon as I started reading her, my mind was pinging with how good she is. Her writing is interesting, fresh, precise and muscular. The Solace of Open Spaces, which was originally published in 1985, was Ehrlich’s first book and although before writing it she had only lived in the city, she hits on truths about humans’ relationship with the wild that most writers never achieve. ‘Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are,’ Ehrlich writes, with the wisdom of ages. I quickly placed her with my living writing heroes, among other names who also happen to be American women environmental writers: Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein.
In this collection of short essays on rural life in Wyoming, Ehrlich writes of her time working on a sheep ranch. I am a sheep farmer’s daughter from the Orkney Islands. She is thousands of miles and 40 years away, but the routines and smells of the lambing shed are familiar. The scale of the ranches and size of the flock – fifteen thousand sheep – is something else, but the knowledge is universal.
There are other personal resonances for me, too, and similarities between Ehrlich’s life and writing and my own. She first travelled to Wyoming to make a film about sheep herders but, following the death of her partner David from cancer, ended up staying. In her grief, she writes, ‘I decided to winter alone in a one-room cabin on the North Fork of the Shoshone River.’ I can understand this impulse: I was newly sober and fragile when I moved to spend a winter on the tiny Orkney island of Papay. We both found living a spare existence in an unforgiving landscape helped during our convalescence. ‘The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me,’ Ehrlich writes.
The book is full of vivid details and gnarly anecdote. There are wild animals and lightning strikes, snake bites and broken bones. But, like the sheepherders she portrays, there is delicacy as well as a toughness to her writing. The details are careful and attentive. To write so fiercely takes sensitive control of the craft.
It is sexy too. A few careful, sensual paragraphs on her encounters with ‘a young rancher’ show her finding, in sexual connection, some ease in her pain. Later, in the storming yet tender chapter, ‘Rules of the Game: Rodeo’, she writes about her new husband and their honeymoon at the rodeo. Life on the plains does not mean isolation from human relationships, indeed the friendships and connections made are often deep.
These essays are a tribute to the people of these communities and a way of life that was dwindling in the 1970s and is almost gone now. Ehrlich writes of the romance and reality of cowboys and ‘the West’, dispelling myths of ‘a boy’s world’. ‘The women I met – descendants of outlaws, homesteaders, ranchers, and Mormon pioneers – were as tough and capable as the men were soft-hearted,’ she writes. She wants to be honest but also to show the idiosyncrasies that make the place special. It’s a balancing act I’ve negotiated in my own writing when I was portraying Scottish islands and their communities. We learn, entertainingly, about rivalry between sheep herders and cowboys, and about how ‘Wyoming hospitality was an extravagant blend of dry humour and benign neglect’. She has a gift for pen portraits of individuals and revealing anecdote, as well as an eye for bigger analysis, summing up a way of life where ‘a person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place’.
After her one-room cabin, Ehrlich moves to a nearby town of fifty, ‘including the dead ones’. In the same way as I have written about life on a very small island (Papay’s population is around 70), Ehrlich observes that ‘a big ranch is a miniature society’. If you can learn to live a peaceable and responsible life here, you can move on anywhere. Both my island and her ranches are places where life is highly influenced by the seasons and weather, in particular the wind. She also writes about the lives and traditions of the native American peoples who knew this land long before the ranchers, acknowledging important history and lived experience that many writers of the time would have ignored.
Ehrlich has been called a travel writer but this is travel writing that has embedded itself. She was not just passing through. It would be more accurate to include Ehrlich’s work in the more recently defined genre of ‘place writing’. A virtuoso passage on Wyoming’s natural bentonite clay, which moves gracefully from local geology to America’s spiritual problems, showcases her skills and could even be called ‘psychogeography’, linking as it does the physical make-up of a place to the characters of its inhabitants. This type of first-person writing can also be known as – the term differing depending on your era and viewpoint – gonzo journalism, immersive reportage or creative non-fiction. It was certainly ahead of its time.
Ehrlich has had a 40-year writing career and continues to write and publish; her most recent book was 2013’s Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami. My highlights of her writing include A Match to the Heart (1992), in which she recounts her experience of being struck by lightning, a central event of her life and something so filled with metaphor it almost seems fictional, and This Cold Heaven (2002) about her travels to Greenland, a place she returns to repeatedly over many years and, just as in Wyoming, takes the time to understand with sensitivity by living and working in it. What these works have in common is a boldness and a desire to investigate the extremes of experience. But they also share brilliantly researched detail. I learned a lot about both meteorology and the human body from A Match to the Heart. The experiences detailed in The Solace of Open Spaces were obviously formative for Ehrlich as she constantly refers back to Wyoming in later work, making comparisons, homesick.
In Wyoming, she meets Ralph Waldo Emerson’s granddaughter (a woman ‘who ranches alone’), which is apt, for Ehrlich seems to be the artistic descendant of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir (of whom she wrote a photobiography, published in 2000). The female writers of the twentieth century carry the legacy of the great naturalists of the nineteenth. They are the leading voices of their time in encouraging people to love, and conserve, the wild. Ehrlich writes of the ranchers, ‘in the process of keeping their distance, they learn what makes the natural world tick and how to stay sane’. Throughout The Solace of Open Spaces she is learning this too, just as I have: how the indifference of nature can be calming; how being alert to your surroundings can bring rewards. There is a really beautiful passage near the end, when Ehrlich writes:
All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call ‘aware’ – an almost untranslatable word meaning something like ‘beauty tinged with sadness’. Some days we have to shoulder against a marauding melancholy.
I am so glad The Solace of Open Places is being republished by Daunt Books because I think it will be just as relevant to readers in 2019 as when it was written. Back in the 70s, Ehrlich went looking for something authentic, something physical, in the plains of Wyoming and people now, in the digital age, want this more than ever. I hope this book will lead readers to her whole body of work. She could be talking about her own writing when she describes the men of the sheep ranch: ‘What we’ve interpreted as toughness … only masks a tenderness inside.’ The Solace of Open Spaces is a book I will give as a gift. It is slim, yet vast, and deserves to be read more widely.
Amy Liptrot, 2019
PREFACE
This book was begun in 1979 and finished in 1984. Originally conceived as a straight-through narrative, it was instead written in fits and starts and later arranged chronologically.
It is impossible to speak of writing this book without mentioning the circumstances and transitions taking place in my life at the time. Beginning in 1976, when I went to Wyoming to make a film, I had the experience of waking up not knowing where I was, whether I was a man or a woman, or which toothbrush was mine. I had suffered a tragedy and made a drastic geographical and cultural move fairly baggageless, but I wasn’t losing my grip. As Jim Bridger is reported to have said, ‘I wasn’t lost, I just didn’t know where I was for a few weeks.’ 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.
Friends asked when I was going to stop ‘hiding out’ in Wyoming. What appeared to them as a landscape of lunar desolation and intellectual backwardness was luxurious to me. For the first time I was able to take up residence on earth with no alibis, no self-promoting schemes.
The beginnings of this book took the form of raw journal entries sent to a friend in Hawaii. I chose her because she had been raised in a trailerhouse behind a bar in Wyoming; she then made the outlandish leap to a tropical climate and a life in academia. I was jumping in the opposite direction and suspected we might have crossed paths mid-air somewhere.
The sudden changes in my life brought on the usual zany dreams: road blocks were set up where I walked barefoot with a big suitcase; national boundaries changed overnight and I was forced to take a long, arbitrary detour. The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative.
The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
The narrative that follows has an overlapping chronology. It is riprap and does, I hope, form a hard roadbed. But as with all major detours, all lessons of impermanence, what might have been a straight shot is full of bumps and bends.
THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES
It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep – sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool. Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.
