The Solace of Open Spaces

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Ehrlich loves the huge skies and mountains of Wyoming, and celebrates the harsh landscapes, where summers are arid and baking hot, and winter is almost as cold as the Arctic. There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration… Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. 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. As she works hard at physical labor, meets new people, falls in love with the land, and sheds her past like sweat running down her back, healing from grief occurs - although she doesn't exactly say this. 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.

A collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, the classic companion to Gretel Ehrlich's new book, Unsolaced "Wyoming has found its Whitman. 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. I understand that she first wrote these as journal entries, then as letters, and eventually revised them into a publishable form.

To me, this feels like a young person's book: Ehrlich doesn't understand how it feels to be too old or sick to spend 16 hours in the saddle, and she doesn't really explore the toll this must take on the body. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. Though I definitely won't argue with the handful of reviews that mentioned this collection of essays is more about cowboys than open spaces, because parts of it definitely felt like that to me, too. There is surely and definitively a solace in open spaces, and one we would do well to heed before all of our open spaces are gone.

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erlich is a collection of a dozen loosely connected chapters about the author’s experiences living and working amid Wyoming’s vast open spaces. Animals hold us to what is present: who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how our bank accounts describe us.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. This Land, la collana di Black Coffee dedicata al territorio e alla natura degli Stati Uniti d’America si conferma una delle iniziative editoriali migliori di questi ultimi tempi, e per me, che da un po’ di tempo sto cercando di approfondire la storia degli stati che compongono la federazione degli USA allo scopo di identificarli e riconoscerli sempre più nella differenze e nelle loro caratteristiche e unicità, una miniera inesauribile. What started out as a work trip became the beginning of a new life, and a long and deep attachment to place.

Quando la claustrofobia inizia a farsi sentire, il cervello preme contro le pareti del cranio e la mente, soffocata, dilaga - invade letteralmente se stessa. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilization. She learns what we all do once some cataclysm awakens us to the finitude and fragility of life — that this appetite for life is best roused by the most prayerful of acts: the act of paying attention; that to see the world more clearly is to love it more deeply.

A native of Santa Barbara, California, who studied filmmaking and became an academic in her home state, she had no particular yearning to leave. The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed – were finally ourselves. In Wyoming we are supplicants, waiting all spring for the water to come down, for the snow pack to melt and fill the creeks from which we irrigate.