Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch in California and was educated at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She is the author of 13 books, including three books of narrative essays, a novel, a memoir, three books of poetry, a biography, a book of ethnology/travel, and a children's book, among others. They include The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), Heart Mountain (1989), Drinking Dry Clouds (1991), Islands, the Universe, Home (1991), A Match to the Heart (1994), Questions of Heaven (1997), A Blizzard Year (2000), John Muir (2000), This Cold Heaven (2001), The Future of Ice (2004), In the Empire of Ice (2010), and Facing the Wave (2013). She has published in Harper's, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Life, National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, Aperture, National Geographic Traveler, Architectural Digest, Orion, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Antaeus, and Outside, among many others. Ehrlich is the winner of many awards, among them, the 2010 PEN Thoreau Award, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold B. Vurcell Award for distinguished prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Expedition Council Grants from the National Geographic Society for circumpolar travel in the high Arctic. Ehrlich has spent much of the last 16 years traveling in Greenland and the Arctic. She lives in Wyoming.
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The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"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.
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The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"The Smooth Skull of Winter"
On the winter solstice it is thirty-four degrees below zero and there is very little in the way of daylight. The deep ache of this audacious Arctic air is also the ache in our lives made physical. Patches of frostbite show up on our noses, toes, and ears. Skin blisters as if cold were a kind of radiation to which we’ve been exposed. It strips what is ornamental in us. Part of the ache we feel is also a softness growing. Our connections with neighbors—whether strong or tenuous, as lovers or friends—become too urgent to disregard. We rub the frozen toes of a stranger whose pickup has veered off the road; we open water gaps with a tamping bar and an ax; we splice a friend’s frozen water pipe; we take mittens and blankets to the men who herd sheep. Twenty or thirty below makes the exchange of breath visible: all of mine for all of yours. It is the tacit way we express the intimacy no one talks about.
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The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk"
Today the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come. Now I feel the tenderness to which this season rots. Its defenselessness can no longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud. The string of storms that came across Wyoming like elephants tied tail to trunk falters now and bleeds into a stillness.
There is neither sun, nor wind, nor snow falling. The hunters are gone; snow geese waddle in grainfields. Already, the elk have started moving out of the mountains toward sheltered feed-grounds. Their great antlers will soon fall off like chandeliers shaken from ballroom ceilings. With them the light of these autumn days, bathed in what Tennyson called “a mockery of sunshine,” will go completely out.
The Solace of Open Spaces:Essays
“Harrowing . . . A sobering account of the human and environmental toll [of the tsunami] . . . Readers of her book can witness the devastation through keen eyes . . . The resilience of survivors is inspiring.” —The Economist [on Facing the Wave]
“A powerful book by one of the West’s foremost writers on the natural world . . . An accessible, poetic and urgent frontline report from frigid, yet vibrant territories and ice-laden ocean waters that few of us have visited . . . Ehrlich painstakingly observes what most others scarcely notice.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer [on The Future of Ice]
“This eclectic chronicle of recovery offers excursions into neurobiology, cardiology, the lore and science of lightning, and the medical literature of lightning injury . . . Evocative writing and lots of fascinating facts.” —The New York Times Book Review [on A Match to the Heart]
“A stunning rumination on life in Wyoming’s high plans . . . Ehrlich’s gorgeous prose is as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning.” —Newsday [on The Solace of Open Spaces]
Selected Works
