From one of our most intrepid and eloquent adventurers of the natural world: an account of her search for home—experiences traveling in Greenland, the North Pole, the Channel Islands of California, Japan; of herding animals in Wyoming and Montana, and her embrace of the balance between the ordinary and celestial.
At the time To Touch the Water was published, Gretel Ehrlich was a filmmaker, essayist, editor, cow- and sheepherder, part of both the West and New York, as well as a poet. The poems here speak deeply of personal experience. They are portraits of the people who have pressed their lives on hers; strong open images of the landscapes that are the West, complete with storms, drought, sun and wind; love poems as large and grainy as the landscapes. Death is never far away. Although her poems are personal in detail, they speak to all about the truths love and life hold.
For one year, thirteen-year-old Timmy records in her journal the changes she sees in the natural world and her family's activities on their Wyoming ranch as they fight to save it from financial ruin.
After nature writer Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning near her Wyoming ranch and almost died, she embarked on a painstaking and visionary journey back to the land of the living. With the help of an extraordinary cardiologist and the companionship of her beloved dog Sam, she avidly explores the natural and spiritual world to make sense of what happened to her. We follow as she combs every inch of her new home on the California coast, attends a convention of lightning-strike victims, and goes on a seal watch in Alaska. Ehrlich then turns her focus inward, exploring the tiny but equally fascinating ecosystem of the human heart, culminating in a stunningly beautiful description of open-heart surgery.
