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.
A stunning collection of personal observations that uses images of the American West to probe larger concerns in lyrical, evocative prose that is a true celebration of the region.
For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.
Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.” This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.
Yellowstone, the world's first national park, was forged by fire and ice. It is a land of contradictions, exquisite beauty, and stark extremes. Geysers spew and hot spot springs boil in this land of year-round frost, bearing witness to the molten lava that lies a mere two miles below the surface. Delicate flowers bloom perilously close to pools belching clouds of sulfur and steam. Dense forest, lush meadows, vaulted canyons, and plentiful lakes, rivers, and creeks teem with life: moose, elk, deer, buffalo, ravens, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, river otters, and native trout.
In vivid and eloquent prose, essayist and naturalist Gretel Ehrlich traverses Yellowstone on foot and on horseback; shares her experiences in Yellowstone's wild country; explores its diverse, seemingly incongruous features; and chronicles its violent, volcanic birth, as well as its continuing transformation.
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.
Drinking Dry Clouds is Gretel Ehrlich's storytelling in full swing. This inspired fiction collection opens during World War II with the stories of cowboys, waitresses, and bartenders along with Japanese-Americans interned at Wyoming’s Heart Mountain. Many of these characters were introduced in Ehrlich’s novel Heart Mountain. As she explains, “When I returned to my characters, five years after their initial appearance in my life, they seemed to want to report to me, so I let them speak in the first person.”
A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to survivors, and experience their terror and exhilaration in villages and towns where all shelter and hope seemed lost. In an eloquent narrative that blends strong reportage, poetic observation, and deeply felt reflection, she takes us into the upside-down world of northeastern Japan, where nothing is certain and where the boundaries between living and dying have been erased by water. The stories of rice farmers, monks, and wanderers; of fishermen who drove their boats up the steep wall of the wave; and of an eighty-four-year-old geisha who survived the tsunami to hand down a song that only she still remembered are both harrowing and inspirational. Facing death, facing life, and coming to terms with impermanence are equally compelling in a landscape of surreal desolation, as the ghostly specter of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power complex, spews radiation into the ocean and air. Facing the Wave is a testament to the buoyancy, spirit, humor, and strong-mindedness of those who must find their way in a suddenly shattered world.
Ehrlich explores the twin solitudes of political exile and geographic isolation in this powerful novel—the story of Japanese Americans forced into a relocation camp—set in Wyoming during World War II.
