Winter lasts six months here. Prevailing winds spill snowdrifts to the east, and new storms from the northwest replenish them. This white bulk is sometimes dizzying, even nauseating, to look at. At twenty, thirty, and forty degrees below zero, not only does your car not work, but neither do your mind and body. The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last. Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we’ve interpreted as toughness—weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice—only masks the tenderness inside. 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...For the first time I was able to take up residence on earth with no alibis, no self-promoting schemes. This book falls into a genre of literature of which I am very fond --- personal observations and understandings of place. However, this book left me cold. 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. Or maybe it was that the title led me to believe that the book would be filled with observations about healing and comfort found in open spaces of the American west, but aside from the fact that the author chose to live in the west after a personal tragedy, there is little in these essays that suggest that the open spaces provided the solace. Along with a great deal of information and insight on the lives of ranchers, herders, cowboys and their beliefs and work ethic, Ehrlich also shares many tales of her relationships with these people. Many are humorous and show how people of a certain region have their own way of doing everything just slightly differently than everybody else from the language to the way they regard one another. In Wyoming, everyone knows everyone and there is a strict Western code to be followed. Ranchers are courteous and kind, hardworking, tough and yet gentle. The demanding and difficult weather and terrain make a unique type of society where people are often isolated for many months of the year. One woman in the book hadn't left the ranch in 11 years. That type of isolation causes a lot of strange behavior, from the violent to the apparently crazy. No matter what a person's attitude, however, he or she is accepted.

bello questo memoir, che nasce sotto forma di diario inviato a un'amica e la cui stesura è compresa fra il 1979 e il 1984, composto da scritti divisi per tematiche - i cowboy, appunto, i rodeo, la danza del sole - che incrociano gli incontri e gli stati d’animo dell’autrice che, californiana di nascita e newyorkese di adozione, arriva nel Wyoming per girare un documentario, resta per elaborare un lutto e finisce per non andare più via.The Solace of Open Spaces is a 1985 memoir by the American author, filmmaker, and poet Gretel Ehrlich. Built from journal entries originally written in “fits and starts” for a friend in Hawaii, the book is a mosaic of Ehrlich’s experiences living and working on Wyoming ranches as she grieves for her partner, David. A celebrated memoirist and nature writer, Ehrlich has won the Whiting Award and the Henry David Thoreau Prize. When I requested this title in NetGalley, I did not realize it was an older book of essays coming up for a reprinting. I actually have another book from the author on my "around the world" shelves at home - This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland. So she was on my vague periphery, but I was very happy to have had a chance to read this book, even if it isn't new. These transcendent, lyrical essays on the West announced Gretel Ehrlich as a major American writer—“Wyoming has found its Whitman” (Annie Dillard). Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life.

The Solace of Open Spaces (first published in 1985) is made up of twelve short essays that are both poetic and factual. Reflecting on her personal experience with grief and healing during the period of her life after her partner’s death, Ehrlich not only describes what she observed in the landscape of Wyoming but how this landscape effected her viscerally—physically and emotionally. Jimmy notices men waiting outside and learns it’s time to get to work. Jimmy’s new boss says he hopes Jimmy was soaking up what he heard. He then explains there are three gods in Texas: the Almighty himself, Buster Welch, and George Strait. “You just met one of them,” says the boss. 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. And yet this cosmic perspective, this sublime invitation to unselfing (to borrow once again Iris Murdoch’s splendid notion), is readily available everywhere we look, right here on Earth, so long as we are actually looking. A century after Hermann Hesse observed that “whoever has learned how to listen to trees… wants to be nothing except what he is,”, Ehrlich writes:

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Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.” Walking to the ranch house from the shed, we saw the Northern Lights. They looked like talcum powder fallen from a woman’s face. Rouge and blue eyeshadow streaked the spires of white light which exploded, then pulsated, shaking the colors down — like lives — until they faded from sight. In most parts of Wyoming, the human population is visibly outnumbered by the animal. Not far from my town of fifty, I rode into a narrow valley and startled a herd of two hundred elk. Eagles look like small people as they eat car-killed deer by the road. Antelope, moving in small, graceful bands, travel at sixty miles an hour, their mouths open as if drinking in the space. The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet...Sentence structure is shortened. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs...What’s behind this laconic style is shyness. There is no vocabulary for the subject of feelings. It’s not a hangdog shyness, or anything coy— always there’s a robust spirit in evidence behind the restraint...The silence is profound. Instead of talking, we seem to share one eye. Keenly observed, the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient. Territorial Wyoming was a boy's world. The land was generous with everything but water. At first there was room enough, food enough, for everyone. And, as with all beginnings, an expansive mood set in. The young cowboys, drifters, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, were heroic, lawless, generous, rowdy, and tenacious. The individualism and optimism generated during those times have endured.

After five years, Ehrlich leaves Wyoming to travel and pursue new projects. However, she keeps returning, and when she marries, she and her husband set up home in Shell, Wyoming. They run their own ranch, and Ehrlich helps out on her neighbors’ ranches whenever necessary. Fencing ultimately enforced boundaries, but barbed wire abrogated space. It was stretched across the beautiful valleys, into the mountains, over desert badlands, through buffalo grass. The "anything is possible" fever — the lure of any new place — was constricted. The integrity of the land as a geographical body, and the freedom to ride anywhere on it, were lost. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The writing reads often as prose poetry—most frequently when the landscape and its inhabitants are described. This is what I liked most about the book. I have never been out west. This was new territory for me. I am more at home om wooded, lushly vegetated, hilly terrain. Yet I do appreciate the wide open vistas at the sea. Places inhabited by few do attract me, and so I easily connect to Gretel Ehrlich’s musings. Here follow a few short quotes. See what you think:In part I wonder if it's partly due to the organization of the slim collection. As Ehrlich wrote in her Preface: "Originally conceived as a straight-through narrative, it was instead written in fits and starts and later arranged chronologically" ( ix). Keenly observed, the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient. The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes, or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence with a fat wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lips and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical, but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear. Il Wyoming è la terra della salvia, scrive Greta Ehrilch, e io non lo immaginavo, ma anche del vento, della neve, del freddo che ti si insinua nelle ossa e ti anestetizza la mente, e qui è rispondente al mio immaginario.