The Solace of Open Spaces [Paperback]

Gretel Ehrlich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 1986

This series of essays about rural life, based on the author's experiences on a small farm in Wyoming, focuses on the people and landscape of the West and explore themes common to all areas.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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." Whether she's reflecting on nature's teachings, divulging her experiences as a cowpuncher, or painting vivid word portraits of the people she lives and works with, Gretel Ehrlich's observations are lyrical and funny, wise and authentic. After moving from the city to a vast new state, she writes of adjusting to cowboy life, boundless open spaces, and the almost incomprehensible harshness of a Wyoming winter:

"When it's fifty below, the mercury bottoms out and jiggles there as if laughing at those of us still above ground. Once I caught myself on tiptoes, peering down into the thermometer as if there were an extension inside inscribed with higher and higher declarations of physical misery: ninety below to the power of ten and so on."

After experiencing the isolated life of a sheep herder, she writes, "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."

Ehrlich's gift is one of subtle precision. She writes beauty into the plainest of thoughts and meaning into the simplest of ideas: "True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere." --Kathryn True

From Publishers Weekly

Like many before her, poet Gretel Ehrlich discovered the therapeutic qualities of the West. In 1976, a time of personal crisis, she moved from the East to a small farm in Wyoming where she ultimately found peace of mind and inspiration. Originally, she had gone west to make a film for PBS; she returned to work with neighbors at cattle- and sheep-ranching, taking pleasure in open spaces. Ehrlich writes with sensitivity and affection about people, the seasons and the landscape. Whether she is enjoying solitude or companionship, her writing evokes the romance and timelessness of the West. November
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 2, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140081135
• ISBN-13: 978-0140081138
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A love affair with Wyoming, September 22, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)

Gretel Erlich was a poet and filmmaker when she first came to Wyoming in 1976. She was so taken with everything about the place that she became a cowherd, which gave her time to write about the American West. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words.
In The Solace of Open Spaces, Erlich presents us with an eclectic bunch of frontier characters that she met while working as a ranch hand. Almost unaware of what's been accomplished, we readers find ourselves shedding former stereotypes of these people in exchange for seeing them for what they are: unique, quirky, interesting, inexplicable men and women. The Weather (and the word deserves that capital letter, as you'll see upon reading the book) plays as large a role as the people in Ehrlich's book.
About the title: When she arrived in Wyoming, Erlich was grieving the death of someone important to her. 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.
Altogether, a beautiful book and a wonderful read.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A woman in Wyoming, August 12, 2000

By 

"dusty_pages" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)

Gretel Ehrlich does for the state of Wyoming what other writers have done for other states: Terry Tempest Williams for Utah, Robert Michael Pyle for Washington, Bernd Heinrich for Maine, Jennifer Price for California, Scott Russell Sanders for Indiana. She has given it a space on the literary map. In this book she makes no really brilliant discoveries, which isn't surprising given that she is a relative newcomer to the ranch life she attempts to describe. She can be faulted, I think, for her idealized depiction of the lifestyle and landscape on a Wyoming ranch, and she never addresses some of the hard issues, such as reconciling the ranchers' alleged intimacy with the land with their pillage of that same land. But the prose is beautiful, and her insights about people and landscape are sound. I would tentatively recommend this book, but if you haven't read anything by Terry Tempest Williams, read her books first.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The West seen through a filmmaker's eye, August 2, 2002

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)

In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. Ehrlich, born and raised in California, retains her outsider's eye for detail, and is able to translate the perspective of someone trained in documentary filmmaking very effectively into the medium of words.

Her portrayal of the men who work in this environment is very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously courtly. Not to be outdone by the men in this world of extremes and hard work, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and independent. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a lost heritage.

Hers is also a personal story. Beginning with the wrenching death of a close male friend, it recounts in her growing love for Wyoming and its people the discovery of a new life. And while her book is no heart-on-the-sleeve display of pain and recovery, one senses at almost every step the healing process that underlies the words. As slender as a book of poems, this volume of essays calls out to be read slowly and savored, word for word.