Customer Reviews

The Solace of Open Spaces

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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.

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.

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.

My first images of Wyoming were formed as a boy, watching "The Virginian" on TV. It was a landscape of gently rolling hills and a mild climate where you could go around in shirtsleeves pretty much all the time. Well, of course, Wyoming bears no resemblance to a Southern California back lot, as I learned when I finally went there as an adult. The climate is not benign, and the land has a scale that can make you and your problems seem very small indeed.

Gretel Ehrlich writes about the true Wyoming of vast, lonely spaces, and brutal, bone chilling winters. In her book, it is a place to lose oneself and then find redemption in the rhythm of life lived in a hard place. She writes about the people that live in this place and their relationships.She writes of lonliness and endurance, friendship and new beginnings.

The highlight of the book, for me, is "The Rules of the Game", an appreciative essay on Rodeo. I've not read anything like it. Ms Ehrlich's description finds the beauty in this celebration of both individual skill and achievement, and the power and grace of teamwork. It's a lovely piece in a wonderful book.

I first learned of this book from a wizened sheep rancher and shearer discussed in one of Ehrlich's vignettes, and expected a trite outsider's view of this area. (I live not too many miles from where she lived during most of the book). As I feasted on the author's prose, though, I was thrilled to find that I was wrong.

This is a spirited, moving, and perceptive portrait of a land that can be both hostile and nurturing, and those people who have become a part of the country. The author relates her responses to the land, tying these reactions to emotional transformations she experienced as she learned the territory and its ways.

Yes, the book is good as a travelogue. However, it really excels in its analysis of a land and its people. Ehrlich's book both confirmed and sharpened the impressions I had developed as I learned about my new home. Wherever you live, this is an excellent book for you to read.

This little collection of prose is surprising. A reviewer who didn't care for this book mentioned that it didn't do much to develop or push its theme forward. I think that description is accurate, but misses the point: the book, like its subject matter (Wyoming, mostly, NOT Montana), defies being pushed in any direction. It has a way of imposing itself upon the reader. The vividness of phrase dominates the imagination, but the place it brings you to is an open space, where you're only supposed to linger, discovering and uncovering little surprises of detail as they arrive. It is a wonderful experience and highly recommended, though with a warning: you must be prepared to wander a bit and fall into a different rythm, with different rules, for at least a little while.

I discovered this book while working as a tour guide in Wyoming, and found that it captured the spirit of the place beautifully. Ehrlich is an outsider-turned-insider, which I learned from her writing and from accounts of Wyoming natives who knew her and indeed respect her. Her accounts take you to shepherding and into a Native American sun dance ritual; fascinating stuff and there's much more. Her prose is highly poetic. My wife and I have recommended this book to many people over the years, and each person has thanked us profusely for the advice. That includes a New York native who moved to Montana, and he, too feels that this book captures the heart of the region.

I'm going to catch flak for this, if only because looking at others' reviews I realized that this is the lowest the book has gotten. This is mainly because the people who read it are a self-selected group, and so they like it, unless they're from Montana, in which case they like it but call it too one-dimensional.

The major problem with this book is that it takes a single theme and doesn't go anywhere with it. There is no progression or movement in its somewhat flimsy premise. To quote the opinion of a man I respect: "The book is in bits and pieces--some of these bits and pieces are good, others are just...bits and pieces. It feels all of her friends told her to write this book, she wrote some bits, showed them around, had somebody read and like them, and then a publisher gave her a check and said 'finish the book'."

The insight provided by this book is debatable, given that she approaches the reality of Wyoming with a desire to reshape this in literary form to fit her notions of theme. There is some good imagery. There is also some wasted space, some disjointed incompleteness, and a sense that the book, as thin as it is, is itself wasting space by refusing to allow for more complex and varied explorations.

Erlich brings Wyoming to life in powerful, luminous, unvarnished prose. She conjurs a rich world of survival beyond the pampered Jackson Hole Tetons. Quiet and powerful, a beautiful work of natural and self exploration.

Ms. Ehrlich has a fine sense of detail for the west of modern times. Those of us in the east tend to view "The West" as a continuous film festival at Aspen or Telluride, or the majestic mountain landscape of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. What we don't see is that 99% of the people live as they always have, with modern tinges: raising animals, surviving the elements, maintaining human relationships and doing it one day at a time. The only difference, is that the pickup truck is handy, and town and clean sheets is never too far away. A good book; makes me want to move there and shut the door behind me!