The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich (New York : Penguin, 1986)
Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces holds Wyoming in its pages -- people, animals, seasons, weather, water, and landscape. Readers meet ranch owners, ranch hands, sheepherders, and "Indian neighbors." We learn about cattle ranching and sheepherding from Ehrlich's first hand experience. Weather moves across the landscape, sometimes bringing drought, sometimes flood. "Winter lasts six months here," Ehrlich explains. At the center of the book is the landscape itself. Each page shares, without romanticizing, what it's like to live and work in the harsh environment surrounding Shell, Wyoming, the nearby Big Horn Mountains rising "up to ten thousand feet." Whether resident, visitor, or armchair traveler, The Solace of Open Spaces, helps readers see Wyoming, where "the water courses...seven rivers and a network of good sized-creeks...trace the history of settlement...." In sharing her personal journey, Ehrlich illustrates the value of paying attention to the places we call home. The resulting intimacy can benefit the land and soothe the spirit.
Most characteristic of the state's landscape is what a developer euphemistically describes as 'indigenous growth right up to your front door' -- a reference to waterless stands of salt sage, snakes, jack rabbits, deerflies, red dust, a brief respite of wildflowers, dry washes, and no trees. In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect -- tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into a pure light. -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich
"A person's life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one's family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place." -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich
"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are." -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich
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