The Solace of Open Spaces

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.

Ehrlich recounts the circuitous route that brought her to a Wyoming ranch. A native of Santa Barbara, California, who studied filmmaking and became an academic in her home state, she had no particular yearning to leave. In her thirties, Ehrlich was given the opportunity to make a documentary for the Public Broadcasting Service about the lives of Wyoming shepherds during the “high” months, June to September. She assumed it would be a short trip inland.

Shortly before she sets off for Lovell, Wyoming, to meet the shepherds and plan her filming schedule, Ehrlich learns that her partner, David, is dying. Unsure how long he will live, Ehrlich makes the difficult decision to continue with the film project.



Ehrlich is instantly captivated by the landscape of Wyoming: “Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect—tumbled and twisted, ribboned and 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.”

David lives long enough for Ehrlich to finish filming, but he dies shortly afterward.

Ehrlich finds herself drawn back to Wyoming. Instead of filming, she begins working on ranches. The wildness of the land and the gentleness of the people have a profound effect on her, and she stays. After three years, she begins writing, hoping to capture in language her experience of the Wyoming landscape: “The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”



For five years, Ehrlich works as a ranch hand and herder, becoming deeply involved in the life of small rural communities. She helps with lambing and calving, as well as branding the young animals. She herds flocks across hundreds of miles of wild terrain. At first, Ehrlich feels that she can lose herself and her grief in the vastness of space, but over time she comes to realize that she has a wholly different relationship to the space; that she finds its emptiness paradoxically full: “True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.”

Ehrlich closely observes the people of Wyoming and their ways of life: ranchers, herders, and cowboys. She is struck by the wide cultural gulf separating these people from Californians, and she comes to respect the Wyoming way of being. She admires the tough gentleness of Western men and women, the courtesy that marks social interactions and, above all, the unique Western shyness: “Not a hangdog shyness, or anything coy—always there’s a robust spirit in evidence behind the restraint, as if the earth-dredging wind that pulls across Wyoming had carried its people’s voices away but everything else in them had shouldered confidently into the breeze.”

Time and again, Ehrlich fingers the land as the reason for the unique mores of Wyoming’s people. She argues that the dangerous weather and inhospitable terrain, together with the isolation those conditions impose on those who work the land, breed their own social rules. She meets one woman who hasn’t left her ranch for eleven years. Ehrlich notes that isolation can be destructive: it causes eccentricity, even violent craziness. This, she suggests, makes Wyoming people more accepting than their coastal cousins.



As well as describing Wyoming life, Ehrlich uses Wyoming as a way to see America afresh and, above all, the way American life is shaped by the vast spaces of the continent: “From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.”

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.

The Solace of Open Spaces was warmly received by critics: “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.” (Publishers’ Weekly)