urn:oclc:696019657 Republisher_date 20120221183130 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120220153038 Scanner scribe18.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Author papers (1923–2005) at Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University

For all of those reasons, I'm both proud of myself for powering through this one and disappointed I didn't trust my gut enough to put it aside early on. But I appreciate that this was also a mode of self-preservation and survival for Ehrlich. She "suffered a tragedy and made a drastic geographical and cultural move" ( ix). Friends implied she should stop "hiding" in Wyoming, that she should face life. Ironically, that's exactly what she was doing. Sometimes it's the return to the earth that reminds us what we have worth living for. Living well here has always been the art of making do in emotional as well as material ways. Traditionally, at least, ranch life has gone against materialism and has stood for the small achievements of the human conjoined with the animal, and the simpler pleasures...The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.One of Ehrlich's best-received books is a volume of creative nonfiction essays called Islands, The Universe, Home. Her characteristic style of merging intense, vivid, factual observations of nature with a wryly mystical personal voice is evident in this work. Other books include This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland and two volumes of poetry. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me...Because ranch work is a physical, and these days, economic strain, being ‘at home on the range’ is a matter of vigor, self-reliance, and common sense. 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.

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Ehrlich’s best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilisation.’ – San Francisco Chronicle