The Solace of Open Spaces

The Solace of Open Spaces is a well written essay. Ehrlich is insightful and thorough in her research, and the piece is well organized. She moves through the seasons (a typical characteristic, we have learned, of the nature essay), describing the countryside and its people in such a way that the reader becomes intimate with the feel of the land and the disposition of the inhabitants.

The movement of seasons allows the reader to follow the narrator through a year’s worth of understanding the land. Ehrlich begins with the winter. It is long and cold, the sun is bright but the air is frigid. Describing winter Ehrlich writes, “I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last.” With this single line she creates a scene (one that makes her reader feel the place with her) while adding to the setting she has already begun to establish. Perhaps most importantly, though, she includes the personal insight that will permeate the remainder of the essay, the kind of mediation and reflection that makes Wyoming real and necessary.

“Spring weather,” she writes, “is capricious and mean. It snows, then blisters with heat. There have been tornadoes. They lay their elephant trunks out in the sage until they find houses, then slurp everything up and leave.” Ehrlich wants her readers to understand the varying extremes of this place, the struggle that weather and natural disasters represent for westerners. She claims that water “shaped the state,” but it is in fact the wind that makes Wyoming what it is; the “meticulous gardener,” she calls it. She uses this description to enter into a discourse on the history of the state.

Summer, then, becomes a monster of its own. The weather is excessively hot, plants kill animals, people work endlessly and sleep only occasionally. “There’s so little to do except work that people wind up in a state of idle agitation that becomes fatalistic.” Ehrlich talks of suicides, family feuds and hospital visits. “Summer,” she writes, “is a go-ahead season.” She is giving this place a life, however uninviting it may seem. She is drawing her readers in with the not-so-beautiful side of this environment.

For Ehrlich, autumn is when the real reflection begins. She creates another scene, one that speaks to the title, a solace, a space for meditation and rumination. She heads for the mountains with a friend, where the world begins to slow down and the writer begins to appreciate her surroundings. “One morning a full moon was setting in the west just as the sun was rising. I felt precariously balanced between the two.”

While there are several short scenes mixed in narrative, the essay is mostly anecdotal, but the stories are compelling nonetheless. Ehrlich introduces her readers to a place that is desolate but full of character, a world where people are simple, straight-forward, hard working. But she makes us understand, they are this way because they have to be; because the land requires it of them.