The Solace of Open Spaces
Kristiana Gregory. Jenny of the Tetons
Gretel Ehrlich. The Solace of Open Spaces
personal narrative
Jenny was a girl whose family was murdered by Indians when they were going to Oregon. She was left alone without anyone. She signed up to help a family with three kids. Jenny passed Indians on the way to the house and felt a renewed hatred for them only to find out that the family she is helping is part Indian!!! She soon realizes that this family is more like her than she knew. She travels with them all around the Tetons and grows to love the area. It made me grow to love the area too, even though I hadn't even been there. This book made me really excited about going to the Tetons. ~ N. & G. Egan
Comments (0)Gretel Ehrlich. The Solace of Open Spaces
personal narrative
Annie Dillard, in reviewing this book, says that with Gretel Ehlrich “Wyoming has found its Whitman.” Another reviewer describes Ehrlich’s prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning.” Both comments hit the mark on this beautiful little book (131 pages) about shepherding in Wyoming.
In the late 1970’s Gretel Ehrlich was a documentary filmmaker from New York working on a film about modern day sheepherders. In the middle of the project her partner died, sending her into a deep depression. Rather than return to New York, Ehrlich decided to stay in Wyoming and become a sheepherder herself: “I suspect my original motive for coming here was to ‘lose myself’ in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up. The vitality of the people I was working with flushed out what had become a hallucinatory rawness inside me. I threw away my clothes and bought new ones; I cut my hair. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me.” So this book is, in part, about living through grief and loss. It is just as much about the extreme landscape of Wyoming and the extreme, wonderfully idiosyncratic characters this landscape engenders.
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