Unsolaced : along the way to all that is

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Ehrlich, Gretel

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

237 pages ; 22 cm.

Summary:

"From one of our most intrepid and eloquent adventurers of the natural world: an account of her search for home--experiences traveling in Greenland, the North Pole, the Channel Islands of California, Japan; of herding animals in Wyoming and Montana, and her embrace of the balance between the ordinary and celestial. In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich announced her aspiration as a writer to assign the physical qualities of the earth--weather, light and wind--to our contemporary age. In Unsolaced, thirty-five years later, Ehrlich shows us how these forces have shaped her experience and her understanding as she recalls the split-end strands of friendships spliced to new loves, houses built and lived in, conversations that shifted outlooks, as she tries to catch a glimpse of herself and the places she has sought as an anchor for her spirit. Ehrlich's quest is not for the comfort of permanence, but for transience, the need to be unsettled--to find stillness in the disquiet of engagement, to find in the landscapes of earth, ice, climate, genetic mayhem, and shifting canvas of memory--the possibility of longing. Ehrlich's voice is a unique amalgam of poetry and science, her attention held fast by the vegetation and animals she cares for, the lyric exaltation of insight that gives both her and her readers an intimation of a greater whole"--

Subject Term:

Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.

Publication Info:

New York : Pantheon Books, 2021.

Subject:

Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.

Ehrlich, Gretel -- Homes and haunts.

Ehrlich, Gretel -- Travel.

American authors

SAILS ISBN:

9780307911797

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library	910.4092 EHR 2021	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norfolk Public Library	910.4092 EHRL	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Plympton Public Library	910.4092 EHR	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis.

Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. "Sentience and sunderance," Ehrlich writes. "How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all." As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

"I've moved too much--something like twenty-eight times since I came of age," writes Ehrlich in this expansive recollection of her travels. She writes that this is a bookend to her 1986 classic The Solace of Open Spaces; here, she recounts the places she's called home and confronts differences caused by climate change. Ehrlich describes her time on a cattle ranch on California's Channel Islands in the late 1990s where "wind was our constant companion and its attendant, the fog," and a game ranch in Zimbabwe, where she worked with a local ecologist to "stop the desertification of the planet." She also muses on her time witnessing melting ice and the disappearance of traditional hunting practices in northern Greenland, writing: "Climate is culture. As soon as the ice in the Arctic began to disappear, so did the lifeways of Greenland." Erlich ruminates on loss both personally (her husband's brain cancer) and climatologically, and has a knack for capturing the lives of those she's met on the road. These include "Mike" Hinckley, the woman who taught Erlich how to cowboy; Allan Savory, who works to fight overgrazing and land degradation in Zimbabwe; and Rifat Latifi, a surgeon from Kosovo working to bring health services to war-ravaged areas. Erlich's memories, rendered in rich, lyrical language, make for a moving ode to a changing planet. (Jan.)

Kirkus Review

From the Arctic to Africa, an award-winning nature writer finds abundant evidence of a changing planet. As a "bookend to The Solace of Open Spaces," from 1984, Ehrlich, also a poet and novelist, offers an intimate, engaging memoir recounting her strenuous adventures--in remote Greenland, war-torn Africa, and the American West--where she has been confronted with dramatic effects of climate change. In the Arctic, sea ice has thinned drastically, putting all life--including humans--in peril. "Ice-adapted people have everything to teach us," writes the author: "they have a survivor's toolbox of self-discipline, patience, and precision. They understand transience, chance, and change." Sadly, since her first visit to Greenland in 1993, Ehrlich has seen that toolbox become ineffective against a warming environment. With the disappearance of snow and ice, "the planet cannot reflect the immense solar heat it receives back into space, and thus, keep the lower latitudes temperate," causing more global heat to be generated. In Africa, sparse rainfall has resulted in degraded and desertified soil; at the African Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, the author learned about restorative strategies such as planned grazing and "putting airborne carbon into the ground." In lush, evocative prose, Ehrlich details some breathtakingly perilous journeys, including trekking across a span of polar desolation, where she feared being stranded forever, and escaping from armed rebels in Zambia. Her personal life was no less dramatic: being struck by lightning, causing a brain injury that took three years to heal; deaths of family and friends; divorce; and bouts of deep loneliness. But her grieving is for the Earth. "We humans have made a world where common sense, compassion, and care for one another and the planet has become too much of a rarity," she writes. "It's getting smaller, isn't it," she remarks to a friend. "All the places we can go to find solace." A vigorous plea for responsible environmental stewardship and a treat for all fans of nature writing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

For Ehrlich, writing and life are inextricably intertwined as her adventures unsought and chosen, in-the-field investigations, spiritual quests, and penchant for wandering, wilderness, and solitude engender both drama and deep reflection. This gripping episodic memoir of ranch life and Arctic travels, visionaries and lovers, environmental destruction and loss is a callback, after a dozen titles, to her first book, The Solace of Open Spaces, and a selective reimmersion in the 35 intervening years. A Californian, Ehrlich staked her first cold-place claim in Wyoming, where she took up cowboying and discovered while living in close proximity to animals the "whole-body sensorium is alive in each of us," an awareness of the interdependence of species and every living being's connection to the land that shapes this entire indelible remembrance. Ehrlich chronicles with enthralling precision the to-the-brink physicality of hard work and daring expeditions and the meditative states nature summons. She vividly recounts sojourns on a Channel Island off the California coast; in Greenland, where the ice and the extraordinary culture it generated are vanishing at heart-wrenching speed; Zimbabwe, where a restoration ecologist fights to preserve grasslands that protect against drought and starvation; and Kosovo, where she speaks with genocide survivors. Writing with fire and ice of beauty, risk, and devastation, Ehrlich shares wonder, wisdom, candor, and concern to soul-ringing effect.

Library Journal Review

In spare, yet poetic writing, Ehrlich (Islands, the Universe, Home) explores how we find peace both at home and abroad. Following a nonlinear path of exploration, Ehrlich incorporates essays about her life in Wyoming, the death of her father, loss of her loyal dog, and ranch life, showcasing the pain and peace to be found in nature when coping with grief. Many essays also explore the loss of wildlife, livelihood, culture, and tradition owing to climate change. Return journeys to Greenland over time demonstrate the extreme effect climate change has had on the natural world and civilization, as towns and wildlife gradually disappear. Travels to Africa full of intense wilderness experiences and connections with locals also reflect this loss. In Japan, Ehrlich climbs Hokkaido's Daisetsuzan, where hikers must avoid a meadow full of bears after 3 p.m., though they can appreciate them from afar. Ehrlich also visits a Global Savory Hub in Sweden where Jorgen Andersson helps her find hope in the choices humankind can make to aid nature. Many of Ehrlich's experiences are presented without interpretation so readers can reach their own conclusions. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Ehrlich's other works, or those interested in climate change observation.--Katie Lawrence, Grand Rapids, MI

Excerpts

PROLOGUE The ribbed hill, gray to green. Pronghorn grazing in first light. The folded mountains, two owls calling, five low-flying geese, and the near-frantic four-note morning call of the robin. I'm in an off-grid cabin set on a glacial moraine surrounded by kettle ponds where, ten thousand years ago, retreating glaciers left lumps of ice. Green rings every pond and the white folded mountains dive down to foothills threaded with blue flax, sagebrush, and native bunchgrass. At dawn a calligraphic shadow--loose, wild, and precise, like old Chinese grass script--curtains the forested east hill. I walk inside it, then emerge in sun trying to re-create parts of my past, as when I once hid behind Wyoming sagebrush watching sheep graze when all this began. Would it be better to write nothing at all? No doubt it would. Yet here, I feel most at home. Everything is moving, but there's so much we can't see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what's under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands. The mind splices fragments of sensation and language into story after story. The blood in my veins and every blade of grass is oxygen, sugar, photosynthesis, genetic expression, electrochemistry, and time. I watch clouds crush the last bit of pink sky. Breath slips even as I inhale, even as snow falls out of season and mud thaws, even as lightning ignites a late spring. I try to calculate the time it takes to scratch these words. Thoughts flare and fade. Ink across paper registers a kind of time theft during which I fictionalize an ongoing present, the ever-elusive me, you, here, and there, all existing somehow in a slightly fraudulent now. My cabin faces stacked peaks that reach 13,800 feet and are part of the Wind River Mountains. Those mountains are my mind's wall and wellspring. Down here, the light is peach colored, and as the sun shifts, one loose shadow, like thought, takes on a sharp edge. Nearby, a meadowlark sings the western meadowlark anthem. Territory is presence. Presence means song, then nest. Nest means egg, fledgling. Time flies and stars are dying. I try to count the split-end strands of lost friendships spliced to new loves, betrayals and failures, houses built, lived in, and sold, as if nothing could possibly be held close or hold me motionless, as if there were no door I couldn't exit, no door that would let me in. What has been forgotten, gone unnoticed? Stacked notebooks don't begin to frame it all, yet I page through them omnivorously, trying to catch a glimpse of myself and others, and the places we've lived in. How do we know anything? How do we lose it so easily? Almost daily I return to the high country. Mountain is shoulder: I rub against it and step forward. The hinge squeals, an arm lifts, a rock wall slides, and for a moment the mountain's inner sanctum is revealed. Later, down-trail, I lie on grass in the sun with my horse grazing nearby and touch the frayed ends of memory, a soft mane of them, as if fingering braille. # In that eyelid of time between night and now, the horse whinnies at five thirty in the morning, startling a pair of sandhill cranes that have nested nearby. It's early May and the pond sucks green from the field, lays it on its surface like a coat. The sun's metallic sheen spreads between cattails whose million seeds have yet to burst. I get up and pace, sink back on the couch, walk up the hill, sit on bare ground between two muddy ruts. A whole day goes by. Night is no cushion. Nor is comfort. It's been snowing and raining here, and the mud deepens. I've moved too much--something like twenty-eight times since I came of age--and I can't always anchor my spirit. But why would I want to? Anchor it to what? I've loved each place deeply. I try to imagine the comfort of sameness--those friends who live in the houses where they were born or to which they returned, and imagine too the discomfort it must arouse, the sense of confinement. Sun comes out. Freedom is the green pond turning blue, the muskrat pushing dried reeds and grass to the far bank while making a summer house. I imagine hundreds of mud-andstraw huts clustered together, lit by glowing lanterns like the ones I saw on Kyoto's Kamo River. My own building project--a writing studio--is clamorously under way. Yet I'm saddened to see sawn and planed logs stacked up. If I listened, I might hear the chaos of those trees being dismembered, their bark peeled, their tendons sliced and the unbearable noise of nail guns assaulting their limbs. Spring is this: One day the sandhill cranes dance; the next day swallows arrive and push bluebirds from their nest box. A week later an aspen leafs out, while on the mountain, beetles kill off every whitebark pine. Seventeen pronghorn antelope attempt a river crossing and are washed downstream, get out, try again. A prim gray cloud passes over. A porcupine sleeps in the willow, one leg dangling, black nose pointed up smelling for fire, smelling for rain. Worldwide, violent storms split trees in half, persistent droughts suck bones, rain loosens whole mountains: a mud flow destroys my childhood home, a cornice crumbles, a typhoon drowns a hundred people in Japan, hurricanes raze Caribbean islands, a volcano blows, an avalanche takes three friends. I rise early. Between first light and coffee, a pair of honking geese fly low over rising water. I hear the jake brakes of a semi loaded with last year's hay going downhill on the road. Rain begins. Smarty, my horse (from the bloodline of Smart Little Lena), runs for his shed when lightning flashes--not a cloud-toground strike like the one that got me, but cloud to cloud--an infusion of savage energy. A goose calls, gets an answer, tips its head back in delight as its mate arrives, and the builder sashays through snowdrifts by dogsled. The generator is started: a table saw grinds through forests and a whole room goes up. In rainlight the mud glistens. Excerpted from Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is by Gretel Ehrlich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.