Lessons from Fire and Ice

GRETEL EHRLICH IS MOST COMFORTABLE ABOVE TREE LINE. “I hate the heat,” Ehrlich says, as she’s said for much of this 90-degree afternoon. We’re hiking the glacial moraine behind her to the western face of the 14,000-foot-high Wind River Range. And Wyoming cabin, flanked by a boulder-strewn meadow stretching though clouds rile and thunder booms, the temperature remains high. “We’re at 8,000 feet,” she says. “This is sub alpine. We’ve never had 98- to 100-degree heat up here.”

Ehrlich’s last two books, The Future of Ice and This Cold Heaven have examined the problems of climate change, and she’s at work on a third, Farthest North, for which she’s spent a year studying glaciers — from Alaska to Greenland to Western Siberia to the Eastern Canadian Arctic. “These kettle ponds,” she says, pointing, “were scoured out during the last ice age. Usually they fill up in spring with rain and snowmelt, and provide great water for wildlife and domestic animals — and also a habitat for birds and ducks. But they’re all dry. The big ones have never dried up.”

Rain sprinkles and thunder sounds, closer this time. In August, 1991, Ehrlich was struck by lightning on a hike at her former ranch near Shell. She barely survived, then spent years in recovery, during which she wrote a memoir of her experience, A Match to the Heart — a stunning examination of body, mind and nature, and how they are intertwined. “To be struck by lightning,” she wrote. “What a way to get enlightened.” It was not the first time she’d been hit, and after the second, objects began to combust around her: a hotel lobby, a plane, a forest. Ehrlich’s favorite dog, Sam (“a kelpie ... a herding dog”) had been with her, and though he survived until 2003, today is the anniversary of his death. Gaby, Sam’s sole-surviving relative, trots beside us. She is deaf and arthritis causes her to move stiffly. Yet she yaps at an antelope in the dry pond. Ehrlich smiles. “Those are your seal barks,” she says, ruffling Gaby’s fur.

For Ehrlich, and in various mythologies, dogs are “spirit helpers,” standing “for the guardian who carries the human spirit forward.” A favorite expression of hers is, “God is dog.” She elaborates: “I’m not a theist. There’s godliness, there’s divinity, the divine in every square inch, every atom. But to ascribe it to a single point or persona is missing how complex it all is.”