Lessons from Fire and Ice

Kearns has been more than congenial at dinner, helping Ehrlich pick Swiss chard and tomatoes from their garden and assisting in the grilling of buffalo burgers. Conversation ranged from questions of free will to those of the presidential debate, and there was not a moment when Ehrlich did not smile. Their wedding was a Buddhist ceremony, with prayer flags decorating the cabin. “The priest said, ‘Do you want me to wear my robes, or blue jeans?’ I said, ‘Robes.’ We had ranchers, writer friends, just really hardcore. It was fantastic.”

The leis they wore hang by a French door, near a padded bench and high windows that cause the room to float on a landscape of thick sagebrush, erratic boulders and scoured
meadowland. “I wanted a space that would in some way acknowledge the beauty of this landscape,” she tells me. “Without calling attention to itself.” She’s written, in Islands, the Universe, Home, that “I want to break down the dichotomy between inside and outside, interior and exterior ... a house is not a defense against nature but a way of letting it in.” Her adjacent study, where I’ve slept — with screened windows ajar to sagebrush, hummingbirds and chipmunks — is even more one with nature.

“Powerwise, I’m off the grid. The cabin is solar heated. I do have a little propane stove that gets turned on when it starts getting to 20 below.”

In this heat, Ehrlich wears khaki shorts, a brown shirt and her blonde hair in pigtails. She’s 62 and broader than in photographs from the 1980s, when a stunning cowgirl gazed sexily at us from book jackets. Her face is tougher, reflecting a life outdoors. Yet her personality, aloof and mysterious in print, is wise-crackingly funny. Its edge is rough as the 8-foot-high boulder, “lion colored and dappled with lichen,” 40 yards from the house, where Sam is buried and about which Ehrlich has repeatedly written. “This is the landscape that’s become my heart’s home,” she says.

It’s been so since 1976, when she traveled to Wyoming to make a documentary about sheepherders, “an ethnographic film about lonely people in lonely places.” She returned during the terrible winter of ’78/’79, when temperatures plummeted to 60 below. Her first great love, David Hancock, a partner on the film, had succumbed to cancer. She was grief-stricken, isolated and camped in a one-room cabin near Yellowstone Park, performing day-work “for meat” on ranches. “I had suffered a tragedy,” she wrote in Solace. And here adds, “I didn’t care if I lived or died. I cut my hair off with sheep shears, and I burned all my clothes in a burn-barrel back of a sheep wagon. It was tabula rasa time.”