Lessons from Fire and Ice

But that winter and the next she read “the entire Western canon,” wrote a book of poetry, To Touch the Water, journaled and found her voice as a writer. “All art, all expression, all of living is perceived through some sense of stripping everything away,” she says. “And I believed I needed to live before I wrote.” Eventually she produced The Solace of Open Spaces (1985) and Islands (1991), about those ranching years, establishing herself, with Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen, as a new intelligence in the literature of place.

Time magazine called Solace “the sleeper of the year,” and it won both the H.D. Vursell Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. One critic remarked of Solace, “Her essays, mdelicately combining interior and exterior exploration, are as spare and beautiful as the landscape from which they’ve grown.” Another said, “Ehrlich’s best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau.” She had written of the Wyoming ranch country and the people who work it with lyricism and deep affection. “I think writers are lonely people,” she says. “You’re always embracing and struggling against being an outsider.” The ranchers proved “instant community, instant family.” They “gave me a life. I was just this little wraith, living like a coyote. I had nothing.”

Though Ehrlich grew up near Santa Barbara, in privileged circumstances — her father was a plastics manufacturer who invented, among other items, the seeping garden hose — she was not a trust fund brat. “My parents insisted that my sister and I go out and meet life in any way we chose, but get out and make it on your own.” Ehrlich chose to “ride the rough string,” learning “lessons from the round corral — you get bucked off and you get back on. And you don’t become a victim.” She wasn’t close to her family, “Probably ever. Later they’d say, ‘What have you done this year?’ and I’d hand them a book. They visited Shell, which was pretty hardscrabble for them. They’d say, ‘It’s a shame you didn’t buy a ranch in Jackson.’ I’d say, ‘Give me the money and I will.’ We led very different lives. But we talked about everything before they died.”

I ask what killed them. “Martinis and cigarettes,” Ehrlich says. “That’s what they die of in Santa Barbara.”

She adored animals as a child, rode horses and sailed, and felt more akin to the Mexicans and Asians of coastal California than to her parents’ country club set. “I wanted to live in remote places with animals,” she says. “But I loved Japanese and Chinese poetry. And I was fascinated by things Asian.” In 1978 she would spend time in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, but by age 12 (when she left Montecito for boarding school) she’d discovered Latin poetry and the writings of Zen master, D.T. Suzuki. “The basis of meditation is that, between each breath is death,” she says. Latin strengthened her sense of language (she still reads in it) and Zen helped her cope, leading to the study of art, dance and avant-garde theater at Bennington. She nearly completed film school at UCLA, before being offered her first job, as a film editor for
NET in New York. She took it.