Lessons from Fire and Ice

The result was a unique nonfiction work, part memoir, part treatise on neurobiology, cardiology and lightning, part spiritual meditation on death and near-death, part ode to love and other injuries of the heart. It’s both a paean to home and to her dog, Sam, the spirit-helper, who led her back from the underworld. Above all, it’s confirmation of her belief in sila, that Inuit notion that weather equals consciousness. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Ehrlich is a compulsive connector of the physical to the mystical,” and the Rocky Mountain News added, “The Buddhist in her gives us a thoughtful meditation on the state of suspension between life and death.” The London Review of Books said: “A Match to the Heart is a tale of solitude. There is no one to share Ehrlich’s ordeal intimately.... Her solitude is almost never commented on; it is just a truth about her.”

The book seemed to purge Ehrlich of fire, and to nudge her toward ice. She began journeying to the Arctic. “It was just too painful to come back to Wyoming,” she explains. “And in the Arctic I saw this amazing culture that was threatened. Because the ice is disappearing. So that other part of me, ‘the trained ethnographic film maker,’ came into being.”

It’s afternoon and we’ve moved to her study, where my rumpled sheets on the window seat contrast vividly with the order of her talismans, notebooks and mementos from Greenland. The one-room cottage has plank floors, high windows and a simple desk at its center. Ehrlich gives a tour: “That’s a Siberian reindeer harness, that’s the National Geographic map of Greenland I carry, those are my handmade sealskin mittens and boots, my field notes in Ziploc bags, that’s a knife made in Alaska, my collections of Asian poetry and books by the Transcendentalists, a Jackson Pollock print — Action! Do something! — a piece of Siberian tundra.” The list continues.

I ask if she has a writing ritual. “Absolutely not. If somehow you can’t do that ritual, then you say, ‘Oh well, I guess I can’t write today.’ If you’re lucky enough to wake up and not be dead, then you can write.” We move to her desk, decorated with a piece of Mali cloth from Zimbabwe. “That’s where I’m going next. But here — I’ve been writing this section of Farthest North, about the Koni people, nomadic reindeer herders in Siberia. I’ve put in stuff about tundra ecosystems and what’s happening to that, in terms of melting permafrost. And things about the Bering Sea. It’s really a book about the effects of climate change on indigenous Arctic people.”

I ask about the brush sketches on her desk. “They’re doodles. I do them when I’m thinking about Greenland and ice. I hate to say it, but I’ve spent more time there, in a more intimate way, than I have here. I keep dreaming of hunters carrying these huge panes of ice and putting them back down on the water. Greenland’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

By 1993, she had begun the years of travel that resulted in This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2001), the 16th of her published books. She wrote in its preface, “I first traveled to Greenland ... not to write a book but to get above tree line.” Her weakened heart could not function at an altitude “where I felt at home,” and she learned that “tree line can be a factor of latitude ... it’s a biological boundary created by the cold.” She lived with the Inuit and Koni, crossing ice by dogsled at 60 below, the snow by reindeer sled and backpacking through an Arctic wilderness where no human had ventured.