Lessons from Fire and Ice

Greenland was another remote place with a strong community and hunting culture that wasted nothing, was in sync with nature and Zenlike in its existence. “I feel totally at home there. Living with the Inuit, you see people in whose eyes and faces is the isolated world into which they go. They haven’t been jaded by Starbucks or convenience stores. Nothing is convenient ... but to me it’s like a cow camp. I tell them, ‘This is Wyoming, with ice instead of sagebrush!’”

Seasons took years to finish. “My parents were dying, and I told them I would help them, because they’d saved my life.” But after their deaths she returned to the Arctic. Cold seemed to obsess her. In the fragility of its embrace she learned that not only were glaciers receding, but that humans and animals who depended on them, for hunting, were threatened.

I coax her back to Wyoming, this home on 40 acres she’s struggling to save, and to her marriage. She laughs about the latter. “It’s as hard as it ever was,” she says. “To be with a person ... in your 20s there’s so much excitement about how you’re going to make your life. But we’re sort of at the end of the line, here. It requires more tolerance and compassion than a young relationship, which is fueled by lust and by excitement about what’s coming up in the future. Now it’s the Buddhist commitment to do the best, and to be compassionate.” She frowns. “It’s about forgiveness and taking care of each other in the last years of your life. None of us is perfect, especially me. And Tom has a writer’s sense of despair and desolation and darkness.”

She looks off. “We’ve really been depressed over the drilling issues. This land is his heart’s home, as well. I’ve lived sort of a bum’s life — I mean, I have nothing, no family ... and there’s the whole issue of loneliness. It’s nice to think that there’s somebody around who might notice that you’re dying.”

Gaby needs a walk, so Ehrlich stretches then leads us through 40 yards of sagebrush, heat and slate-gray cloud cover, to the enormous boulder by Sam’s grave. It’s marked by a white stone from the meadow. She studies it, then points to an adjacent piece of ground. “This is where I want to be buried.”

I recall a passage from The Future of Ice: “The place where Sam is buried is a view of the world without end. It is the center and the edge of time; it’s the place where eyelids fall away.”

Not a bad spot, I offer.

“Yeah.” She grins. “One friend has said, ‘Stop being so depressed about everything, Gretch. Just think, we get to witness this enormous change. As enormous as the beginning of an ice age.’” She touches the boulder. “And from a geological point of view, of course, it’s all a phase. It’s just humans and animals. Megafauna’s going to crash and the planet will survive. Then something else will happen.” She turns back toward the cabin, but hesitates, gesturing.

“That’s all there is: stripped-away life. This sage doesn’t expect to become a pine tree. The pine trees don’t have an expectation that they should live 100 years. Coming home, to live here and write about it, I had to actually understand that I was part of the natural world. There were no inalienable rights attached to my existence. There was just bare-assed existence.”

Again she laughs.

Everything is about learning to see.”