Kayce rings up his dad who grabs Ryan (Ian Bohen) and heads to the scene. Protestors are restrained in zip ties as he pulls up and John says, “Son, if I spent a week thinking of ways to f**k up my day I could not have come up with this.” Jimmy notices men waiting outside and learns it’s time to get to work. Jimmy’s new boss says he hopes Jimmy was soaking up what he heard. He then explains there are three gods in Texas: the Almighty himself, Buster Welch, and George Strait. “You just met one of them,” says the boss. Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming”, a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. I liked Islands, the Universe, Home and expected to like The Solace of Open Spaces just as much. Unfortunately that was not the case. It might be a matter of poor timing, but I found Ehrlich's words in this slim collection of essays frustrating in a way I didn't feel with the other one. Maybe revisiting the open planes of Wyoming just isn't what I needed right now. It left me feeling cold. I am cold.

Winter lasts six months here. Prevailing winds spill snowdrifts to the east, and new storms from the northwest replenish them. This white bulk is sometimes dizzying, even nauseating, to look at. At twenty, thirty, and forty degrees below zero, not only does your car not work, but neither do your mind and body. The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last. These transcendent, lyrical essays on the West announced Gretel Ehrlich as a major American writer—“Wyoming has found its Whitman” (Annie Dillard). A collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, the classic companion to Gretel Ehrlich’s new book, Unsolaced Ehrlich is instantly captivated by the landscape of Wyoming: “Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect—tumbled and twisted, ribboned and faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into a pure light.”

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All winter we skate the small ponds – places that in summer are water holes for cattle and sheep – and here a reflection of mind appears, sharp, vigilant, precise. Thoughts, bright as frostfall, skate through our brains. In winter consciousness looks like an etching. And yet this cosmic perspective, this sublime invitation to unselfing (to borrow once again Iris Murdoch’s splendid notion), is readily available everywhere we look, right here on Earth, so long as we are actually looking. A century after Hermann Hesse observed that “whoever has learned how to listen to trees… wants to be nothing except what he is,”, Ehrlich writes: I punched cows with a young man named Martin, who is the great-grandson of John Tisdale. His inheritance is not the open land that Tisdale knew and prematurely lost but a rage against restraint. The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative… As with all major detours, all lessons of impermanence, what might have been a straight shot is full of bumps and bends. of a mad architect- tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into pure light.”

Lloyd’s had enough but, unfortunately, Rip’s not ready to let up. Lloyd says Walker had it coming and Rip confirms no one on the ranch wants Walker dead more than he does. However, John wants Walker to stay put so that’s what’s going to happen. Rip reminds him to always put the ranch first. She also fires the nosey receptionist for good measure, announcing the company’s moving to Montana as she leaves a stunned workforce behind while making her exit. Territorial Wyoming was a boy's world. The land was generous with everything but water. At first there was room enough, food enough, for everyone. And, as with all beginnings, an expansive mood set in. The young cowboys, drifters, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, were heroic, lawless, generous, rowdy, and tenacious. The individualism and optimism generated during those times have endured.In part I wonder if it's partly due to the organization of the slim collection. As Ehrlich wrote in her Preface: "Originally conceived as a straight-through narrative, it was instead written in fits and starts and later arranged chronologically" ( ix). Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces—the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons—in the remote reaches of the American West. She brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists. Together, these essays form an evocative and vibrant tribute to the life Ehrlich chose and the geography she loves. But I appreciate that this was also a mode of self-preservation and survival for Ehrlich. She "suffered a tragedy and made a drastic geographical and cultural move" ( ix). Friends implied she should stop "hiding" in Wyoming, that she should face life. Ironically, that's exactly what she was doing. Sometimes it's the return to the earth that reminds us what we have worth living for. One of Ehrlich's best-received books is a volume of creative nonfiction essays called Islands, The Universe, Home. Her characteristic style of merging intense, vivid, factual observations of nature with a wryly mystical personal voice is evident in this work. Other books include This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland and two volumes of poetry. Jamie ( Wes Bentley) follows up on the info he received which indicated his biological father, Garrett Randle, might have been behind the hit on John, Beth, and Kayce. He speaks with Terrell Riggins’ lawyer about setting up an interview, revealing he’s going to offer Riggins immunity.

Some essays are autobiographical. These mirror the circumstances shaping her life at the time. We hear of the suffering and death of a beloved partner. Both were still young at the time. She stumbles through this early experience. The Solace of Open Spaces (first published in 1985) is made up of twelve short essays that are both poetic and factual. Reflecting on her personal experience with grief and healing during the period of her life after her partner’s death, Ehrlich not only describes what she observed in the landscape of Wyoming but how this landscape effected her viscerally—physically and emotionally. Later, she quotes someone but can’t remember who, “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences.” Yep, “absolute indifference.” And even later, “There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality an invigoration...Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are....”What I had lost (at least for a while) was my appetite for the life I had left: city surroundings, old friends, familiar comforts. It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort, reference points, a disguise for what will always change...For the first time I was able to take up residence on earth with no alibis, no self-promoting schemes. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me...Because ranch work is a physical, and these days, economic strain, being ‘at home on the range’ is a matter of vigor, self-reliance, and common sense. A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.

The book is not about the “solace of open spaces”, as the title indicates. It is instead about the men and women who inhabit such places. Those not attuned to Wyoming’s inherent beauty may declare it to be empty and without interest. It is a matter of perspective. One’s attitude will influence one’s view of the book. Ehrlich grew up in Santa Barbara, California, an academic, who decided to give it up for the open spaces of Wyoming. The original reason for the trip was for Ehrlich, who was a filmmaker in addition to being a writer, to film a documentary for Public Broadcasting. The documentary was designed to focus on sheep herders and their lives throughout the high months of the year, which are June through September. A beautiful book with a great deal of thought put into words. The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erlich is a collection of a dozen loosely connected chapters about the author’s experiences living and working amid Wyoming’s vast open spaces. The book was written in 1985 and still feels current. Beth heads out, declaring she’s off to ruin a life. (Such a classic Beth exit line.) Kevin Costner and Piper Perabo in ‘Yellowstone’ season 4 episode 5 (Photo Credit: Paramount Network) In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously, usually on behalf of an animal or another rider.”In characterizing the ranchers in this way, Ehrlich combats the stereotypes that are associated with ranchers and reveals them to be just as complex and dynamic as any other people. The Solace of Open Spaces is a 1985 memoir by the American author, filmmaker, and poet Gretel Ehrlich. Built from journal entries originally written in “fits and starts” for a friend in Hawaii, the book is a mosaic of Ehrlich’s experiences living and working on Wyoming ranches as she grieves for her partner, David. A celebrated memoirist and nature writer, Ehrlich has won the Whiting Award and the Henry David Thoreau Prize. In most parts of Wyoming, the human population is visibly outnumbered by the animal. Not far from my town of fifty, I rode into a narrow valley and startled a herd of two hundred elk. Eagles look like small people as they eat car-killed deer by the road. Antelope, moving in small, graceful bands, travel at sixty miles an hour, their mouths open as if drinking in the space. Today the sun is out — only a few clouds billowing. In the east, where the sheep have started off without me, the benchland tilts up in a series of eroded red-earthed mesas, planed flat on top by a million years of water; behind them, a bold line of muscular scarps rears up ten thousand feet to become the Big Horn Mountains. A tidal pattern is engraved into the ground, as if left by the sea that once covered this state. Canyons curve down like galaxies to meet the oncoming rush of flat land. Living well here has always been the art of making do in emotional as well as material ways. Traditionally, at least, ranch life has gone against materialism and has stood for the small achievements of the human conjoined with the animal, and the simpler pleasures...The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.