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We all know now how the founding of the American West was made legendary, was and is romanticized. We know that there were and are many Wests, and that this “founding” of a land that had been found centuries before uprooted long-established cultures of Native Americans and Mexicans. We know that the history of the European-settled West is most notable for its boom-and-bust cycles, for how states took government handouts while proclaiming independence. But years after the correctives, we also realize how enduring are the heroic images of Western frontier life.1 James Olney has written, in words numerous critics have echoed, that autobiography is “the most elusive of literary documents” (“Cultural Moment,” ‒), and perhaps even more than the books by Barich, Williams, Heat-Moon, Matthiessen, and Hubbell, Gretel Ehrlich’s collection of essays about Wyoming, The Solace of Open Spaces, appears elusive and resists definition. The other writers, even if their subject matters and book structures are not the usual fare for autobiographies, do describe events in a span of time; Ehrlich, however , makes no chronological beginning, middle, and end, and instead the book’s structure dramatizes Ehrlich’s slowly understood realization that Wyoming is indeed where she belongs, where she has made “home.” Perhaps, one might argue, Ehrlich’s book is not an autobiography and she is simply writing a series of personal essays about Wyoming, particularly given that several chapters of the book were first published individually. But the new essays, the way Ehrlich Making a Home on the Range Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Western Myths 7 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 145 arranges the sequence of chapters, and the material she includes about her fiancé David’s death suggest that she is doing grief work by constructing a life-story that will give meaning to her past as it is lived from the present into the future. In the preface to The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich says it is “impossible to speak of writing this book without mentioning the circumstances and transitions taking place in my life at the time” (ix), though interestingly she alludes only to a “tragedy” that disoriented her, that made it difficult for her to know exactly where she was. She explains that what she did know was that she had no desire to resume her life in New York City, with old friends and familiar comforts. Though friends asked her when she was going to stop “hiding out” in Wyoming, she recognized that “for the first time [she] was able to take up residence on earth with no alibis, no self-promoting schemes” (ix). Ehrlich wrote her book in “fits and starts”; it began in the form of raw journal entries sent to a friend in Hawaii. Explaining the choice of this friend to read her journal, Ehrlich writes: “I chose her because she had been raised in a trailerhouse behind a bar in Wyoming; she then made the outlandish leap to a tropical climate and a life in academia. I was jumping in the opposite direction and suspected we might have crossed paths midair somewhere” (x). The move to Wyoming, Ehrlich says, was a long, arbitrary detour, until she recognized that the detour had become the actual path; likewise, in her writing, the “digressions” about Wyoming become her story. Similar to Hubbell in A Country Year questioning remaining on her Ozark farm, Ehrlich is wondering whether to stay in Wyoming. In an autobiography, the writer’s “story” is, as Olney says, halfdiscovered in memory and half-created by writing, and likewise Ehrlich is half-discovering and half-creating what in Wyoming might make it “home.” Ehrlich takes up familiar subjects that have been essential to the mythmaking of the West: cowboys, rodeos, ranch life, sheepherding, the Indian Sun Dance, Wyoming weather and landscape . The book records Ehrlich’s intellectual and emotional sorting through of her responses to these Western images, to Western life and landscape. Reacting strongly to animals, to cowboys, to ranching women, and to the forbidding, harsh landscape, she discovers useful relations among human and nonhuman others previously unknown to her, all of whom aid her act of self-creation by teaching her about what she is coming to love. Refiguring the Map of Sorrow 146 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 146 [18.225.31.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:30 GMT...

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