The Solace of Open Spaces

 

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

This slim volume is a continuation of the Wilderness theme that has been dominating my reading for the past few months. It contains a series of essays, more or less chronological, from a New York City transplant to the western side of the Bighorn Mountains.

I was drawn to the book because of its title. That solace mentioned is certainly something I have felt many times during my wanderings out west. That the book was set in one of those stomping grounds was a happy accident I discovered in its first pages. It was pretty great to be reading about familiar places -- Shell and Sheridan, for example -- that I'm hoping to visit next year.

But knowing those places also made it hard to read. There is always some discomfort in reading someone else's description of a place you love. In this book, that was compounded by the author's citified background and with the authoritative way she writes about the place. She seems to insist that her truths are the truths of the land, which makes me suspicious. For example, after complaining of the way culture has romanticized cowboys, she writes, "Because these me work with animals, not machines or numbers, because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage to find out what makes a herd of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy" (53). Seems to me she's replacing one romantic vision with another -- and no romantic vision can be particularly accurate.

In the end, though, it was a passage near the end of the book that wound up coloring the whole experience for me. It came as the author was describing a sacred Native ceremony she had been invited to attend. After being approached by some young males, she writes, "...they flirted with me, then undercut the dares with cruelty. "My grandmother hates white tourists," the one who had been eyeing my chest said. "You're missing the point of this ceremony," I told him. "And racism isn't a good thing anywhere" (114). Her response to this situation strikes me as incredibly tone deaf and ignorant. First, she was a white tourist. But more importantly, the author participates in the Great American Myth of Racism, which is that it consists of actions and words. It's not. Racism is a system, one that creates institutions that privileged one group of people over all others. It's pretty clear that Native peoples are not the beneficiaries of American institutions. There is a reason that Ehrlich can easy move from New York City to Shell, WY, where she is free to write about a culture she barely knows, but Native populations have a hard time making the transition from the Spokane Indian Reservation to Spokane proper. Erhlich's comment in this situation demonstrates how unaware she is of her own privilege, how little she understands the role of race in our country, and how much she is willing to ignore about the past to celebrate the present moment in which she finds herself. How can we trust someone so willfully ignorant about such a fundamental fact of American life?