Response 7: The Tenderness That Fills Open Space

Wyoming. Desolate. Empty. Vast stretches of plains and sky. In the winter, howling winds. Frozen. This is Gretel Ehrlich’s landscape in The Solace of Empty Spaces. Her description of the land is minimal. She can only write so much about the space between one thing and another. But the ways in which this uncharted landscape – this wild space – have shaped the culture of the people who live there is more significant than we imagined.

“To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming’s openness, he said, “It’s all a bunch of nothing – wind and rattlesnakes – and so much of it you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been and it don’t make much difference” (2.)

Background and foreground, I believe, has multiple meanings in this context. The people who live in this landscape are relatively new there, and not too long ago, Wyoming was part of the “Wild West.” The open space, the lack of buildings and cities, allows for an autonomy not found in more developed areas. You can’t tell where you’re going, and it doesn’t make a difference, because you have the freedom to go and do whatever you want. You can live on your ranch and raise your cattle how you want them, and I get the feeling from the way that Ehrlich has painted the landscape in this book, that no one is going to come and tell you otherwise. But background can also refer to heritage and social standards. Having recently moved to this place and adopted this lifestyle, old ways must have been discarded. Cowboying is a new lifestyle unique to the United States. Who were these people before they came here? Who will they be when the wild is all gone? Their freedom is unique to this area, nurtured even more by their isolation. They are held to no standards. They follow no preconceived notions of what it means to be a cowboy. Women cowboy as well, and within this book are female characters named Mike and BobbyJo. It doesn’t make a difference. They know who they are.

Perhaps the strongest connection between the landscape and culture in Wyoming is that of the cowboys. Ehrlich tears down misconceptions of this role, the stoic figure America characterizes thanks to Marlboro advertisements and Western movies. She reveals what makes so much more sense: that the cowboy is connected to the land that he works, the awesome landscape that he takes in every day, and the animals that he births and raises. These are not tough men who lack emotion. No, these are men who are required to tough it out, to possess patience and resilience. One man tells Ehrlich, “Cowboys are just like a pile of rocks – everything happens to them. They get climbed on, kicked on, rained and snowed on, scuffed up by the wind. Their job is ‘just to take it’” (50.)

Ehrlich finds that the cowboy’s coarseness is a mere surface for his underlying tenderness. Because of the harsh winds and conditions, a cowboy must be resilient. But they are also compassionate because of what they do. “Because these men 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 her of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy” (52-53.)

What Ehrlich finds from living in Wyoming that this duality of character is something that she comes to embody as well. She braved the winter in a frozen cabin with no one except her dog, finding solace in the solitude. “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 free” (44.)

She finds that “What can seem like a hard-shell veneer on the people here is really a necessary spirited resilience” (43.) While people may shoot the hats off their neighbors in silly fights, they also care for each other. Wyoming, with only a few towns and one university, becomes cozy for Ehrlich in its vastness, because with less human spaces, people congregate more. Friends drive hours to each other’s ranches for dinner. They offer help when its needed with the cattle. The landscape of Wyoming, so vast and empty, has created a people who look for the tenderness, who search through that cold space for the warmth of another heart. The people of Wyoming are rooted in their land; they care for the animals, who outnumber them, and they look forward and backward, not sure which is which, but live on.

I grew up in a small beach town in Connecticut, close to New York City. Many of the residents were originally New Yorkers. My parents moved my family from Manhattan on my first birthday, believing a life in the suburbs would be ideal for their baby girl. We have beaches, but the water is not the ocean – it’s the Long Island Sound. Our town is charming, quaint, beautiful, and considered a suburb of New York City. But it is not diverse like the city. Growing up, I was not exposed to the rich culture that any city, especially New York, has to offer. When I think of my childhood, I think of playing on the beach, in the tide pools, on the jetty. My mother would let me and my little brother run away for hours at a time, knowing that we’d be safe. There is no surf in the Long Island Sound, no real danger. We lived in a smaller, sheltered, more “idyllic” version of the city; the Shakespearian forest that city-dwellers escape to. It was like a vacation to the Cape, but one that never ended. The Long Island Sound is a small body of water – I could always see the other side. Are we sheltered because of the protective setting? We came to live here for that very reason.

On September 11, I watched smoke rise on the horizon from where the towers had stood. For the first time, I felt exposed, part of something bigger, closer to something dangerous. The city and all the possibilities within it were closer than I had ever imagined. And beyond the Long Island Sound was an ocean. I appreciate the protective arms of the Sound, that we can wade in its shallow waters and not worry about being swept away by bigger waves. I know every rock on that beach by heart, and I’ve discovered every creature that crawls or swims in the tidal pools. And I did it all on my own, the Sound protecting me.