Greta Ehrlich

Greta Ehrlich received her education at Bennington College, the UCLA Film School, and the New School for Social Research. In 1956 she made a film about the sheepherders of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and decided to remain in the area. She and her husband Press, an outfitter, reside on a ranch in the Big Horns. Her other books include two works of fiction, Heart Mountain, and Drinking Dry Clouds.

When I ask 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. The Solace of Open Spaces, 1985.

In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing 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 a pure light. Ibid.

At night, by moonlight, the land is whittled to slivers - a ridge, a river, a strip of grassland stretching to the mountains, then the huge sky. Ibid.

Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us. Ibid.

The Navajo talk about the land as if it were parts of the body and soul. I sometimes think of landscape that way. It's a matter of transposing identities and seeing how that makes you feel and think. Talking on the Water, 1994,

I like the word inter-living, because in order to express something well you need to have observed the details of it so closely that the boundary between its life and yours becomes blurred. Ibid.