Most people make it through life without being struck by lightning. But most people aren't Gretel Ehrlich, the visiting author and former Wyoming sheepherder who has been singed by lightning not once but twice and is grateful to be here to talk about it.
She is also familiar with bighearted landscapes. Her 1981 composition "The Solace of Open Spaces" was honored by her peers as one of the best American essays of the century.
Ehrlich will have a chance to address both this weekend when she reads selections of her work at a bookstore, then delivers a writing lecture at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
In a telephone interview this week from her home near Santa Barbara, Calif., where she was busy packing for trips to Alaska and Greenland, the author dismissed her first lightning episode as not very serious. It hit her during a rainstorm in Wyoming.
She'd been riding horseback down a treeless mountain slope with a companion, Ehrlich explained, when she spotted a nearby flash of "ground lightning," one that must have developed an attraction for either her horse or her spurs.
"It just came right at us," she said. "The person riding behind me said a big ball of light sort of jumped off the top of my head. But we were both fine -- the horse and me."
Writing about it in her first book, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1984) -- a portrait of Wyoming that included her essay by the same name -- Ehrlich devoted only a single paragraph to lightning experience No. 1, which seemed to belie her theme.
"It felt as though sequins had been poured down my legs," she wrote. "Then an electrical charge thumped me at the base of my skull, as if I'd been mugged. Afterward, the crown of my head itched and the bottoms of my feet arched up and burned. 'I can't believe you're still alive,' my husband said. The open spaces had cleansed me before. This was another kind of scouring, as when at the end of a painful appointment with the dentist, he polishes your teeth."
Her second episode occurred years later, in 1991, when Ehrlich was walking alone with her dogs on her Wyoming ranch just as a thunderstorm blew in. This time the lightning was far more deadly; Ehrlich never saw it coming. All she can recall is the sensation of regaining consciousness some time later, as she wrote in her 1994 memoir, "A Match to the Heart":
"I woke in a pool of blood, lying on my stomach some distance from where I should have been, flung at an odd angle to one side of the dirt path. The whole sky had grown dark. ... Where were the dogs? I tried to call out to them, but my voice didn't work. I couldn't swallow. ... Everything was terribly wrong. I had trouble seeing, talking, breathing and couldn't move my legs or right arm. Nothing remained in my memory."
Later, she learned that her body had just suffered a bolt of lightning -- her body hair was singed, among other telltale symptoms -- and her heart and nervous system were seriously damaged. She barely reached the hospital without dying. Her soon-to-be-ex husband (they'd been separated for four months) gave her a ride.
"I was sort of slowing down," she says now, "like a fly in winter."
In the weeks ahead -- first at a health clinic in Montana, later under the care of an expert cardiologist in a hospital in Santa Barbara, where her parents lived -- Ehrlich kept lapsing out of consciousness. Three times she suffered cardiac arrest. She was close to becoming a statistic.
According to a recent federal report, lightning kills an average of 80 people and injures 300 more each year in the United States. Those who survive often report a variety of long-term, debilitating symptoms, including memory loss, attention deficits, sleep disorders, numbness, dizziness, stiffness and pain.
It took Ehrlich a full two years in Santa Barbara to recover. The Pacific Ocean helped. She'd been raised outside of town on her parents' rustic horse ranch, where her experience as a rider began.
Some of her earliest memories, Ehrlich said, involved reading. "My mother always said I was born with a book in my hand. I just always loved to read."
After high school, she attended Bennington College in Vermont for a while, studying dance and painting and literature, then transferred into a dance program at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she later switched to filmmaking.
With about a quarter to go before graduating, Ehrlich left UCLA to take a job editing film for a New York TV station that later became part of the Public Broadcasting System. She never earned a degree, but voices no regrets.
"That was the whole point," she said, "-- to get a job."
She continued to work in film for 10 years. One of her last projects took her to a 250,000-acre sheep ranch in northern Wyoming, where she quickly fell in love with the country and decided to stay. After the death of a friend there in 1979, she began writing "The Solace of Open Spaces" -- the story that launched her career. It first appeared in Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1981.
"I came here four years ago," Ehrlich wrote in her essay. "I had not planned to stay, but I couldn't make myself leave. John, the sheepman, put me to work immediately. It was spring, and shearing time. For 14 days of 14 hours each, we moved thousands of sheep through sorting corrals to be sheared, branded and deloused.
"I suspect that my original motive for coming here was to 'lose myself' in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up. ... I threw away my clothes and bought new ones; I cut my hair. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me."
The clarity of the prose in the essay later grew into a book, a best seller.
"Vivid, tough and funny," the writer Annie Dillard wrote of Ehrlich. "Wyoming has found its Whitman."
Other books would soon follow: "Heart Mountain," a novel, in 1987, and "Islands, the Universe and Home," a second collection of essays, in 1991.
But "The Solace" continued to shine. Toward the end of the 1990s, it was selected for inclusion in "The Best American Essays of the Century," which begins with Mark Twain and includes the likes of Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, E.B. White, Rachel Carson and Martin Luther King. Ehrlich was one of just a dozen authors whose essays were chosen from the last two decades of the century.
In the 1980s, Ehrlich also began visiting Alaska. She figures she could have easily chosen to live here, since she admires both the people and the landscape.
"There are a bunch of us in Wyoming who always say, 'Well, gosh, if we had landed in Alaska in our 20s rather than Wyoming, we'd be living there really happily.' It has a lot of the same spirit, just that wonderful hospitality and that wonderful carefree attitude."
On a trip to Alaska in 1989, she got marooned in Fairbanks during a fierce January cold snap that sent the temperature on the Tanana River plummeting to near 80 below. The airport was closed for days.
"It was unbelievably cold," Ehrlich recalls. "Planes weren't flying. All the electricity in Fairbanks was off. That was really fun, really interesting: Alaska at its best!"
Before the love affair went much further, however, Ehrlich was struck by the bolt of lightning in Wyoming, then confined to California for months. She tried returning to the high country of Wyoming -- where she now has a second home in the Wind River mountains -- but found that at least for a while she couldn't handle the elevation.
"Even if I just drove over a mountain pass, I would feel like I was having a heart attack," she said. "I would have these crushing chest pains."
Partly out of desire to return to open spaces at an elevation she could manage, Ehrlich in 1993 began visiting Greenland. There she became fascinated by the relatively unspoiled subsistence-hunting culture that still prevails among the Inuit, the island's dominant culture. She befriended several families and followed them on their hunts, which ultimately led to her most recent book, "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland" (2002).
Self-imposed rules prohibit the use of snowmachines on subsistence hunts in Greenland, Ehrlich says. So they always traveled by dogsled, with the teams harnessed in the distinctive Greenlander "fan hitch" style.
"It's pretty chaotic, and these are just sort of half-wild dogs anyway," she said. "They're not in any way tame or approachable, and they only know the person who feeds them and harnesses them."
Through several years of visits she never tried to drive a team herself, but she did attempt to control the dogs once while riding in the sled.
"The hunter had gotten off to try to get a seal in the winter hunting style, which is to stand over a breathing hole with a spear," Ehrlich said. "And in the meantime, one of the dogs was in heat and ran off. (The hunter's wife) and I were trying to control the dogs, but they paid absolutely no attention to our voice commands."
Unlike Alaska, with its high wages and wealth of natural resources, the 60,000 or so Inuit and the few thousand ethnic Danes who live in Greenland aren't supported much by the global economy. But they manage.
"You know these guys, they really get it," Ehrlich said. "They have a different sense of what 'wealth' is. The Danes have instituted Danish socialism, which coincided almost seamlessly with the natural communalism of Inuit life. So it works very well."
After her visit to Alaska, Ehrlich plans to return to Greenland, this time to report on climate change for National Geographic magazine and possibly do some reporting for National Public Radio.
The science of global warming also lies at the heart of her upcoming book, "The Future of Ice," to be released in November. In its rough draft form, Ehr-lich says, it was 300 pages long, but by the time she quit pruning it was 100.
While in Anchorage this week -- she's also addressing audiences in Fairbanks and Juneau -- Ehrlich plans to deliver talks on the craft of writing. She admits she would really rather talk about good literature. She thinks reading well is the key to writing well.
"Because I think books are better teachers -- and life," she said. "There's life and there's books and what else do you need? Hell, everything I have to teach about writing I could do in about a day."
But reading is lifelong.
"I read poetry every day," Ehrlich said. "I also read a lot of science and fiction and nonfiction. I reread the classics, and I read the new classics. My bookshelves contain all my friends, most of whom I've never met and many of whom are dead.
"But they just present the kind of liveliness of the mind that you can't get in any other way. Liveliness of the mind and imagination."
Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com. Online sources and information
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READING, CRAFT TALK
Gretel Ehrlich will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Title Wave Books at 1360 W. Northern Lights Blvd. The craft talk will begin at 4 p.m. Sunday in Room 150 of the Arts Building at the east end of the University of Alaska Anchorage. Both events are free and open to the public.
