Interviews
Grounded in the Earth: A Conversation with Gretel Ehrlich
Jan Richards
Last November, I met with Gretel Ehrlich—author of acclaimed nonfiction books such as The Solace of Open Spaces, A Match to the Heart, and This Cold Heaven—in a café in the historic district of Fairhaven. We met a few hours before her reading that evening from her new book, The Future of Ice. Gretel walked into the café wearing a thick, white parka. It seemed so appropriate, this woman who binds her life with so much cold and snow and ice. When she sat down and looked out the window of our corner booth, the Sound flowing beneath and beyond our gaze, the sun just setting past the islands in the water’s wake, her blue eyes danced. “Wow, this is gorgeous! Is the ferry to Alaska down there?” I smiled and told her that it was waiting for her. She never hesitated in her response. “You better not tell me that – I’d have to bust out of here! Anything to be outside!”
Gretel and I began speaking as if we were friends having a cup of late afternoon tea. We talked for more than an hour about our spiritual beliefs, the daily rituals of “sitting Buddhism,” our concerns for the planet, and how lost we both feel in a country that has turned its back on the environment. An hour had passed before I realized that I had not once looked at my pad of notes and questions. The recorder was still spinning slowly and our tea had been refreshed many times, but I had yet to ask a single pre-meditated inquiry. Our talk centered on what was most important to both our lives, our spirituality and Buddhist beliefs. It became an exchange about our concerns for the future.
In a typical interview, the one asking the questions needs a roadmap, a guide to securing the conversation and moving it in a direction that meets the ultimate goal of getting in touch with the author, of revealing something unknown to the public. In the hour and a half that I spent talking to Gretel Ehrlich, I learned lots of things I could not find in a book, even in one of her own. I found out that we all should be talking to each other in the same manner. Everyone who cares about the future of our planet should be talking about what’s happening to our ecosystems and what we need to be saying in order to preserve them. We need to do what Gretel Ehrlich has spent her life doing. We need to ground ourselves in sacredness.
Jan Richards: A lot of your writing centers on open spaces and I was wondering what kind of place you grew up in?
Gretel Ehrlich: Well, I grew up on a horse ranch outside of Santa Barbara. So I was just outside a lot. My parents forbade me to be inside the house until dinner time, pretty much, because they thought it was healthy for children to be outside and I concur with that. So we raised horses. I had chores everyday. I took care of foals. We had twenty brood mares, you know, there was just lots to do and I loved it. I can’t remember when I couldn’t ride a horse. I had this outdoor life. I also read voraciously all my life. But I read outside. I would take my books outside and read and wander around on my horse. I rode up into the mountains every afternoon. So that was my young life and I think that kind of set me up for the life I’m leading now. I actually started reading about Buddhism when I was fourteen, in boarding school, and I read the essays of Suzuki. But I wasn’t aware then whether there was a practice that went with it… I then lived in Japan in ’69. I came back and went right to the Los Angeles Zen center.
JR: I was wondering how your belief in Buddhism has influenced the journeys you’ve been on. If that’s involved at all in the process of where you decide to go and what things you are looking for when you get there.
GE: The Buddhist practice is just a part of my life so I can’t quite discern what’s enforced by that thought. I’ve always had a really strong attraction to Asia, especially Japan. I don’t really know why, it’s just been there, built in I think from as long as I can remember. So, I don’t know what influenced what, but certainly the way I understand the world is completely bound up with Buddhists and their world view, I mean it isn’t a belief system. You don’t have to believe anything to be a Buddhist. It’s just a practice. But yeah, I think it influences everything I do, and yet it’s so open-ended that I can go from traveling with subsistence hunters in Greenland to driving in ambulances with the medical battalion of the Kosovo Liberation Army and feel completely at home with both. Buddhism is not theistic. It doesn’t constrain you in any way. And so I feel that I’m just a citizen of the world…..in what Robert Thurman calls “the Buddhisphere.” I live in a Buddhisphere. I’m always interacting with it, and its interacting with me, I suppose.
JR: Do you ever have fears on your trip? Have you ever been afraid of things when you are in such remote places and alone? How do you deal with some of the life-threatening events that happened on those trips and do you concentrate that response in the Buddhist way?
GE: I have been in some kind of dangerous situations. On dogsleds in Northern Greenland we went through the ice once and there was a pretty good possibility of drowning and I was a little frightened. Not really: I mean my first thought was “Oh, at least I’m going to die in a really beautiful place that I love, and with people I admire and respect.” That seemed o.k. (laughter), but at the same time I could see that they were so capable of doing what’s necessary to not get into deep trouble. I became more interested in those moments of watching what they were doing and worrying whether the dogs were drowning, because they all disappeared into the water and were thrashing around. And you know, I guess I try to think less about myself than just about staying awake and aware and seeing what’s going on around me. I’ve been held at gunpoint in Africa and I’ve dodged a few bullets.
JR: Can you tell me a little bit about that?
GE: No, no, its too complicated but, we just got ambushed by some bad people. We were on a big cattle ranch and we had to make a kind of a Western escape, across country, cutting wires and then hiding out in a farm down the road. Bribing our way to the border, that was the best. The best way to bribe people in Africa, well of course there’s always money, but even more effective these days is food. Because everybody’s starving in sub-Saharan Africa. So we just arrived at the border with bags and bags and bags of food, cooked and fresh, and we walked into the border guard’s station with all this food and said “Oh, we’ve just been to a party and we had food left over and we wanted to share it with you.” And we put the food down and he kind of smiled and looked at us and the gate just opened up. Anyway, I think people are fearful because perhaps they haven’t come to terms with the imminence of death, which is everywhere, and it’s all the time. I think that’s why Buddhist practice involves breathing: that you realize between every breath there is a death. That everything is provisional, that impermanence is the real structure of the world. When everything is provisional then anything is possible at any moment, and I think out of that we develop a sense of humor that sort of lightens things. So that even when you’re in serious trouble, you can still think and you cannot be overwhelmed by fear. Of course nobody wants to die, but you just have to take what comes to you every day, take a deep breath and go through it. So I think Buddhist practice really helps with that.
JR: With that in mind, in Cold Heaven you talked about solitude and suffering and privation, and I’m wondering with how you deal with loneliness on a trip like that?
GE: Oh, well I was with people all the time, so my loneliness was sort of the internal kind of loneliness that I carry around with me. Often I was with people for long periods of time without having a common language, although we sit and we make do the way one does. And so I just try to remember that there is no real loneliness, just your perception as separate from others, as well as being sort of molecularly conjoined with everything and always reacting. Grasping and rejecting. And when you try to stop grasping and rejecting all the time then the sharp edges of loneliness start going away. I mean there’s always a sense that you’re alone. The privacy of the mind is something that can be understood by anyone or communicated to anybody, but nobody can understand the contents of consciousness. It’s poignant and it’s ever-present, but it’s not tragic. I sort of see it as something that goes along with being alive and being a human. So, I mean it’s always with me but I can live quite happily with it.
JR: In Cold Heaven when you were talking about suffering, I thought about your trip to China. I was wondering what kind of suffering you saw there and how it influenced you.
GE: Well, the suffering I saw in China was kind of psychological, because of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Their humanity was stripped away. I mean they weren’t allowed to be who they were in any sense of the word. Families were broken apart. Family members were encouraged to betray each other. Mothers were turning their daughters in for having a wrong thought about the regime and this and that. I mean just really crazy making kind of stuff went on. People were executed and tortured. I have a friend there who was a concert pianist, and when they found that out they put him in solitary confinement for ten years and hung him by his thumbs for 24 hours at a time, so it would ruin the ligaments in his hands so he could never play the piano again.
JR: Oh god.
GE: They did stuff like that all the time. So, that’s real suffering. I mean millions of people starved to death as Mao went by in his train with the blinds closed pretending that it wasn’t happening. They were only starving to death because he forbade them to work in the fields, for a period of time when they were supposed to be melting down all the pots and pans and things to make steel so that it could become a great industrial nation. Suffering seems to come from the insanity of a single person, or one or two people who somehow get into power and distort the common sense of the common person. You know, people know how to take care of themselves, how to grow food, how to take care of each other in communities. If people were just left to their own devices I think it would be probably be a better world, a saner world.
JR: I am curious. After you go to these places and then you come back to the United States, I’m wondering how you reconcile the change.
GE: Well, I don’t feel safe in America any more, particularly (laughter).
JR: Most of us, some of us don’t.
GE: Well, I don’t worry about it too much, but, its not a matter of safety, its just a matter of culture shock when you’ve been living with subsistence people on a dog sled on the ice for months, and then you come to the, oh gosh, the materialism of America—its shocking, discouraging. I mean my own home is kind of simple and rustic and bohemian and that’s one thing. But when I see what America represents, I’m just disappointed and kind of shocked at the excess and the hollowness and the loneliness of people and the kind of coldness of people here. On the other hand, when I came back from Greenland—if I had been there in the dark time, in the winter—the first time I got a terrible migraine headache which I’d never had before, because the light was just too much for me. I went and bought a pair of sunglasses and sat in the bathroom at some horrible airport with wet towels on my head.
JR: I have migraines so I know exactly what you’re talking about.
GE: Really. I went home and just kind of hid out for a couple of weeks. But I’m much better at making the transition now. I just try to appreciate where I am when I get over the material reality of America. But, you know I live way out in the country so I sort of feel very happy wherever I am. I mean if I’m there on my own terms. I’m not particularly happy sitting in this hotel room right now, my little cage. I’m happy out in the country, I’m happy in all the places I visit and there’s just beauty and energy and great people and wonderful lives and stories and things everywhere.
JR: Tell me about the moment you first realized you wanted to live in Wyoming.
GE: I’d been living for a few months in Colorado and I got this grant to make a film in Wyoming. I drove up over the lip (I was driving north from Fort Collins to Wyoming) of this big wide plateau, and a whole herd of antelope ran across in front of the car, and a young woman on horseback who had been cowboying, I mean out of nowhere, tied her horse up at a hitch rail and went into the local post office. Which is, sort of, just a post office and bar. And she got off, got her mail, got back on her horse and rode off, and I kept driving and more antelope went racing by, and some elk, and that was it! It took those few seconds—there was this big, big sky, and sagebrush and grass and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and I just had this immense and sudden sense of home. I knew that I was someplace I wanted to be, and nothing else mattered. And I really, could barely, ever leave again. At least by choice.
JR: I know you had to leave once. You had the incident with the lightning. And of course that took you to Greenland, so I’m curious how all of that changed your life. I mean on a broad scale.
GE: Good question! You mean being hit by lightning? (laughter) Well, you know it changed everything. I almost lost my life several times. I lost my ranch, my community, my husband left me, my animals. I lost everything. And I was suddenly in a hospital and then living with my parents. I needed help as well, it was just, you know, an immense loss. It took years to sort of sink in, what exactly I had lost. Yes, so of course it changed my life totally, from being a rancher who lived on the land and didn’t go too many places, to somebody who is always on the road, moving around. You can’t have both though.
JR: After that incident, did it affect your writing in terms of what you sought, the trips you take now?
GE: Well, my life is different so I write about different things. I go places because I don’t have a center from which to write anymore. But I always write, I always have, and I always will, wherever I am, whatever happens.