An Explorer of the Territory Within

Here’s a real woman for you. Gretel Ehrlich has been hit by lightning, operated her own ranch in Wyoming and been seal and walrus hunting on a monthlong trek in Greenland by dogsled. Her new book, “This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland” (Pantheon) is an internal Iditarod. Does she whine about the cold? No. Do her feet hurt? “Can’t remember.” Is she ever afraid? “What is there to be afraid of?” Ehrlich is a Buddhist, born and raised in Santa Barbara. Buddhists have their own machismo. A “stop whining, stop judging and start living” kind of machismo. It is daunting.

The lines on Ehrlich’s face are daunting. Her weathered skin and complete calm are daunting. The level of certainty she has achieved about herself and her instincts, wherever they may take her, is also daunting. (She’ll write a piece before she knows who will publish it, even if it involves extensive investments of time and money, though she has mortgage payments just like everyone else).

When Ehrlich fell in love with Greenland almost 10 years ago, she had already lived many lives. She’d written 11 books, won prizes ranging from an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in 1981 to a Guggenheim in 1988, and her work had been anthologized in just about every collection of Western literature. A regular contributor to Harper’s, she had established a reputation on both coasts as a Western writer in love with open spaces, horses and dogs, and an adventurous traveler with a clear but painterly eye.

Love had been hard on Ehrlich. She had been married young, to a man she really loved, but in 1975, just six months into their life together in Wyoming, working on a documentary about sheepherders, he was taken by cancer. She worked her sadness to the bone, renting a place for $45 a month and working as a ranch hand, delivering calves in the middle of the night, doing her chores on skis. She stayed outside all the time, whenever possible above the tree line.

She had written enough pieces on the north, Alaska and the Arctic, to know that it was a place she could relax and see clearly through what promised to be a difficult decade. Both parents, at home in Santa Barbara, were ill and dying. Her mother was going blind, and Ehrlich herself was recovering from, well, death.

The lightning that struck her in 1991 had damaged her heart, and it would take years of the kind of recovery most people do in bed to get it up and running again. Her book based on that experience, called “A Match to the Heart” (Pantheon, 1994), was reviewed in The Times by an awed Michael Dorris, who called it “a dazzling work of art.”

Ehrlich wrote a 1992 piece for Harper’s on Arctic Canada, and one on Greenland in 1997. She began reading the diaries of polar explorer Knud Rasmussen and got on a plane. “This Cold Heaven” opens with the exuberance she first felt looking down from the plane as it flew beyond the tree line.

Trees, she says, remind her of “emotional entanglements,” “the realm of human sorrows.” Perhaps she also wanted to explore a place where light and dark lost their traditional meaning to better understand her mother’s worsening blindness. Ehrlich’s explanation is simpler. “I just go places where I feel happy,” she says over a flagrantly hedonistic lunch at Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, the city where she lived long ago. “I don’t want to know too much about what makes me tick because that’s illusory. Once you conclude these things, it’s like hardening of the arteries. I want to be in places where there’s clarity and no distractions. You have to give yourself over to the beauty of things and not engage in things that are self-aggrandizing or involve self-drama. The practice is to keep reality reality. I’m the lens, when I travel, a human lens, that has no need to do anything that benefits ego.”

The Search for a Resting Place

Ehrlich seems to carry her happiness on her back like a turtle, as though you could put her down anywhere and she’d be OK. “Yup, just give me some seal ribs,” she says, washing down tuna sashimi with champagne, “and I’ll be happy.” She wears a bracelet of wooden beads with a red tassel, which keeps dipping into the jasmine tea. “I’ve spent my time in cities,” she says. “And it’s OK. I studied theater, I went to Bennington and UCLA film school, I lived in New York for a while. But the north is the best place to rest.”

Between Oct. 24 and early February, remember, the sun does not rise in Greenland. The Inuit, she writes, love this time. They go visiting at all hours, they mend things, and smoke and talk and, yes, drink. Families sleep all together. Rarely are there separate bathrooms. More often, pots serve as toilets. These are details, along with wife trading and a different approach to monogamy from the one our own culture professes to have, that other travelers to Greenland have spent a great deal of time coming to terms with. Not Ehrlich. She notes the details of her daily life among the Inuit, but never seems to mind habits different from her own or pass judgment. “I don’t go into someone else’s culture with ideas about how they live,” she says. “Everything they do makes complete sense to me. My job is to see the context.”

As in her other books, Ehrlich saves her dramatic writing for natural beauty: “Walking back to my perched house, I see that out on the bay one collapsed iceberg holds a tiny lake in its center, a turquoise eye glancing upward. The moon comes up in the east as if it were a sun rising, and for the second time in one day the mountains go bright.

“Today winter was a burning lake, and I watched it catch fire.”

Early Difficulties With Saying Goodbye

Gretel Ehrlich, who is in her mid-50s, comes from Danish-Bavarian-German-Jewish stock. Her father always wanted to ranch. The family had a house in Mexico City and a house in Santa Barbara, full of animals. There was a great respect for differences between people, and a huge respect for animals. Oddly, however, Ehrlich hated traveling. She remembers it as being wrenching to say goodbye to the animals. “I hated change. If my mother changed the furniture in the living room, I’d cry.” Strange for a person whose cultural observations are so free of judgment and whose relationships with people she meets are extremely close, yet free of clinging attachments.

“Peter Matthiessen [another Buddhist writer] says that what attracts some of us to nonattachment is that we need [attachment] more than other people.”

In “This Cold Heaven,” Ehrlich meets a young girl named Marie Louisa in the village of Illorsuit. Marie Louisa is 11 now and living in Denmark with her father but was only 5 when Ehrlich, who is childless, first stayed with her family. They took long walks together, and formed a common language, though neither of them spoke the other’s. When Ehrlich left by ferry, the girl sobbed and followed in a skiff and could not be comforted. The girl and the woman formed a bond that has a tremendous power in the book. This is as close as Ehrlich gets to attachment.

Men pass across her horizon, and she describes one in particular as being so lit from within that she feels the impulse to have his child (but doesn’t). Another man she mentions in the book is wrenchingly handsome and therefore dangerous. An Inuit man wants to marry her, but emotional entanglement is not what she is searching for. (At lunch, the waiter tries to take away her potstickers to make room for the next course. She picks up her chopsticks, looking as ferocious and humorous as an Inuit mask, and makes them into horns on her head. He runs away.)

She Feels at Home Living to the Extreme

Conditions were extreme--subzero temperatures, a pure protein diet of narwhal, seal and walrus, not to mention months without light.

But it seems that the physical preparation was the least of it, and that Buddhist equanimity helped a great deal with preparations for the internal Iditarod. “I’ve always spent a lot of time outside,” she says. “I discovered living in Wyoming that the best way to fix cabin fever was to go [cross-country] skiing every day for an hour. I’ve never had central heating in my life.” Ehrlich is having a house built now in Wyoming, and hopes to spend more time there. Asked how many head of cattle she has, she laughs. “That’s a question you never ask a rancher,” she says. “It’s like saying, how much money do you have?”

Ehrlich, who now spends her down time in a small town on the coast just north of Santa Barbara, is working on a novel, a great joy, she says, because she is free of ethnographic notes, free to invent. She’s a slave, she says, to the characters, and to invention rather than facts.

Every so often, she’ll throw out a chapter, toss it in the trash, unceremoniously. “Hell, we throw out the newspaper every day, and there’s plenty of good writing there.” She’s also working on a piece of nonfiction about a man in Africa who is studying sustainable models of civilization in an effort to stop the desertification of the world. She describes him as “one of the great visionaries of the West.”

But betraying her status as a rather famous writer, she says she’d rather not talk about either one of these projects. It’s too early.

Fear Conquered by Embracing One’s Self

I can’t resist asking once more if Ehrlich is ever afraid, because it makes sense that a life outdoors might be one way to conquer all kinds of fears. She says that fear is something we create to “populate our loneliness.”

Asked to explain, she says, “We splinter ourselves into unrelated moods and fears and needs, but the essential self stays the same. Why should I feel lonely one moment and not the next? There’s a sameness to all these moods--fear, loneliness--but there is an essential self that doesn’t change. You see it when you see animals being born. The foal stands, wobbles, shakes its head, and there is its personality, the one that you will come to know.” Ehrlich shakes her head in perfect imitation of a young foal being born.

It’s part theater and part Buddhism.