John Ford and Henry David Thoreau ride together through Wyoming

The great epic journey that forms the foundation of American political and cultural mythology is the one that, during the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, brought the pioneers and settlers from the east of the country westward. It was a journey, both concrete and symbolic, from the hierarchical, teeming, and unjust civilization of the first cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—to the deserts, plains, forests, rivers, and mountains of a vast territory where the promise of a free, equal, and prosperous life lay. The comfort of the open airIn Gretel Ehrlich's (1946) autofiction, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in Catalan in a reliable translation by Yannick Garcia, we are told of an individual journey that is the reverse of that foundational collective journey.

Ehrlich, born and raised on a Californian ranch in Santa Barbara, began to build a career in the film industry. Everything was going smoothly, but in 1976, while she was in Wyoming filming a movie, the man she loved, with whom she had decided to try to build a future together, died of a sudden cancer. Overnight, Ehrlich's life collapsed, and she only began to figure out what to do with the wreckage when she chose not to return to California and to stay in Wyoming. In a short time, she went from filming movies to herding a flock of two thousand sheep along a "long stretch of sheep" hundreds of kilometers long. The comfort of the open air It is the sober, intelligent and poetic account of that life change and the process of adapting to an extreme and unique reality: that of the ranches and cowboys of deep America.

Imagine a book where the westerns of John Ford and Anthony Mann resonate in unusual harmony with the pantheistic transcendence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. That is to say: on the one hand, the stark, unexpressive harshness of men and women deformed by lives that can only be endured through stoicism and a will to resist, and, on the other, the intelligent and empathetic sensitivity of those who are capable of finding meaning in the wild magnificence of nature and also of finding tenderness in it.

This is the main virtue of Ehrlich's book: how he combines, thanks to precise and vivid prose—meditative, ironic, and lyrical at the same time—a melting pot of highly heterogeneous human and literary elements. In the slightly more than two hundred pages that make up the book, we find the chronicle of a daily life marked by exhausting and never-ending work (raising animals, herding them, protecting them, running a business), the record of the passing seasons (with their freezing winters and scorching summers), their capacity to both inspire wonder and to isolate, destroy, or drive one mad, and the vivid and endearing parade of characters who both confirm the stereotypes we've been taught (they are conservative, unsociable, laconic, and direct) and deny them (they are also supportive and compassionate)...

Ehrlich's life has ultimately not been that of a rancher, but that of a writer renowned for her essays, travel books, and poetry. I haven't read any of her other books, but this one, the first she wrote and published, exudes a worldly and rhetorical wisdom that is unforgettable. She writes: "True comfort is not finding it, which means it is everywhere."