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.