Response 9: The Solace of Open Spaces

In her essay “The Solace of Open Spaces” Ehrlich connects Wyoming's vast spaces and severe, sudden weather to the way social relations are constructed. Ehrlich asserts that the solitude people live in makes them quiet, that their language is pared-down and communication takes place through silent understanding and interpretation of subtle gestures (6-7). She writes that “people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is a stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals” (11). This description of the way people interact with one another is reminiscent of Ehrlich’s rendering of the unforgiving landscape and weather. Both the bluntness and the severe climate serve to toughen people up. People who live in such isolation must learn to be self-reliant. Ehrlich dramatizes this through anecdotes like the one about her friend who cut off half his foot but stopped to open and close the ranch gate on the way to the hospital. In “The Smooth Skull of Winter” Ehrlich expands upon the idea that “good-naturedness is concomitant with severity” (5) when she discusses the ways in which people help each other during harsh winter months. To illustrate the sense of “camaraderie” (73) that such extreme conditions bring, Ehrlich writes much of this essay using first-person plural, “we” and “our.”

Even though Ehrlich’s connections between Wyoming’s nature and culture do make sense to me, sometimes I find myself doubting her generalizations and questioning her ability to speak for the residents of the state when she has only been living there for eight years. For instance, in “About Men” Ehrlich writes, “In our hellbent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true nature” (49). I find it ironic that she replaces “our” mistaken romanticization with her own. Ehrlich still asserts that there is a true cowboy nature (“his true nature”) and spends the rest of the essay articulating it. At least Ehrlich's characterization has more depth and dimension than a superficial depiction like the Marlboro man, and it adds valuable complexity to the idea of a cowboy, but I still feel like something is missing. Perhaps what's lacking is the perspective of someone who has lived in Wyoming their whole life, and of course Ehrlich can never have this. I can still appreciate and enjoy her work despite this, but her outsider-ness is often in the back of my mind.

I think the landscape of Pittsburgh has influenced the city by making individual neighborhoods more insular and self-contained. Hills and valleys and rivers and mountains create natural boundaries between neighborhoods, and people often seem content to stay in their own areas. Pittsburgh neighborhoods are organized largely according to race and ethnicity, and each has its own business district that reflects the needs and identities of its inhabitants. Much of the city’s commerce and recreation takes place within these neighborhoods, rather than downtown. I haven’t spent much time in other cities so I can’t be sure how different the situation is in Pittsburgh, but I have noticed that downtown is usually an area where people from different neighborhoods come together. Downtown Pittsburgh is certainly not such a place, although it seems to be getting closer.

Pittsburgh grew up around the steel industry and the culture of working in steel mills, and still identifies itself as a scrappy, hard-working, blue-collar town. Workers in steel mills worked long shifts doing punishing, physical work and came to pride themselves on toughness and resiliency. Although the steel industry no longer plays the role it once did, Pittsburghers still define themselves based on the perceived characteristics of steel workers. I think this is especially clear in the way Pittsburghers relate to the Steelers, who are often referred to as a “blue-collar” team. Pride in the steel industry and its workers seems to persist in the city’s football obsession.

These days, many Pittsburghers are originally from other cities, or have parents from other cities. Both of my parents are originally from New York and only moved to Pittsburgh in 1981, although they lived sixty miles away for nine years before that. Many of the friends that I grew up with are also first-generation Pittsburghers. I think this fact dilutes the relationship between nature and culture. In Ehrlich’s essays, I got the sense that most of the people she wrote about came from families who had lived in Wyoming (or at least in the West) for generations. People didn’t seem to move in and out of Wyoming too frequently and so a certain purity of culture was maintained, unpolluted by transplants from other areas. Also, people in Ehrlich’s Wyoming live much closer to the natural landscape than a city girl like me. So while there are connections between the nature and culture of Pittsburgh, I think they might be a little harder to see and difficult to generalize about.