I’m just reading Western writers this month. I’m impatient with New York and Los Angeles angst,  big city stress, mid-western claustrophobia, and deep South drama. I want landscape and weather and self-reliance so I’m reading Thomas McGuane (whose two page essay about horses in Meredith Brokaw’s Big Sky Cooking is worth buying the book for), Ivan Doig, Barry Lopez, and Gretel Ehrlich. This quote comes from Ehrlich’s beautiful book The Solace of Open Spaces which I’m reading for the second time: 

"Because ranch work is a physical and, these days, economic strain, being "home on the range" is a matter of vigor, self-reliance, and common sense.  A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulations of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place."

Take a look also at her book about being struck by lightening (literally), A Match to the Heart.