THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407270425
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
A MATCH TO THE HEART
GRETEL EHRLICH
Pantheon. 200 pp. $21.
IN SEPTEMBER 1991, about one month before the Old Dominion University Literary Festival was to begin, I called Gretel Ehrlich to reconfirm the time of her reading and her travel plans. As festival director, I was disappointed when she told me that she would not be able to participate, but she stunned me into silence with her excuse: ``I was struck by lightning last month.''
Like most people, perhaps, I assumed that those struck by lightning either died or became the stuff of mythology. But lightning strikes, and the survivors of those strikes, are more common than I thought.
Nearly 1,800 thunderstorms occur every moment on Earth, and lightning strikes the planet 100 times each second. In the United States alone, 40 million strikes occur each year, roughly 300 of them direct strikes on humans. Three out of 10 people die as a result of the 10 million to 30 million volts that pass through them in 1/1,000 to 1/10,000 of a second.
Gretel Ehrlich, poet, novelist and essayist, is one of the survivors, and A Match To The Heart records the story of her two-year recovery as a journey back from death. It is a meticulous piece of reporting on lightning strikes, on the effects to the heart and the brain, but it is a far bigger book than that. It is a piece of philosophy, of poetry, a story that takes us to the same deep places that myth takes us - on the hero's journey - into the farthest reaches of the self.
Ehrlich, 48, has published two books of poetry, a novel and a collection of short stories, but perhaps she is best known for one of her two books of essays, The Solace of Open Spaces, a lyrical memoir about her life on a Western ranch. It was on that ranch in Wyoming, a state that has the highest death rate per capita from lightning, that ``electricity carved its blue path'' toward her as she was walking with her two dogs on Aug. 6, 1991. The force of the bolt was so strong that it threw her 40 feet; she struck her left side with such force that she broke her ribs, but the jolt may have saved her life, causing her heart to begin beating again after the electricity sent her into cardiac arrest.
After she realizes that most within the medical profession have little idea how to deal with the effects of lightning strikes, Ehrlich returns, half-dead, to Santa Barbara, Calif., her childhood home. There, slowly, she comes back to life. At first disoriented by the lightning, eventually she begins to see clearly, a poet squinting curiously at her new-found world, cherishing her new life.
``How could I have been so uncurious?'' she asks. ``If I held a match to my heart, would I be able to see its workings . . . would I know my body the way I know a city . . . would I know where the passion to live and love comes from?''
A Match To The Heart is about Ehrlich's quest to regain her health, to see beyond the fog that ``rolled in like a form of sorrow.'' She comes to learn that change is a form of equilibrium. She leaves behind her beloved Wyoming, a failed marriage, the solace of open spaces, but she brings Sam, her dog and close companion, who was also struck by lightning. As they walk along the California shoreline, Sam assists in the healing process by helping her to see, until a minute vision of the world brings her back to life: ``Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that went up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.'' When she can use lightning as a metaphor, she is beginning to heal.
It is in her friendship with her physician, Blaine Braniff, that she truly regains her equilibrium. With lightning comes the loss of dreams, but with Braniff's sympathetic care, Ehrlich begins to dream again. At times the book seems to be as much about Braniff, a cardiologist, and the chemistry of healing as it is about Ehrlich. But if this is the story of the hero's journey back from the dead, then Braniff is the wise man who must be encountered en route.
One of the lightning victims with whom Ehrlich speaks in her attempt to understand her own situation explains that she woke up one night and did not know what her name was. She looked across at her husband and knew his name, but she did not know her own. ``I lay there for a long time but nothing came into my mind. Who was I? Finally I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got up, found my driver's license and had to study my picture and my name. Once I knew who I was, I could sleep.''
Ehrlich, too, is searching for something - a meaning for her experience, a connection, between the lightning and her life, and the understanding of her heart. The lightning hurled her from the human community; her story is the fight to re-enter. Each of her actions leads her back toward life and love, toward the forming of a new exposed skin, her own heart pumping, pulsing with life. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches journalism and English at Old Dominion
University in Norfolk and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys
into Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
[WILLIAM WEBB]
In ``A Match To The Heart,'' Gretel Ehrlich recounts her recovery
from near-death.
by CNB