New York -- This is the last thing writer Gretel Ehrlich remembers before her heart stopped beating in August 1991: She was out walking with her two dogs on her ranch in Wyoming when she heard the distant sound of thunder. Knowing that one of her dogs was afraid of thunder she called him to her. "Don't worry, Sam," she said. "You're safe as long as you're with me."

The next thing Gretel Ehrlich remembers is something she describes as a "coming-back-to-life dream:"

I was underwater, deep in the ocean, in some kind of moribund state. The water was gray and I could see the kelp and the fish lying dead below me. For a long time I was suspended in the ocean like that. And then I heard a heartbeat. Just a single heartbeat. And then I heard another one. There was a long space between the beats. Finally, they started coming more rapidly.

What she was hearing, Ms. Ehrlich says now, was the sound of her heart starting up again. The vision continued:

I saw the gray water being pushed away and blue water began swirling in. The kelp started coming up again and the fish started swimming by. Then suddenly my beloved dogs appeared. They were harnessed together like sled dogs . . . They came down from the sky toward me. And somehow I got harnessed in with them, and they turned around and went back up toward the light.

She woke from this vision to find herself lying in a pool of blood, her legs and right arm paralyzed. She tried to call out but the

muscles in her throat were paralyzed. Breathing was difficult and she was wracked with deep chest pains. Thoughts raced through her mind: Had she been shot in the back by a hunter? Was it a stroke? A heart attack?

Suddenly she became aware of the sound of thunder exploding over her. Streaks of lightning zigzagged through the darkened sky. It began raining. And suddenly she knew what had happened: "Oh God," she thought, "I have been struck by lightning."

It was a direct hit. She lay there in terrible pain, thinking: "I am going to die. I've got to get my thoughts together and not be frightened. I must lie here and die properly."

Ms. Ehrlich, 48, who has been a Buddhist practitioner for most of her life, recalls with some wryness her attempts to "die properly."

"I rolled over on my right side -- because that's the side you're supposed to lie on. And then I twisted myself until I faced east . . ." She stops and laughs. "I'm not sure what I was doing. But I'm lying there and eventually I thought, 'Well, I guess I'm not going to die. At least not now.' " In the act of preparing herself to die, she passed out.

The fact that Ms. Ehrlich did not die on the spot still amazes the cardiologist who later treated her. "Anyone struck as badly as she was -- usually they die immediately," says Dr. Blaine Braniff. "She's very lucky."

Lucky to have survived, absolutely. But Gretel Ehrlich's encounter with one of nature's furies was hardly over, as she recounts in her recently published book, "A Match to the Heart."

In many ways, her ordeal was just beginning.

*

Gretel Ehrlich limps into a midtown Manhattan hotel and sits down to an interview over coffee and orange juice. No, she says, laughing, the limp is not the result of the lightning strike. "I had a horse wreck. He fell in a ravine and landed on top of me." It's nothing out of the ordinary, happens all the time -- horse wrecks and cow wrecks -- when you're working a 3,000-acre ranch as she has for the last 17 years. "Ranch life prepares you for these kinds of things," she says. "You get used to being in pain and used to toughing it out. Being physically vulnerable is part of everyday life."

But being struck by lightning is not. Even if you're Gretel Ehrlich, a woman who "virtually lives outdoors all the time."

A naturalist's eye

There is more than a little irony to be found in Ms. Ehrlich's near-lethal confrontation with nature. In her life as a writer, she has emerged as one of nature's most eloquent -- and respectful -- observers.

Her first book, "Solace of Open Spaces," appeared in 1985. A collection of essays about ranch life in Wyoming, it immediately established her reputation as a nature writer who ranked with the likes of Wallace Stegner and Annie Dillard. In that book and others that followed she presented nature not only as the benign host of incredible beauty but also as a harsh and unpredictable force. Once, commenting on her role as an observer of nature, she said: "I am its humble student of violent weather, endless drought, wild diversity, surprising and profound beauty -- almost impossible to calculate."

Now Ms. Ehrlich, the humble student of nature, turns her naturalist's eye inward as well as outward. In her new book, "A Match to the Heart," she examines the physical, spiritual and psychological consequences of being struck by lightning. The physical consequences, even after three years, still play a role in how she lives her life.

"I still get really tired," she says, sipping black coffee. "I used to do everything all the time, 24 hours a day. There was nothing that was too much for me. And now I have to be really careful about how I expend energy."

East and West

A woman who comes across as both outgoing and introspective, Ms. Ehrlich doesn't look like someone who knows how to "cowboy" (a word used as a verb out West) with the best of them, to ride and rope and punch cattle, to be a midwife to lambs and calves, and to survive 30-below-zero winter nights. Dressed in black, silver bracelets circling her wrists, her long, blond hair spilling over her shoulders, she looks like a sophisticated New Yorker enjoying a late breakfast before hitting Madison Avenue.

She knows New York; in fact, has lived there for brief periods. In the 1960s, while studying dance at Bennington College, she spent a semester in Manhattan with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe. Later, after attending film school at UCLA, she spent a year and a half working as a film editor for educational television. It was a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that sent her to Wyoming to do a documentary on sheepherders. When her fiance and film partner died during the project, Ms. Ehrlich decided to stay on in Wyoming.

Originally from Santa Barbara, Calif., she grew up in a well-to-do family where she and her older sister learned to sail and ride the horses they raised on their 6-acre estate.

"Growing up, I had a real outdoorsy life," she says now. "It was just from college through my 20s that I lived an urbane life. Which I loved. But I've always had a pretty intense connection with nature."

An appropriate encounter

And what of the recent encounter with lightning, she is asked? The one that almost killed her? Has that changed the way she views nature? Is she more afraid? More respectful?

"I think it's just made the connection stronger," she says. A long pause follows. Then: "I think it's completely appropriate that nature almost did me in. To me it's the most appropriate way of dying. That's why I've never been afraid on a ranch. To get lost in a blizzard or hit by lightning or eaten up by a grizzly bear or fallen on by a horse just seems like the perfect engagement in life. And if that brings death to your doorstep . . . well, you're living to the fullest at the point that you die. That's what I suppose anyone would want."

This does not mean, however, that Ms. Ehrlich has plans to go gentle into that good night. Any adversary -- including nature -- can expect quite a struggle from this small but strong woman. "I was willing to die if that's what was going to happen," she says now of that afternoon in 1991. "But I wasn't going to lie out there and let myself die. The survival instinct is real strong."

When Ms. Ehrlich's eyes blinked open for the second time on that August afternoon in 1991 she saw a sky lit up with fingers of lightning. Rain was pouring down on her. Still in terrible pain, but with some feeling now in her legs, she wondered what to do. She knew that no one would come looking for her, since she had just separated from her husband and was living alone. But she also knew that staying there meant disaster. Thoughts raced through her head: I am going to die of exposure and then the eagles and ravens will come and start feeding on me.

But there was an even worse thought: I am going to be hit by lightning again . . . I have got to get out of here.

The earth felt as though it were rolling back and forth like some sort of boiling liquid, but somehow she got to her feet. She looked for the dogs she had raised and loved. They were gone; dead, perhaps. She started off for her house, a quarter of a mile away.

"I had no equilibrium and was partially paralyzed," says Ms. Ehrlich now of her physical condition at the time. "Nothing worked very well. I would lift up each leg to make a step and then put it down. I kept falling over and then would have to get up again."

The rescuing dogs

Somehow she reached her home. She blew the horn on her car, hoping to attract someone's attention. No one heard. She couldn't speak because her throat muscles were still paralyzed, but she discovered she could scream. She picked up the phone, dialed 911 and screamed for help. Then she passed out.

Once again, she had a vision of her dogs bringing her back to consciousness: "Dark again," she writes. "Pressing against sore ribs, my dogs pulled me out of the abyss, pulled and pulled . . . I opened my eyes, looked up, and saw neighbors. Had they come for my funeral?" She later learned the dogs had run home and been found, frightened but alive.

"It's weird," she says, referring to the role her dogs played in her recovery. "For the next year I probably lost consciousness thousands oftimes. And every time I lost consciousness completely and would make this slow descent into blackness, I'd have this vision of the dogs coming down and getting me and bringing me back up."

The dogs took on an importance that went beyond her previous deep attachment to them. Throughout her recovery, she says, "I had to have at least one of them with me."

Ms. Ehrlich was struck by lightning at about 5 in the afternoon, but by the time the emergency medical team got her to the local hospital, it was 9 p.m. The doctor on call confirmed that Ms. Ehrlich, whose eyeballs had turned red and whose hair was burned off the side of her head, had been hit by lightning. No other tests were done because the hospital equipment, including the EKG machine, was not in working order. The hospital experience turned into something resembling the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

"Get yourself out of that hospital," her regular doctor, who was on vacation, told her over the phone the next morning, "and go somewhere else, anywhere." In the next 10 days, Ms. Ehrlich was told by three doctors that there was nothing wrong with her. "The problem is that most doctors don't know much about lightning injuries," she says. "They just don't know what to do. But the negligence came in that they weren't interested in following through and finding out what to do."

Fatal phenomenon

In her book, Ms. Ehrlich notes that "in the United States there are several thousand lightning-related injuries reported every year with almost 600 deaths, a figure which makes lightning responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other natural phenomenon."

As the weeks dragged on and her symptoms grew worse, Ms. Ehrlich wondered if she might become a mortality statistic. Despite what the doctors were telling her, she knew something was very wrong.

"Many times I thought I was going to die," she recalls. "I could just barely stay conscious. It was like there was a black line drawn halfway across my eyes. I had trouble formulating thoughts and speaking." On a day that she thought might be her last, she called her parents in Santa Barbara. Four hours later, her father arrived in a chartered plane and brought her back to her childhood home. Her mother had arranged for a cardiologist to see her.

Close to comatose

"When I arrived, this amazing doctor was there waiting for me," Ms. Ehrlich says, referring to Dr. Blaine Braniff. "At the time I had almost no blood pressure, I had a heartbeat of 25 and I was going into a sort of coma. I could hear the doctor telling my mother, "I can't believe she's still alive."

Gretchen Ehrlich, Gretel's mother, was also waiting for her daughter in Santa Barbara. "I was in a state of shock when I saw her," says Mrs. Ehrlich. "Normally, she's a very strong person physically. But she could just barely talk. And she was having terrible chest pains."

On the way to Dr. Braniff's office, Gretel lapsed into an unconscious state. The next thing she remembers is waking up to the sound of a voice saying, "I can't find a pulse."

Mrs. Ehrlich moved closer to her daughter, praying that she would be all right.

When Ms. Ehrlich recounts this part of the story, her voice trembles slightly. "I looked up and my mother was standing next to me, stroking my arm. I couldn't talk or move and I looked at her and at that moment all of the distance and sometimes troubled years -- all that just went away. Totally. It was just that moment of unconditional love and acceptance that we all long for."

Dr. Braniff then carried Gretel to his car and drove her to the emergency cardiac unit of a nearby hospital. It was there, under the watchful eye of Dr. Braniff, that she began her long journey back to health.

What they found was that the lighting had severely damaged her sympathetic nervous system, an injury that confused her body's ability to stimulate the proper activity in the heart, blood vessels, stomach and sweat glands. She was put on a regimen of round-the-clock medications and rest. The symptoms did not go away for almost a year and there were several times when Ms. Ehrlich felt close to dying.

"I think she was close to dying a few times," says Dr. Braniff. "You need a certain blood pressure to maintain an adequate flow of blood through the arteries in the heart. And she didn't have that."

Getting well

Over the next two years Ms. Ehrlich spent most of her time near the water in Santa Barbara, resting and slowly gaining strength. It was not the way she was used to living her life. "Here I was living in this beach house, just lying there like a blob, asking Blaine what was going to happen next," she says now. "Nobody knew. But he kept saying, 'You're getting better every day. And you will continue to get better every day. It just may take a few years.'"

She worried about this new self who had emerged from the lightning strike. "I was afraid that I'd have to live this dopey life, living on the beach in some sequestered community and go for itty-bitty walks every day and have this physically inactive life. Which was depressing to me."

Another more subtle concern arose: Had her writing powers, her acute sense of observation, been diminished by the lightning damage? "At first it was really hard to focus outward. But I was still registering things in an inward, quiet way. It's just that I could only take in so much."

It was her editor at Pantheon, Daniel Frank, who suggested she write a book about her experience. "I didn't have any doubts about her writing ability," Mr. Frank says. "But she did. I think she was at a point in her life when she was going through a period of despair. Her marriage was falling apart at the time, she was not well and on medications . . . She is a woman of some independence who has always managed to do things ruggedly and I think the physical limitations scared her."

Divorced now from her husband, Ms. Ehrlich lives in the Santa Barbara area and spends summers in Wyoming. "I intend always to have a presence in Wyoming," she says. "I'm actively looking for a place, but I still don't feel that I could live the life I used to live."

There are other changes in Gretel Ehrlich. "I think I am a quieter person," she says simply. "I'm not as aggressive about life."

She speaks of a Japanese monk who visited her during her illness and told her: "You have always been so strong. Now it is time to learn about being weak."

She smiles. "What I hope I've learned from this experience is how to be weak. How to have this combination of strength and weakness . . . And how to work from both those things at the same time so that you're doing more than just punching out a life all the time."