Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place

Much the way Donald Hall’s Seasons at Eagle Pond captured New England, Sky Time in Gray’s River captures the essence of the rural Northwest. Although Rober Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, and southwestern Washington is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the village of Gray's River spoke to him on a visit thirty years ago. Ever since then he has lived in the village, which was one of the first to be established near the mouth of the Columbia River and which still feels only tenuously connected to the twenty-first century. Sky Time brings Gray's River to life by compressing those thirty years into twelve chapters, following the lives of its people, birds, butterflies - and cats- month by month through the seasons.

In showing how the village has changed his life, Pyle illustrates how a special place can change anyone lucky enough to find it and highlights what is being lost in a world of accelerating speed, mobility, and sameness. Above all, Sky Time tells us that you dont have to travel far to see something new every day - if you know how to look.

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An ecologist and author of Chasing Monarchs reflects on the everyday natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest as he describes the lives of plants, animals, and humans through every season of the year during his thirty years living in the village of Gray's River, near the mouth of the Columbia River.

Beforetimes Going to Ground in Gray’s River

“To go to ground”—an English fox-hunting term, meaning “into a burrow or hole in the ground, ‘to earth’”; as in “When a Fox goes to ground, after a long chase . . .”With respect to the digging of Foxes which hounds run to ground.
—Oxford English Dictionary

Walking to the compost this morning, I was arrested by the sight of a leaf pinioned on a rush spike. The bunch of rushes grows in a pot in the corner of the heather garden. The leaf was birch, clear yellow spattered with remnant green. It hung there, impaled as it fell from the tall white wand of the birch. Shivering on the light November air, the leaf was like a moment of grace before the fall. The compost heap shone bright with still more leaves of maple, oak, and hornbeam, spattered among bracts of Brussels sprouts, over- the-hill red currants, and the collapsed brainpan of a jack o’ lantern—the exuviae of a satisfied autumn and its festivals. Returning to the house, I paused as always to rinse the white china chamber pot in the spray of a standing spigot. Just before tossing the water onto the heather, I noticed a struggling spider in the chilly swirl. Spiders up spouts suffer a well-known fate, and so it had. But rescued with an oak leaf, it unfolded just fine. When I placed it on the spigot post, I saw a rotund female of another species, a big native orb weaver, hunched up under the handle. The skinnier one crawled back into its shelter, apparently uninjured by the dunking. So the two spiders had been there together at this late date, somehow surviving the harsh frosts and heavy rains of recent mornings. As I approached the back porch a Steller’s jay rocketed off, screaming that the kibbles were all gone from the cat’s dish. An elegant Anderson’s slug, slender, yellow-rimmed, reticulated, glided away from the bowl too. From the doorway I noticed a flutter in a tall English oak by the drive. The first-year Townsend’s warblers that had come for Thanksgiving were still there, flickering through the tawny foliage together while chickadees and kinglets loitered off to the side. The migrant warblers’ lemony breasts and faces were as bright as the slug’s mantle; their presence was as unexpected as a pair of spiders in late autumn, their gift as sudden and fleeting as a birch leaf on a rush spike.

ONE APRIL DAY in 1970, I drove a wide circle through southwest Washington in search of early-season butterflies to photograph. Very few were yet on the wing, and I came home with only one good shot, a linen-fresh margined white basking next to a new leaf of its host plant, toothwort. I also brought back a vision of the kind of place where I would spend most of my life. My random route took me through several broad, low valleys where streams ran down through green velvet pastures between low evergreen hills to Puget Sound or the Pacific Ocean. To an urban visitor, these valleys looked both bucolic and idyllic. The sun was out that day, giving the rural prospects an uncommon luminosity that intensified their magnetism. I decided then and there that I would someday like to live in such a valley: a place where I could see something new every time I stepped outside. Now that they are in their fifties, as I am, many of my friends are just beginning to seek a permanent home. Work or adventure has taken them here and there, to this house and that, and at last they hope to find abodes that will see them happily into old age. They may think I settled into my long- term habitation awfully early, though it seemed none too soon to me at the time. I had grown up in a Colorado suburb, gone to college in Washington and Connecticut, lived and worked in California, England, New Guinea, and Oregon, dwelling in some twenty homes along the way. I had long idealized a rural or edge-of-wildland domicile that would serve as a “central repository” for my stuff and a warm retreat from which I could range outward into the world. I knew several biologists and writers who had indeed established such holts, but usually only after retiring from a long academic, bureaucratic, or journalistic career. What right had I, a mere whippersnapper, to a country seat?
My family had once owned several ranches in western Colorado, any one of which might have been a perfect place for me to live. But they had been lost since the Depression or before, so I had no patrimony of land to which I might repair. I would have to find and adopt my own home place. My ideal of a naturalist’s abode was Trail Wood, the old New England farmstead where Edwin and Nellie Teale made their final home after Long Island became too populous for them. In his book A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, Teale describbed the arduous process of finding the right place and the success that finally came through the grace of happenstance. I expected that it wooooould be many years before it was time for me to settle, and I would have to make just such a search. The only similarity between my search and the Teales’ was the good luck. It happened like this. My first long-term job, with the Nature Conservancy in Portland, Oregon, involved a great deal of travel and furnished a ration of stress. The gallery job that my wife at that time, Sally Hughes, held was also stressful. Yet our combined salaries were too small even for the tiny shack under the abutments of the St. John’s Bridge in North Portland that we considered buying. We dreamed of retreating to the country.
That summer of 1978 I had a field assistant, a teenager from Ithaca, New York, named David Shaw. On weekends David and I often prowled terra incognita for butterflies within a day’s drive of Portland. On August 30 we ferried across the Columbia River to Wahkiakum County, Washington, where no butterflies had been recorded. I didn’t know at the time that most days it rains in Wahkiakum County. This day the sun shone hard. We found a few butterflies on pastoral Puget Island, netted a few more up the Elochoman River out of Cathlamet, then drove up into the Willapa Hills and crossed the Gray’s River Divide to the west on logging roads. We came down from the hills not long before sunset into Gray’s River Valley. Three years previously, a friend named Denny Gillespie had taken Sally and me here—in the rain—to see a number of historic buildings and to look for butterflies. Remembering a nearby covered bridge from that visit, I proposed that we look for it. “Heck, New York is full of covered bridges,” said David. “Let’s get back for dinner.” I began to turn left on State Route 4 to return to Portland. Then I realized that I wanted to see the covered bridge, and I was in charge. I turned west instead. After we crossed through the bridge and paused on the other side of the river, I beheld a green valley much like the ones I’d fallen in love with eight years before. Then I looked up and saw an old white farmhouse perched among huge hardwood trees. English oaks, red oaks, black walnuts, European beeches and birches, Scots pines, sugar maples, and one great Port Orford cedar all loomed over the place. FOR SALE BY OWNER said the sign by the road. “That’s where I want to live,” I told David, and set off to find the owner. Ed Sorenson was away, but his son, Merle, showed me around the place. The next day Sally and I made an offer. We borrowed money for a down payment, closed at Christmas, weekended all winter, and moved in June. I have essentially lived here ever since. Lives change, and after greatly enhancing the fabric and gardens of the place, Sally returned to her native Eng- land in

Robert Michael Pyle is the author of fourteen books, including Chasing Monarchs, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Wintergreen, which won the John Burroughs Medal. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is a full-time writer living in southwestern Washington.

Twenty years ago, in Wintergreen , his first book about the Willapa Hills in southwestern Washington State, nature writer Pyle (Chasing Monarchs ) noted that the forests of Willapa, though ravaged by logging, still "offer surprisingly much to the observant naturalist whose expectations are not too high." Now Pyle once again writes about the wildlife and plant life of his place of residence for the past 30 years. While the earlier book painted a broad picture, this one focuses on small details and everyday experiences. In 12 chapters spanning January through December, Pyle takes us on long walks, showing us what is growing each season and what the many different birds are doing at any given time. Inside his house, he tells us stories about the bees in the wall, describes how he found a small dehydrated bat in the bedroom and nourished it back to health, and gives an exhaustive inventory of the contents of an old rat's nest in the rafters. We encounter an assortment of neighbors and attend local festivals and meetings. Pyle has the ability to find wonder in the mundane and beauty in the unpretentious. His appreciation of nature helps us look at the world around us with more wonder. Highly recommended for Pacific Northwest and natural history collections.â€"Ilse Heidmann, Washington State Lib., Olympia

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Gray's River, one of the earliest settled communities near the mouth of rural Washington's Columbia River, remains a relatively isolated place, connected to the rest of the state by just one narrow highway. Pyle (author of 14 books, including Chasing Monarchs and Where Bigfoot Walks ) has lived there for almost 30 years, gradually fitting into the self-reliant community. There, villagers recently rallied, unsuccessfully, to save the local post office, located for decades on an elderly resident's enclosed front porch, and still take pleasure in phone service provided by a local company founded in 1927 and now run by the first owner's son. This luxuriant account of an ordinary year among the flora, fauna and folks of the countrysideâ€"where the author's daily walk to the compost heap "is the closest thing I know to sacrament"â€"focuses as much on bats, butterflies and the pleasure of fresh berries as it does on people. His pensive account of the role the Grange (once a radical farmer's movement, dating back to 1867) continues to play in village affairs includes a nugget of celebrity reporting: Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic is a stalwart member of the association. (Jan. 11)

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