Sky Time in Gray's River

by Pyle, Robert Michael

• ISBN13: 9780395828212
• ISBN10: 039582821X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-11
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Much the way Donald Hall's Seasons at Eagle Pond captured New England, Sky Time in Gray's River captures the essence of the Pacific Northwest by telling the story of Robert Pyle's life in rural Washington. One of the earliest communities established near the mouth of the Columbia River, the village of Gray's River is only tenuously connected to the world of the twenty-first century. Although Pyle is a lepidopterist and the Gray's River region is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the place spoke to him three decades ago, and he has lived there, in the same house, ever since. This book brings Gray's River to life by compressing those thirty years into twelve chapters, following the lives of humans, animals, and plants month by month through the seasons. By demonstrating how the village has changed his life, Pyle illustrates how a special place can change anyone lucky enough to find it-and he highlights how much is being lost in a world of accelerating sameness, speed, and mobility. Above all, Sky Time shows that you don't have to travel far to see something new every day-if you know how to look.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Beforetimes: Going to Ground in Gray's River	1	(7)
The Time of Mew Gulls	8	(17)
Frogsong	25	(16)
When Echo Azures Fly	41	(19)
The Time of Trilliums	60	(19)
Arrivals	79	(21)
Swallowtails and Swainson's	100	(17)
Days of Mist and Thistles	117	(17)
The Time of Hay and Berries	134	(22)
Departures	156	(18)
Chinooks and Chanterelles	174	(20)
Tree Time	194	(18)
The Time of Rising Water	212	(20)
Aftertimes: Throwing the Cat on the Compost	232	(11)
Notes and Acknowledgments	243

Excerpts

Beforetimes Going to Ground in Grays River To go to groundan 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 lanternthe 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 Stellers jay rocketed off, screaming that the kibbles were all gone from the cats dish. An elegant Andersons 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 Townsends 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 slugs 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 uncommo

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Excerpted from Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place by Robert Michael Pyle
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