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

Robert Michael Pyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 countryside—where the author's daily walk to the compost heap "is the closest thing I know to sacrament"—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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Review

Pyle has the ability to find wonder in the mundane and beauty in the unpretentious. Library Journal

[A] luxuriant account of an ordinary year among the flora, fauna, and folks of the countryside Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (January 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039582821X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395828212
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,745,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another masterpiece by our latter day Thoreau, December 29, 2008

By 

Panayoti Kelaidis "Senior Curator, Denver Bot... (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place (Paperback)

This book is the perfect antidote to the frenetic pace of urban life. Reading this book, I felt could practically see the mossy limbs of the ancient Bigleaf maples and every butterfly and bird and wildflower of that magical place seems to have been transplanted into the pages of this wonderful book. I am sure that many of us will now welcome bats into our bedrooms as the Pyles seem to: who but Bob, however, would not only tenderly give water to the dehydrated bat, but gently coax it back to vigor by enticing it with gnats and gradually larger insects, describing its increasing vitality by the very cadences of his deathless prose? Each book by Pyle is so different and precious, but this kaleidoscopic journey through the calendar year in a mossy corner of America channels not only the precision of Thoreau by the elegaic muse of John Muir, and yet is quintessentially Pyle! Buy it! Read and treasure this contemporary masterpiece. What on earth does this amazing writer still have in store for us?

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bob Pyle's best book yet!, December 13, 2007

By 

Janna Lee (Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place (Hardcover)

Of all Mr. Pyle's books this one is the most lyrical and delicious. Just read a page before you go to sleep and you will dream of lush forest and lovely creatures on land and in the sky. Every sentence is filled with wonderful images of nature. It would make a nature lover out of any reader.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another outstanding RMP book, January 3, 2008

By 

Joseph H. Beelart Jr. "Joe Hector" (near Portland, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place (Paperback)

I first heard RMP read at an outdoor conference in the late 1990s. Late that evening some of us shared single malt with him around a small table in a little trailer. I was hooked.

First I read his Sasquatch book, which is not about sasquatch, except for a little bit. Then there is his beautiful western butterfly book, a book to be studied and treasured. It opened my eyes to much I had never seen in my many years of wandering the hills.

Enough; this volume is near poetry.

But in it, you will find RMP a bit whimsically professorial. For instance when RMP walks through thistles in his shorts, he remarks on itchy scratches.

Incidently, Gray's River is in SW Washington across the Columbia River northeast of Astoria, Oregon.