Customer Reviews

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

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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?

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.

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.

An imapssioned life, observing and enjoying all around him. A great read for those interested in people and nature, the interconnected web of a rural world. We can all learn something from this book. Thanks Bob!