Robert Michael Pyle has synthesized three
decades of life in a small community in southwest Washington into
this exquisite portrait of place. Each chapter of Sky Time
in Gray’s River represents a month of the year in
Gray’s River Valley; each brims with vivid moments and
vignettes.
Pyle, a renowned butterfly expert, has 14
books to his credit and a regular column in
Orion magazine. This down-to-earth book hums
with the details of country living, the intersection of the wild
with the domestic: A coyote ventures near Pyle’s house, bees
reside in his walls, he excavates a wood-rat nest in the attic.
Pyle delights in phenology, declaring that “the
progression of seasons as told by its animal and plant
appearances” is the ideal way to know a place’s heart.
His pages are alive with the seasonal arrivals and departures of
birds, insects and blooms, and shifts in what the animals, trees
and neighbors are doing.
Although the details are
striking, the book as a whole sometimes feels formless, as if the
chapters are not quite knitted together. At its best, though,
Sky Time follows in the tradition of Aldo
Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.
Pyle’s observations often harbor a lively humor, as in how he
came to hold “a record king salmon in a slimy bearhug.”
Pyle’s engagement with phenomena such as compost
piles and copulating slugs alerts us to wonder’s quiet
residence in the ordinary. The book opens and ends in the compost
heap, and compost is an appropriate metaphor for the mindful living
committed to his home-place that shines throughout the book:
“My daily walk to the compost heap is the closest thing I
know to sacrament.”
Sky Time
inspires us to look for possibilities of grace close to home.
Pyle’s unusual backyard sighting of a rustic bunting (far
from its Siberian breeding range) happens two years in a row. The
bird’s return reminds us of the “sweetness of chance in
any place, and the certainty of wonder in all places.”
Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps
in a Forgotten Place
Robert Michael
Pyle
256 pages, hardcover: $20.
Houghton
Mifflin, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Home is where the compost is.
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