Wintergreen

Zusatztext "Pyle looks past the stumps and clear cuts to rediscover the essence of the Willapa Hills. Even though scarred from decades of logging this terrain is still a wilderness. The author puts the pieces together to create an example of nature trying to survive."Krist Novoselic, former bassist of Nirvana ?Pyle shows himself here to be a cunning essayist who is able to bring to life a region little known . . . a love song to an overlooked--and overworked--land. Kirkus 1/5/87 "Pyle has created a collection of vividly responsive observations and speculations about the diversity and requirements of life, from butterflies to bears" Library Journal 2/1/87 Not just a classic of Northwest nature writing and literature, Wintergreen is a book that transcends the wounded Willapa Hills where it is set and becomes a meditation on the relationship of all people to all places. ?William Dietrich Informationen zum Autor Robert Michael Pyle Klappentext In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitantsanimal, plant, and humanwith the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so evenhanded in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard. In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world. Zusammenfassung In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitantsanimal, plant, and humanwith the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so evenhanded in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard. In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world....

Autorentext

Robert Michael Pyle

Klappentext

In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants—animal, plant, and human—with the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even–handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard.

In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world.

Leseprobe
Introduction to Wintergreen

Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land appeared in 1986—the year of Chernobyl, and a year after the discovery of a gaping ozone hole over Antarctica. A consummate work of natural history, it announced the arrival of a stylist with elan in a field where currents of castigation and warning sometimes give “nature writing” the tincture of sermonology. Wintergreen felt personable, even optimistic. It had no truck with doom and gloom. Its author was possessed—it seemed by nature—of a robust and general enthusiasm, and of a buoyant appreciation for the fact of living. It was easy to imagine Robert Michael Pyle cheerfully rambling in his ravaged land, the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington.

Imagine this I did, in 1986, while devouring Wintergreen cover-to-cover, a binge spurred by affinity and affirmation, or at least by recognition and identification, because here, at last, was a book about home, home as I knew it in my feet, so to speak, home as I loved and understood it. Other readers had described Pyle’s Willapa as a metaphor for global environmental duress—or for something that went unnamed and felt vague—but for me, everything there stood for itself. It fact it was precisely the book’s concrete bona fides—its familiar trilliums, skunk cabbage, and clearcuts—that made reading it feel so companionable.

Wintergreen took a place on my shelf alongside Robert L. Wood’s Olympic Mountains Trail Guide and my Climber’s Guide to the Olympic Mountains. I gave Wood’s guide to a young, lost rambler, the climber’s guide got chewed by voles, and Wintergreen went permanently borrowed. All three books have since been replaced, as has a fourth that, like the others, I pack regularly—Daniel Mathews’ Cascade-Olympic Natural History, a supremely accomplished trailside reference that is out of print but shouldn’t be.

Mathews’ book appeared in 1988, the same year Wintergreen was published in paperback under the sub-title Listening to the Land’s Heart. Listening to the Land’s Heart is no less alliterative then Rambles in a Ravaged Land, but it strikes a more self-consciously poetic note, perilously so—in my opinion—suggesting as it does a preciousness about nature that is entirely absent from the text. Wintergreen is, in its way, poetic, but its poetry is constructed of the raw and tangible, and Pyle, lacking the Romantic impulse, is assiduous in its pages to avoid animism. His Willapa is meaningful to the extent that it is real. Its actual waters run downhill. “Heaven is here,” Pyle has asserted, “angels are butterflies and bats, and the great beyond is the holy compost pile of the ages.”

I came of age in Seattle in the mid-Seventies, an era when it sagged on the bleak edge of null, portal to the North Pacific. “Seattle in the seventies was the nadir of just everything,” the superlative essayist Charles D’Ambrosio has written, and as his contemporary on that peculiar scene, I can attest that he’s hyperbolizing accurately. D’Ambrosio’s answer to the provincial doldrums was to cultivate an inner expatriation and to import his enthusiasms from more sophisticated locales beyond the pale of our rain. Trapped in the veritable outback of nowhere and feeling decidedly marginal, he became, he writes, “clever and scoffing, ironic, deracinated, cold and quick to despise.”

Young white guys in the Seattle of the mid-Seventies, given that they had the luxury, plied one of two pervasive personas—either D’Ambrosio’s Budding Expatriate, or my choice, Wilderness Romantic. I took to the hills whenever possible and eventually expatriated to a logging town where I went to work for the Forest Service in the spirit of Norman Maclean. This was during the heyday of clear-cutting, when mills ran 24 hours a day all over western Washington. I lived …