Twenty-five years ago, I discovered some beautiful hand-crafted stuffed sasquatches at a toy store in Gig Harbor, Washington. I promptly snatched up three of them to take home with me, and they have been with me ever since. In 1992 my very first Volkswalk was the “Bigfoot to Baker,” held in conjunction with a bigfoot festival and parade in Glacier, Washington, and I got a very nice patch shaped like a bigfoot, with a friendly, waving sasquatch on it, for finishing the Volkswalk.
Given my interest in these legendary creatures, it is no surprise that when I came across a book called Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, I promptly snatched that up, too, and hungrily devoured it. Thus began my acquaintance with nature writer Robert Michael Pyle. Since then I have added many of his books to my bookshelves: Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Sky Time in Gray's River, Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip, and his latest, Mariposa Road: the First Butterfly Big Year.
But I had never met nor seen Pyle read until this fall at Wordstock in Oregon.
(See posting for February 6, 2011.) Pyle was there to read and discuss Mariposa Road. As it turned out, he was scheduled into the last slot on Sunday, and Wordstock itself closed immediately after the final readings, so there was really no time to talk to Pyle, though I would have liked to.
Imagine my delight when I discovered that he was going to be in Corvallis at the start of November, doing another reading from Mariposa Road. Pyle is a very friendly, genuine, and fascinating person, with a wonderful sense of humor, not to mention being an incredible writer. He has been nominated for and won numerous awards for his writing, yet he is amazingly accessible and down to earth. While everyone else was off buying his book at the sales table, I raced up to where he was sitting at another table - my pre-purchased copy of the book in hand- and not only did I get it personally autographed, I got to talk with him for a good five minutes and got not one, but two big hugs, along with a sincere comment that he’d love to read some of my writing some time. Needless to say, I was walking on Cloud Nine when I left the reading.
And to top it all off, when I went back outside, there it was across the street – the famed Powdermilk, the 1982 Honda Civic hatchback that I have read about in his books and which has taken him on so many of his trips around the Northwest and the U.S. Since I have always named my cars and kept them for a long time, as Pyle has done, I knew, from the first moment I “met” Powdermilk in Where Bigfoot Walks, that I had met something of a kindred spirit in Robert Michael Pyle. Meeting him in person only confirmed that.
