by Wayne Spitzer

Created on: June 10, 2009

Wild Thing: Tense, Association and Merged-Consciousness in Robert Michael Pyle's 'Where Bigfoot Walks'

In works such as 'Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide' and 'Chasing Monarchs: A Migration with the Butterflies of Passage,' Robert Michael Pyle writes with the eye of a painter, the lexicon of a scientist, the clairvoyance of a medium, and, frequently, the associative flourish of an author of weird tales. More than any of these, though, he writes in the wild tense.

Often, Pyle's descriptive language seems lifted from the painter's palette itself, as when he writes, in Where Bigfoot Walks:

"The moon was still high. Color began to mix in the east, beyond the pale lump of Mount Adams. Pink mares'-tails rode in above the Goat Rocks, and a red flush appeared where the sun soon would Mauve smears intensified by the minute and became purple knives shooting up and through the mountain from the south" (Pyle 34).

There are thousands of similar passages to be found in the well-trodden field of nature writing; what's interesting here-if not altogether unique-is the author's use of color, of light, and how he mixes these colors in precisely the same manner as an Impressionist painter. Pyle is, if not painting with words (as David Campiche writes in The Daily Astorian), writing with light.

"I consider the human trait of color vision to be one of the greatest gifts of kindly evolution," writes Pyle in 'The Tangled Bank.' "Given this childhood infatuation with the rainbow, it isn't surprising that seashells and butterflies captured my fancy, or that I asked for parrot tulip bulbs for my eighth birthday" (Orion Magazine, January 2007).

Elsewhere in the article he writes:

"Nothing clashes in nature, but certain colors just look good side by side. For example, the cherry crown of a redpoll among rosehips deep in winter's bleakness on a white Wyoming plain. Spring azures nectaring on bluebells, and swallowtails on lilacs at Easter time, as Paas-bright eggs hide in the fresh green grass below. The magenta of Parry's primrose and Lambert's locoweed in midsummer meadows. Then in September, Wilson's warblers staging like lemon drops among scarlet currants before migration, and cinnamon monarchs floating over fallen peaches. I still love a winter's monochrome on the lower Columbia, and admire the array of grays that gives rise to every rainbow. But I am no less thrilled to awake each day to a world produced in Technicolor."

These passages

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