The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland

When people connect with nature, they do so in a specific place, and The Thunder Tree shows how that connection can change a life forever, how roots in the earth can be as important as roots in a family. For Bob Pyle, that place was the Highline Canal in Colorado. When he first discovered it as a boy in the 1950s, the canal and its surroundings were largely a wasteland, an accidental wilderness on the edge of a growing city. But as he grew up, the canal became his sanctuary, his teacher, the place where he developed a passion for the natural world. Once, a stately cottonwood along its banks literally saved his life during a freak hailstorm.
By showing how the course of a life can be changed by a piece of land, Robert Michael Pyle argues eloquently that if we fail to preserve our opportunities to explore nature, we will diminish our lives and our culture immeasurably. Rich in history, poignant, and beautifully written, this is a book you will never forget.

The High Line Canal was part of a late 19th-century plan to bring water to eastern Colorado. But the canal on the outskirts of Denver was abandoned by the 1950s when the author discovered it. Pyle ( Evergreen ) has written an engrossing story of at least two levels: a charming memoir of his youth on the canal and a sobering account of uncontrolled development and loss of habitat. The canal had a profound effect on young Pyle, providing sanctuary, recreation and an intense interest in the world of nature. When his family moved to a new suburb (Aurora), they were at the edge of country; wasteland, vacant lots and abandoned farms abounded. Pyle saw the community grow from 20,000 to 200,000; high-rise buildings and shopping centers took over the countryside, and some species of wildlife became extinct. By the 1970s, 60 miles of the canal right-of-way became a public pathway and later, part of the National Trail System.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Natural history and memories fashion this ode to Colorado's High Line Canal by Pyle (Wintergreen, 1986), whose gentle style belies a lyric intensity rarely found in place-portraits. The one-hundred-year-old High Line Canal, a once great notion to bring Rocky Mountain water to irrigate the Great Plains, caught Pyle's imagination when he was a boy--and it has mesmerized him ever since. The canal, never completed and long abandoned, is still in evidence around the Denver area, but whereas in Pyle's youth it was a place of mystery and life, now it's bordered by senescent farms and industrial parks, trashed by dumping, its riparian habitat for the most part devastated. Pyle brings us back through the canal's past, exploring pockets of Coloradan history to provide the whys and wherefores behind the building of the structure. Given the scarcity of water in those parts, the canal attracted not only farms but a cascade of plants and wildlife as well: foxes and racoons, cornflowers and toads, magpies and cottonwoods, and various types of butterflies--painted ladies and question marks and mourning cloaks. The author's rhapsodies are short-lived, though, as he slips into gloom while he ponders the canal's current state of affairs--environmental disfigurement in the wake of urban sprawl; the woeful extinction of local species; the humiliation of a unique place. It comes as no surprise that he winds up with a plea to protect the canal and its remaining wildlands. Never preachy, never cloying: a powerful and memorable example of place-writing. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"The Thunder Tree" was a huge, hollow old cottonwood in which the author and his brother once found shelter as children from a life-threatening hailstorm. The tree grew along the High Line Canal, built in the late 19th century as part of a grand plan to bring river water to the Western plains for irrigation. Only a portion of the canal was ever built, but that portion happened to run through the city of Aurora, Colorado, where the author lived as a child and young adult. This book is a collection of essays about the High Line Canal and the butterflies, magpies, cottonwoods, and other living things that existed nearby. Pyle's recollections about growing up in Aurora with his family and friends in the 1950s add a personal dimension. In a broader sense, this book is about the relationship between people and natural areas and how each affects the other. Pyle, who has a Ph.D. in ecology from Yale, is the author of Wintergreen ( LJ 2/1/87) as well as several guides to butterflies. Recommended for both academic and public libraries.
- William H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.