Book Description

Follow Author and Storyteller Robin Moore back to his boyhood home in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, where he and his grandfather spent their days on the thickly-forested woods, exploring the beauty and mystery of the natural world.From the Introduction: The first really valuable thing I lost in the woods was a Barlow pocket knife. It was a knife my grandfather had given me for my eighth birthday. As he handed it to me, he said, "I guess you're old enough to have this now." But I wasn't. I had the knife less than a week before I lost it. I'll never know for sure how it got lost. One moment I had it, then it was gone. As soon as I knew the knife was missing, I wondered if I really was old enough to have such a fine possession. Fighting back tears of frustration, I remember hunting for that knife, going down on my hands and knees and searching through the leaves in the woods near our house. But I never found it. It's probably still laying out there somewhere, its bone handle dulled by the weather, its blade rusted the color of leaves in Autumn. Since then, I have lost many things in the woods: hats and gloves, wrist watches, flashlights and compasses. But probably the thing I miss the most is the loss of the woods themselves. When I was a boy, growing up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, I lived right across the road from my grandfather's house, just outside the town of Roopsburg. In those days, the woods and fields of the Appalachian foothills were still free and wild. And my grandfather and I spent as much time as we could out and away from civilization, roaming through the wild world. But nowadays, many of the places where I dreamed and played aren't wild anymore. They have been chopped up into neat yards with large houses, surrounded by wooden fences enclosing plastic swing sets. Even worse, some of our favorite places have been taken by highways and parking lots and shopping malls. The wildness of those places has been lost, at least for the next hundred years or so, until the woods comes back to reclaim them. But, as every storyteller knows, nothing is really lost as long as it lingers in the imagination. So come along with me now, and I'll take you back to some of my favorite wild spots and tell you a little about the sad and wonderful things that happened there...Author Biography: Robin Moore is an award-winning author and storyteller who has written more than a dozen books about the History and Folklore of the Pennsylvania Mountains, where his family has lived for more than 200 years. He has given more than 5,000 programs and workshops at schools. libraries, museums and festivals and has told stories to more than a million people. He served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, earned a Journalism Degree from Pennsylvania State University and worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor before beginning his career as a children's book author and traveling storyteller in 1981. He was named Storyteller of the Year and Author of the Year by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association. He holds a Master's Degree in Oral Traditions and is Program Coordinator for the Writing and Oral Traditions Program at The Graduate Institute. In addition to being published by HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster, he is owner of Groundhog Press, a small independent publishing house which produces books and recordings celebrating the oral tradition.