Issue #2: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A vibrant walk through a brilliant mind observing all the seasons at Tinker Creek
Book Review
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
“Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein said; and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on the glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye. (p 122)
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Book information and ratings:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | by Annie Dillard, 1974 | |
Genre: | Nonfiction, narrative |
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Subject: | Nature, philosophy | |
Rating: | Worth the read | |
Read as: | Print copy | |
Readability: | Moderate | |
Subject Weight: | Heavy | |
How I found this book:
I had a professor in college who introduced me to creative nonfiction. She always said she “went through the 60s and 70s, not around them.” While she confessed to layering on long, beaded necklaces in the morning, just to strip them off one by one and hang them on her rearview mirror as she drove to work (worried that she would look “too hippie” in the conservative BYU-Idaho environment), she was passionate about sharing the writers that shaped some of her formative years, including Joan Diddion and Annie Dillard. I read anything I come across from those two authors.
About this book:
I wasn't sure what to expect when I started Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “Pilgrim” has such antiquated connotations (Pilgrim’s Progress, anyone?)–and is Tinker Creek a real place?
Well, if you decide to pick up this book, prepare to be an unprepared traveler in a naturalist’s world. Annie Dillard is your guide at the actual Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At 29 she has the sharp-trap mind of an academic, the musings of a philosopher, the curiosity of a naturalist, and the words of a poet.
She launches you head-first into her world where a trip to the creek is a daily ritual, where you see a frog’s skin deflate as its guts are being liquified and sucked by a water bug below, where a green winged thing escaping a spider’s web is a “small event,” where muskrats flick ghost-like on water and shore, and where an entire universe is held in one jar of creek water. She explores all the creatures, all the places, in all the seasons, in all the weather–including a major flood.
****
One of my favorite stories is of her stalking a coot as the snow is melting, careful to not spook the supposedly shy waterbird. After 40 minutes,
[...] it began to light in my leafy brain that maybe the coot wasn’t shy after all. That all this subterfuge was unnecessary, that the bird was singularly stupid, or at least not of an analytical turn of mind, and that in fact I’d been making a perfect idiot of myself all alone in the snow. [...] I stopped; I raised my arm and waved. Nothing. In its beak hung a long, wet strand of some shore plant; it sucked it at length down its throat and dove again. I’ll kill it. I’ll hit the thing with a snowball, I really will; I’ll make a mud-hen hash. (p 45)
But, she doesn’t even form the snow ball.
HA! I could see myself doing the exact same thing–carefully creeping up on a wild animal that couldn’t care less who I was or what I was doing….
****
She shares another experience that I will never forget; she calls it “unusual,” “unexpected,” and “ridiculous” (p 226):
There was a snake at the quarry with me tonight. [...] I came closer still, and saw the unmistakable undulating bands of brown, and hourglasses: copperhead. (p 222)
Most people would carefully back away in this situation. Instead, she slaps her legs, stomps her feet and INTENTIONALLY sits down next to it–but only four feet away. (Don't worry, she says: most adults don’t die from copperhead bites, and she always carries a snake bite kit in her pocket anyway, and the nearest hospital is close enough…umm…really???)
All right then, copperhead. I know you’re here, you know I’m here. This is a big night. I dug my elbows into rough rock and dry soil and settled back on the hillside to begin the long business of waiting out a snake. (p 223)
At length a mosquito “sings” in her ear, she shoos it away. It lands on her ankle, she brushes it off.
To my utter disbelief, it lighted on the copperhead. It squatted on the copperhead’s back near its "neck," and bent its head to its task. I was riveted. I couldn’t see the mosquito in great detail, but I could make out its lowered head that seemed to bore like a well drill through surface rock to fluid. (p 226)
When I reached home, I turned first to the bookshelf, to see if I could possibly have seen what I thought I had. All I could find was this sentence in Will Barker’s book, "Familiar Insects of North America": "The bite of the female (Mosquito, Culex pipiens) is effected with a little drill that can puncture many types of body covering–even the leathery skin of a frog or the overlapping scales on a snake." All right then; maybe I had seen it. Anything can happen in any direction; the world is more chomped than I’d dreamed. (p 226-227)
****
The entire book is peppered with interesting facts: the phenomenon of sublimation; how much horsepower the sun sends to an acre of land; that birds head south for food, not for the warmth; that eels have been observed slithering across meadows to get to streams that lead to salt water; the intricacies of caribou hooves; that seagulls can wake up frozen on the sea, immediate prey for any passing predator; that there is such a thing as a horsehair worm: exactly the size and shape of a strand of hair and also…it’s a worm (gross!); and so, so much more.
My least favorite passages were about parasites. Did you know that parasites make up 10% of the animal kingdom? I could have gone my whole life happily never knowing that information–or how they breed or feed or kill the host. Ew.
And, just when I thought we had left the whole topic of fecundity and parasites and the fecundity of parasites behind, she later wonders: “Could it be, counting bacteria and viruses, that we live in a world in which half the creatures are running from–or limping from–the other half?” (p 233).
****
Her references are flung far and wide–and she slips them into her musings so seamlessly, that you almost don’t notice the breadth and depth of her knowledge base. I tried to make a catalog of those she quoted, but I gave up. A short list includes: Einstein, Van Gogh, Eskimo shaman, Genghis Khan, da Vinci, The Koran–and dozens of others I am not familiar with. Also, The Great American Forest by Rutherford Platt is, “one of the most interesting books ever written” (p 164) and Edwin Way Teale’s The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects is “a book I couldn’t live without” (p 168).
She also references the Bible quite a few times. At this point in my life, I’m not interested in reading what others have to say about god. Each time she referenced a creator or the Bible, I mentally held my breath, anticipating an unpleasant dip or dive into tepid, teeming religious froth…but it never came. She just touches on religious history or structure, like hopping across stones on her creek, never falling in.
****
This is one of my favorite philosophical passages:
Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus that they need not ever mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?) It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death–emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.
All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first. (p 178)
I laughed! Indeed. Someone else first. Anybody? Anybody?
****
A question looped quietly in my mind as I read this book. While she shows us how she lives, I wondered how does she have a living? How is it that so many of us have to trade our afternoons for money while she can literally “spend” her hours freely at the creek, no dollars missed?
(I realize that her “living” is beside the entire point of this narrative–not important and specifically not included. I realize that my looping question has more to say about me than about her: that I cannot imagine indulging in an afternoon so free of “shoulds” and responsibilities that I could sit guilt-free long enough to become part of the environment, inviting the skittish, wild muskrats into my line of sight. I mean, who knew that was even a thing?)
She addresses her lifestyle in a round-about way almost at the end of the book:
Thomas Merton wrote: “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. (p 268)
So, that’s how she owns her time and chooses her world? She just won’t have it any other way??! Well, then. That must be a stubborn streak at its finest!
****
However she manages it, whether this narrative is a quilt of stolen afternoons from the practicalities of life or the actual stuff of her daily experience, it is a taste of true type of living–one that I’ll cherish from the page and put on my bucket list for later (now that I know it’s a thing).
****
“Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein said; and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on the glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye. (p 122)
About the author:
ANNIE DILLARD (1945-current ) is a PROLIFIC nonfiction writer–I simply cannot list all of her work. Check out her beautiful webpage at http://www.anniedillard.com/.
She earned a B.A. (1967) and M.A. (1968), both in English, from Hollins College. She was 29 when she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which was her second publication (her first being a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel). In 1975, she received a Pulitzer prize in general nonfiction for this work (one year after its publication).
Sources:
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1974. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990, New York.
*This is Issue #2 of The Book Moth
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"Stubborn streak at it's finest." That makes me what to know her better!