Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

by Annie Dillard

  Once I knew a woman, who has since died, whose field was German philosophy. When I knew her she had just been widowed. Her husband—an old man, remote and stern—had held a university chair in intellectual history; between them they had written a dozen books. Once, when the woman and I were alone, she broke down. She broke down in grief, and cried in my arms, and repeated into my shoulder, “He was so cute!”

  The child wheels the blackboard against a bare wall, to serve as our mural or graffito for the weekend. She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here—the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay. We have lived together so often, and parted so many times, that the very sight of each other means loss. The ever-taller embrace of our hellos is a tearful affair, aware as we are of our imminent parting; fortunately the same anticipation cancels our goodbyes, and we embrace cheerfully, like long-lost kin at a reunion.

  I have not been here in years. I think of it, though, when I cannot sleep; I stand on the bank and watch the river move, and watch the water’s speckled reflections jiggle on the overarching boughs of sycamore, and jiggle on the sycamore’s trunk, and on the bottoms of its leaves. Across the river I see pasture veined by the thin paths of cows. The cowpaths wobble over the floodplain and cut around the junipers and clumps of thistle or rose; they climb a close-cropped slope whose every bump and ripple shows, a slope which is actually the foot of a wooded mountain. The pasture ends, and the forest begins, in a saggy wooden fence.

  Personally, I find the keeping of golden Guernseys rather an affectation. But the actual cows themselves, I allow, are innocent. The actual cows themselves, in this soporific vision of mine, are splayed about the landscape, lending solid areas of warm color to a field otherwise pallidly, sentimentally, green. Behind their pasture is a border of woods, a sloping cornfield, and beyond, rolling ridges.

  When we opened the cottage over an hour ago, I found a note taped to the icebox door. It read: “Matches in the tin box on mantel. Do not eat purple berries from bush by porch. Bulbs of creek grass OK, good boiled. Blue berries in woods make you sick.” Accompanying the text were careful schematic drawings of the plants in question: pokeberry, something I do not recognize, huckleberry. Huckleberries are perfectly edible. Many people have used this cottage over the years—including, I suppose, grouches with sour stomachs, and hoaxers. If I were interested in such things, I would have to do all the research again. I am not interested in such things. It has been quite a while since I sampled bits of the landscape. I have brought a box of groceries from home.

  It is all woods on this side of the river—woods, and a surprising number of paved roads. A steep driveway leads from a hill down to the cottage; you park beside the cottage on the grass, on that thin, round-bladed, bluish grass that grows under trees. The cottage rests on cinder blocks; a sort of yard slopes to the river’s edge.

  In the 1920s, American manufacturers started prefabricating summer cottages; this cottage is one of the first of those. It does not look prefabricated. It is just on the fussy side of idyllic—white frame, two bedrooms, a big screened porch, and lots of painted latticework. When you lie in bed you can see the big bolts in the ceiling that hold the house together. The bolts are painted white, like everything else.

  You know what it is to open up a cottage. You barge in with your box of groceries and your duffelbag full of books. You drop them on a counter and rush to the far window to look out. I would say that coming into a cottage is like being born, except we do not come into the world with a box of groceries and a duffelbag full of books—unless you want to take these as metonymic symbols for culture. Opening up a summer cottage is like being born in this way: at the moment you enter, you have all the time you are ever going to have.

  The child maintains—she has always maintained—that she remembers being born. It is a surefire attention-getter. “I remember,” she says, “the light hurt my eyes.” Many of her anecdotes are literary like this, and more than a little self-pitying. Should I stop hugging her so much?

  Filling the window’s frame, crowding each of its nine square panes, is the river, moving down.

  The yellow afternoon light has faded from the water and the blue evening light is fading; the sycamore branches over the bank are flattening and growing dark. I see the sky on the running river. Blue, it shatters and pulls; blue, it catches and pools behind a rock. The sun is down behind the mountains, but not yet down behind the world.

  The child and I go to play in the water. We leave the cottage, crouch on the bank, and send sticks down the river. Soon the night is too dark for us to see. We fetch some candle stubs from the house; we fetch some flat kindling from the woodpile; we light the candles, stick them to the flat wood, and launch them into the river. The river and the sky are just visible as blueness, bordered everywhere by indecipherable black. Now we can see the candle flames mark their own passage. We watch them wander above the water; we watch them wobble downstream and gutter out, one by one, just before they would have rounded the black, invisible bend.

  “You cannot kill time,” I read once, “without injuring eternity.” Our setting the candles afloat down the river—was this not a pretty thing to do? Why, when we were actually seeing the candles wobble down the river, did I think, this should be better? It seemed both to take too long and end too soon. As a memory, however, it is already looking good.

  In bed I stare at the painted bolts in the walls. I hear the river outside the window, if I remember to listen. I read a magazine which contains instructions for jumping from a moving train:

  If for some extraordinary reason you have to jump off a moving train, look ahead and try to pick a spot that looks soft. Throw your pack and, as you jump, lean way back (this is the hard part) and take huge, leaping steps in the air. If you lean back far enough, and don’t trip as you touch the ground, you will experience the rare thrill of running 35 to 40 miles an hour.

  I cannot remember to listen for the river. Some elation keeps me from sleeping. I leave the bed and move to the porch, and stand in the open back door. There is a whippoorwill; there are stars over the pasture. It occurs to me to try to step down from the porch, which is moving in orbit at 68,400 miles an hour. I plan to take huge, leaping steps in the air. It will be, I realize, a rare thrill, but unfortunately I cannot find a landing space that looks soft.

  II

  Saturday morning, and all is changed. Sunlight on the table and on the shining wood floor is bright; the child and I walk around squinting and eager for action. How could I ever have wanted to read? I can scarcely credit that we played cards on this table last night, almost whispering, in a circle of lamplight not four feet across. Who, on a Saturday morning, would think of reading or playing cards? We are as changed from evening to morning, and as careless of yesterday, as if we had flown overnight to Nepal.

  The child has found a bicycle under the porch; she wants to ride it. Incredibly, there is a bicycle pump half buried in the dry dirt beside it—a pump which works, once I scour and oil the shaft and screw dirt from the nozzle with a paperclip. I drag the bike out and stand it in the bluish grass at the foot of the driveway next to an apple tree. Pump the tires. I find a wrench to adjust the seat, find some WD-40 to loosen the bolt; lower the seat. Adjust the handlebars. Oil the chain and the steering column. Wash the seat, the handgrips, the fenders while I’m at it.

  Throughout these tasks, which occupy the morning, the child and I are singing some old Dixieland standards: “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” “Cherokee,” “Basin Street Blues”—most of which we have sung often before. When the bicycle is ready to roll, it is almost t
ime for lunch. The child mounts the bike and wobbles up the driveway. She takes a right, turns down the hill, and vanishes, singing at the top of her lungs.

  On the bluish grass under the apple tree are two wrenches, a can of WD-40, a hammer, a scouring pad, a straightened paperclip, a pile of dirty paper towels and sponges, a pail of dirty water, and the child’s sweater. I am hungry. In all the history of the world, it has never been so late.

  I do not know when the child will be back, or if she will want to take a walk. I haul out my notebooks and sit at the table.

  The child bursts in, hale and enthusiastic. She has discovered a long loop route around which to ride. While she talks she reaches into the table’s drawer and finds the deck of cards we brought. She sits at the table, rummages through the deck, and asks if we have any clothespins.

  I am always amazed at how straight she sits in a chair, at how touching is the sight of her apparently boneless hands, and at how pleased she herself is with those hands, how conscious of them. She asked me once if she could insure them. Do we have any clothespins?

  She wants clothespins to fasten some cards to her bicycle so that when the wheels turn the cards will slap in the spokes. She pulls from the deck a pair of aces and a pair of eights.

  Last night we played poker, the two of us. We got popcorn butter on the cards; we used aspirin tablets as chips. In the course of the play I showed aces and eights—“dead man’s hand”—so I told her about that. I told her we call aces and eights “dead man’s hand” because Jesse James was holding them in a poker game when he was shot in the back. I no longer rememeber precisely why someone shot Jesse James in the back, but I made up something I hope she forgets before she passes it on.

  I find her some spring clothespins in this pre-equipped cottage which apparently has everything needed for life on earth except poker chips. I make her a sandwich, and put it in a knapsack with a jar of milk, a banana, and a funny little riddle book I found last night. Off she goes.

  Once, many years ago, there was a child of nine who loved Walter Milligan. One Saturday morning she was walking in the neighborhood of her school. She walked and thought, “The plain fact is—as I have heard so many times—that in several years’ time I will not love Walter Milligan. I will very probably marry someone else. I will be untrue; I will forget Walter Milligan.”

  Deeply, unforgettably, she thought that if what they said about Walter Milligan was true, then the rest went with it: that she would one day like her sister, and that she would be glad she had taken piano lessons. She was standing at the curb, waiting for the light to change. It was all she could do to remember not to get run over, so she would live to betray herself. For a series of connected notions presented themselves: if all these passions of mine be overturned, then what will become of me? Then what am I now?

  She seemed real enough to herself, willful and conscious, but she had to consider the possibility—the likelihood, even—that she was a short-lived phenomenon, a fierce, vanishing thing like a hard shower, or a transitional form like a tadpole or winter bud—not the thing in itself but a running start on the thing—and that she was being borne helplessly and against all her wishes to suicide, to the certain loss of self and all she held dear. Herself and all that she held dear—this particular combination of love for Walter Milligan, hatred of sister and piano lessons, etc.—would vanish, destroyed against her wishes by her own hand.

  When she changed, where will that other person have gone? Could anyone keep her alive, this person here on the street, and her passions? Will the unthinkable adult that she would become remember her? Will she think she is stupid? Will she laugh at her?

  She was a willful one, and she made a vow. The light changed; she crossed the street and set off up the sloping sidewalk by the school. I must be loyal, for no one else is. If this is the system, then I will buck it. I will until I die ride my bike and walk along these very streets, where I belong. I will until I die love Walter Milligan and hate my sister and read and walk in the woods. And I will never, not I, sit and drink and smoke and do nothing but talk.

  Foremost in her vow was this, that she would remember the vow itself. She woke to her surroundings; it was cold. Even walking so fiercely uphill, she was cold, and illuminated by a powerful energy. To her left was the stone elementary school, deserted on Saturday. Across the street was a dark row of houses, stone and brick, with their pillared porches. The porch floors were painted red or gray or green. This was not her own neighborhood, but it was her turf. She pushed uphill to the next corner. She committed to memory the look of that block, that neighborhood: the familiar cracked sidewalk, how pale it was, how sand collected in its cracks; the sycamores; the muffled sky.

  Now it is early Saturday afternoon—the center of the weekend.

  I am sitting under the sycamore on the riverbank below the cottage, just below the driveway. The dog and I have returned from a walk through the woods by the river upstream. Now I sit and look around and try to comfort the dog, who, on his part, is trying to persuade me to continue our walk downstream to New Orleans.

  It is the height of day in the height of summer—mid-July. This means that the sky essentially does not exist, or is not, at any rate, a thing you would care to examine. Under the sky in the distance ahead roll some hazy wooded ridges—the mountains. Below them are crowded slopes of field corn. In their floodplain pasture a dozen brown cows are drowsing on their feet, heads down, or browsing near the fence on slopes where the woods’ shadow falls. I watch a flycatcher on a limb across the river. The air is so fat with food that this flycatcher never leaves its perch; it simply turns its head, snaps its beak, and dines.

  Two things are distracting me. One is a gang of carp on the river bottom; I can see the carp where the sycamore boughs cast shade. During times of excess leisure like this, you can see not only fish, but also a loose-knit network of sunlight on fishes’ backs. The same moving pattern falls on the stony river bottom. It looks as though someone has cast over the fish a throw net made of sunlight. Some people eat carp.

  Near the bank at my feet is a sunny backwater upon which dozens of water striders are water striding about. They seem to be rushing so they don’t fall in. I soon discover that these insects are actually skidding along on the underside of a cloud. The water here is reflecting a patch of sky and a complete cumulus cloud. It is on the bottom of this cloud that the water striders are foraging. They are the size of biplanes or prehistoric birds. They scrabble all unawares on a cloud bottom, clinging to this delicate stuff upside down, like lizards on a ceiling.

  While these complexities are narrowing the focus of my attention, the dog looks up. I look up. The wide world swings into view and fades at once while I listen for a sound. The dog and I are both hearing it. We hear a slow series of clicks up on the road. It is the child, riding her bicycle up the hill.

  The child is riding her bicycle up the hill. I stand and look around; the thick summer foliage blocks the road from view. I turn back toward the river and hear the playing cards slap in the spokes. They click and slap slowly, for the hill is steep. Now the pushing grows suddenly easier, evidently; the cards click and slap. At once, imperceptibly, she starts down. The pace increases. The cards are slapping and she is rolling; the pace speeds up, she is rolling, and the cards are slapping so fast the sounds blur. And so she whirs down the hill. I can see her through the woods downstream where the road evens out. She is fine, still coasting, and leaning way back.

  We do love scaring ourselves silly—but less every year. Have I mentioned that my classmates and I are now thirty-five?

  There is an old Pawnee notion that when you are in your thirties and forties you are “on top.” The idea is that at this age you can view grandly, in the fullness of your strength, both the uphill struggle of youth and the downhill slide of age. I suggest that this metaphor is inaccurate. If there is such a place as “on top”—if there is a sensation of riding a life span’s crest—it does not last ten or twenty years. On the contr
ary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.

  You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers; you revolve in your upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside down onto your head, hope you will somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven’t the strength.

  But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb’s whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.

  Now the world swings into view again. I shift my weight. The cumulus cloud has dissolved in the river. The water striders have lost their grip on the heavens. One by one they seemed to have slipped from the sky, somersaulted in the air, and landed on their feet in this backwater under the sycamore. The carp are stirring up silt from the bottom. The cows are apparently moribund; the dog is at standby alert.

  Here it comes again. The child has gone around the loop of roads and is climbing the hill once more. I turn toward the cottage, thinking she might be coming down the drive. But there she goes again, down the hill. She really does sound like the London blitz.

  This is limestone country. That means the dairy farmers lose a cow every few years; the cows, poor things, fall through their pastures when the underground roofs collapse. They break their legs or worse and die there of shock, I guess, or blood loss, or thirst, or else the farmers shoot them there. I once saw one of these cows which had fallen through.