Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

  When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

  But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

  It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.

  When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.

  But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. “Launch into the deep,” says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”

  The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

  When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

  3

  Winter

  I

  It is the first of February, and everyone is talking about starlings. Starlings came to this country on a passenger liner from Europe. One hundred of them were deliberately released in Central Park, and from those hundred descended all of our countless millions of starlings today. According to Edwin Way Teale, “Their coming was the result of one man’s fancy. That man was Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy New York drug manufacturer. His curious hobby was the introduction into America of all the birds mentioned in William Shakespeare.” The birds adapted to their new country splendidly.

  When John Cowper Powys lived in the United States, he wrote about chickadees stealing crumbs from his favorite flock of starlings. Around here they’re not so popular. Instead of quietly curling for sleep, one by one, here and there in dense shrubbery, as many birds do, starlings roost all together in vast hordes and droves. They have favorite roosting sites to which they return winter after winter; apparently southwest Virginia is their idea of Miami Beach. In Waynesboro, where the starlings roost in the woods near the Coyner Springs area, residents can’t go outside for any length of time, or even just to hang laundry, because of the stink—“will knock you over”—the droppings, and the lice.

  Starlings are notoriously difficult to “control.” The story is told of a man who was bothered by starlings roosting in a large sycamore near his house. He said he tried everything to get rid of them and finally took a shotgun to three of them and killed them. When asked if that discouraged the birds, he reflected a minute, leaned forward, and said confidentially, “Those three it did.”

  Radford, Virginia, had a little stink of its own a few years ago. Radford had starlings the way a horse has flies, and in similarly unapproachable spots. Wildlife biologists estimated the Radford figure at one hundred fifty thousand starlings. The people complained of the noise, the stench, the inevitable whitewash effect, and the possibility of an epidemic of an exotic, dust-borne virus disease. Finally, in January, 1972, various officials and biologists got together and decided that something needed to be done. After studying the feasibility of various methods, they decided to kill the starlings with foam. The idea was to shoot a special detergent foam through hoses at the roosting starlings on a night when weathermen predicted a sudden drop in temperature. The foam would penetrate the birds’ waterproof feathers and soak their skins. Then when the temperature dropped, the birds would drop too, having quietly died of exposure.

  Meanwhile, before anything actually happened, the papers were having a field day. Every crazy up and down every mountain had his s
hrill say. The local bird societies screamed for blood—the starlings’ blood. Starlings, after all, compete with native birds for food and nesting sites. Other people challenged the mayor of Radford, the Virginia Tech Wildlife Bureau, the newspaper’s editors and all its readers in Radford and everywhere else, to tell how THEY would like to freeze to death inside a bunch of bubbles.

  The Wildlife Bureau went ahead with its plan. The needed equipment was expensive, and no one was quite sure if it would work. Sure enough, on the night they sprayed the roosts the temperature didn’t drop far enough. Out of the hundred and fifty thousand starlings they hoped to exterminate, they got only three thousand. Somebody figured out that the whole show had cost citizens two dollars per dead starling.

  That is, in effect, the story of the Radford starlings. The people didn’t give up at once, however. They mulled and fussed, giving the starlings a brief reprieve, and then came up with a new plan. Soon, one day when the birds returned at sunset to their roost, the wildlife managers were ready for them. They fired shotguns loaded with multiple, high-powered explosives into the air. BANG, went the guns; the birds settled down to sleep. The experts went back to their desks and fretted and fumed some more. At last they brought out the ultimate weapon: recordings of starling distress calls. Failure. YIKE OUCH HELP went the recordings; snore went the birds. That, in toto, is the story of the Radford starlings. They still thrive.

  Our valley starlings thrive, too. They plod morosely around the grass under the feeder. Other people apparently go to great lengths to avoid feeding them. Starlings are early to bed and late to rise, so people sneak out with grain and suet before dawn, for early rising birds, and whisk it away at the first whiff of a starling; after sunset, when the starlings are safely to roost bothering somebody else, they spread out the suet and grain once again. I don’t care what eats the stuff.

  It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

  Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog; in late fall and winter, and only then, can I scale the cliff to the Lucas orchard, circle the forested quarry pond, or follow the left-hand bank of Tinker Creek downstream. The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. Now I can see the house where the Whites and the Garretts lived on the hill under oaks. The thickly grown banks of Carvin’s Creek where it edges the road have long since thinned to a twiggy haze, and I can see Maren and Sandy in blue jackets out running the dogs. The mountains’ bones poke through, all shoulder and knob and shin. All that summer conceals, winter reveals. Here are the birds’ nests hid in the hedge, and squirrels’ nests splotched all over the walnuts and elms.

  Today a gibbous moon marked the eastern sky like a smudge of chalk. The shadows of its features had the same blue tone and light value as the sky itself, so it looked transparent in its depths, or softly frayed, like the heel of a sock. Not too long ago, according to Edwin Way Teale, the people of Europe believed that geese and swans wintered there, on the moon’s pale seas. Now it is sunset. The mountains warm in tone as the day chills, and a hot blush deepens over the land. “Observe,” said da Vinci, “observe in the streets at twilight, when the day is cloudy, the loveliness and tenderness spread on the faces of men and women.” I have seen those faces, when the day is cloudy, and I have seen at sunset on a clear winter day houses, ordinary houses, whose bricks were coals and windows flame.

  At dusk every evening an extended flock of starlings appears out of the northern sky and winds towards the setting sun. It is the winter day’s major event. Late yesterday, I climbed across the creek, through the steers’ pasture, beyond the grassy island where I had seen the giant water bug sip a frog, and up a high hill. Curiously, the best vantage point on the hill was occupied by a pile of burnt books. I opened some of them carefully: they were good cloth-and leather-bound novels, a complete, charred set of encyclopedias decades old, and old, watercolor-illustrated children’s books. They flaked in my hands like pieces of pie. Today I learned that the owners of the house behind the books had suffered a fire. But I didn’t know that then; I thought they’d suffered a terrible fit of pique. I crouched beside the books and looked over the valley.

  On my right a woods thickly overgrown with creeper descended the hill’s slope to Tinker Creek. On my left was a planting of large shade trees on the ridge of the hill. Before me the grassy hill pitched abruptly and gave way to a large, level field fringed in trees where it bordered the creek. Beyond the creek I could see with effort the vertical sliced rock where men had long ago quarried the mountain under the forest. Beyond that I saw Hollins Pond and all its woods and pastures; then I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains.

  Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared, then another, and another. It was the starlings going to roost. They gathered deep in the distance, flock sifting into flock, and strayed towards me, transparent and whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. I didn’t move; they flew directly over my head for half an hour. The flight extended like a fluttering banner, an unfurled oriflamme, in either direction as far as I could see. Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced. The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye. Over my head I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.

  After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feathered dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?

  Some weather’s coming; you can taste on the sides of your tongue a quince tang in the air. This fall everyone looked to the bands on a woolly bear caterpillar, and predicted as usual the direst of dire winters. This routine always calls to mind the Angiers’ story about the trappers in the far north. They approached an Indian whose ancestors had dwelled from time immemorial in those fir forests, and asked him about the severity of the coming winter. The Indian cast a canny eye over the landscape and pronounced, “Bad winter.” The others asked him how he knew. The Indian replied unhesitatingly, “The white man makes a big wood pile.” Here the woodpile is an exercise doggedly, exhaustedly maintained despite what must be great temptation. The other day I saw a store displaying a neatly stacked quarter-cord of fireplace logs manufactured of rolled, pressed paper. On the wrapper of each “log” was printed in huge letters the beguiling slogan, “The ROMANCE Without The HEARTACHE.”

  I lay a cherry log fire and settle in. I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel. I never cease to marvel at the newspapers. In my life I’ve seen one million pictures of a duck that has adopted a kitten, or a cat that has adopted a duckling, or a sow and a puppy, a mare and a muskrat. And for the one millionth time I’m fascinated. I wish I lived near them, in Corpus Christi or Damariscotta; I wish I had the wonderful pair before me, mooning about the yard. It’s all beginning to smack of home. The winter pictures that come in over the wire from every spot on the continent are getting to be as familiar as my own hearth. I wait for the annual aerial photograph of an enterprising fellow who has stamped in the snow a gia
nt Valentine for his girl. Here’s the annual chickadee-trying-to-drink-from-a-frozen-birdbath picture, captioned, “Sorry, Wait Till Spring,” and the shot of an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill, labeled, “Needs a Push.” How can an old world be so innocent?

  Finally I see tonight a picture of a friendly member of the Forest Service in Wisconsin, who is freeing a duck frozen onto the ice by chopping out its feet with a hand ax. It calls to mind the spare, cruel story Thomas McGonigle told me about herring gulls frozen on ice off Long Island. When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which had frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it. Some of the gulls were already dead. He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then, with a steel knife he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack. The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy room. And out on the Bay, the ice was studded with paired, red stumps.

  Winter knives. With their broad snow knives, Eskimos used to cut blocks of snow to spiral into domed igloos for temporary shelter. They sharpened their flensing knives by licking a thin coat of ice on the blade. Sometimes an Eskimo would catch a wolf with a knife. He slathered the knife with blubber and buried the hilt in snow or ice. A hungry wolf would scent the blubber, find the knife, and lick it compulsively with numbed tongue, until he sliced his tongue to ribbons, and bled to death.