Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

  Still, the day had an air of menace. A broken whiskey bottle by the log, the brown tip of a snake’s tail disappearing between two rocks on the hill at my back, the rabbit the dog nearly caught, the rabies I knew was in the county, the bees who kept unaccountably fumbling at my forehead with their furred feet…

  I headed over to the new woods by the creek, the motorbike woods. They were strangely empty. The air was so steamy I could barely see. The ravine separating the woods from the field had filled during high water, and a dead tan mud clogged it now. The horny orange roots of one tree on the ravine’s jagged bank had been stripped of soil; now the roots hung, an empty net in the air, clutching an incongruous light bulb stranded by receding waters. For the entire time that I walked in the woods, four jays flew around me very slowly, acting generally odd, and screaming on two held notes. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

  Coming out of the woods, I heard loud shots; they reverberated ominously in the damp air. But when I walked up the road, I saw what it was, and the dread quality of the whole afternoon vanished at once. It was a couple of garbage trucks, huge trash compacters humped like armadillos, and they were making their engines backfire to impress my neighbors’ pretty daughters, high school girls who had just been let off the school bus. The long-haired girls strayed into giggling clumps at the corner of the road; the garbage trucks sped away gloriously, as if they had been the Tarleton twins on thoroughbreds cantering away from the gates of Tara. In the distance a white vapor was rising from the waters of Carvin’s Cove and catching in trailing tufts in the mountains’ sides. I stood on my own porch, exhilarated, unwilling to go indoors.

  It was just this time last year that we had the flood. It was Hurricane Agnes, really, but by the time it got here, the weather bureau had demoted it to a tropical storm. I see by a clipping I saved that the date was June twenty-first, the solstice, midsummer’s night, the longest daylight of the year; but I didn’t notice it at the time. Everything was so exciting, and so very dark.

  All it did was rain. It rained, and the creek started to rise. The creek, naturally, rises every time it rains; this didn’t seem any different. But it kept raining, and, that morning of the twenty-first, the creek kept rising.

  That morning I’m standing at my kitchen window. Tinker Creek is out of its four-foot banks, way out, and it’s still coming. The high creek doesn’t look like our creek. Our creek splashes transparently over a jumble of rocks; the high creek obliterates everything in flat opacity. It looks like somebody else’s creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer. The color is foul, a rusty cream. Water that has picked up clay soils looks worse than other muddy waters, because the particles of clay are so fine; they spread out and cloud the water so that you can’t see light through even an inch of it in a drinking glass.

  Everything looks different. Where my eye is used to depth, I see the flat water, near, too near. I see trees I never noticed before, the black verticals of their rain-soaked trunks standing out of the pale water like pilings for a rotted dock. The stillness of grassy banks and stony ledges is gone; I see rushing, a wild sweep and hurry in one direction, as swift and compelling as a waterfall. The Atkins kids are out in their tiny rain gear, staring at the monster creek. It’s risen up to their gates; the neighbors are gathering; I go out.

  I hear a roar, a high windy sound more like air than like water, like the run-together whaps of a helicopter’s propeller after the engine is off, a high million rushings. The air smells damp and acrid, like fuel oil, or insecticide. It’s raining.

  I’m in no danger; my house is high. I hurry down the road to the bridge. Neighbors who have barely seen each other all winter are there, shaking their heads. Few have ever seen it before: the water is over the bridge. Even when I see the bridge now, which I do every day, I still can’t believe it: the water was over the bridge, a foot or two over the bridge, which at normal times is eleven feet above the surface of the creek.

  Now the water is receding slightly; someone has produced empty metal drums, which we roll to the bridge and set up in a square to keep cars from trying to cross. It takes a bit of nerve even to stand on the bridge; the flood has ripped away a wedge of concrete that buttressed the bridge on the bank. Now one corner of the bridge hangs apparently unsupported while water hurls in an arch just inches below.

  It’s hard to take it all in, it’s all so new. I look at the creek at my feet. It smashes under the bridge like a fist, but there is no end to its force; it hurtles down as far as I can see till it lurches round the bend, filling the valley, flattening, mashing, pushed, wider and faster, till it fills my brain.

  It’s like a dragon. Maybe it’s because the bridge we are on is chancy, but I notice that no one can help imagining himself washed overboard, and gauging his chances for survival. You couldn’t live. Mark Spitz couldn’t live. The water arches where the bridge’s supports at the banks prevent its enormous volume from going wide, forcing it to go high; that arch drives down like a diving whale, and would butt you on the bottom. “You’d never know what hit you,” one of the men says. But if you survived that part and managed to surface…? How fast can you live? You’d need a windshield. You couldn’t keep your head up; the water under the surface is fastest. You’d spin around like a sock in a clothes dryer. You couldn’t grab onto a tree trunk without leaving that arm behind. No, you couldn’t live. And if they ever found you, your gut would be solid red clay.

  It’s all I can do to stand. I feel dizzy, drawn, mauled. Below me the floodwater roils to a violent froth that looks like dirty lace, a lace that continuously explodes before my eyes. If I look away, the earth moves backwards, rises and swells, from the fixing of my eyes at one spot against the motion of the flood. All the familiar land looks as though it were not solid and real at all, but painted on a scroll like a backdrop, and that unrolled scroll has been shaken, so the earth sways and the air roars.

  Everything imaginable is zipping by, almost too fast to see. If I stand on the bridge and look downstream, I get dizzy; but if I look upstream, I feel as though I am looking up the business end of an avalanche. There are dolls, split wood and kindling, dead fledgling songbirds, bottles, whole bushes and trees, rakes and garden gloves. Wooden, rough-hewn railroad ties charge by faster than any express. Lattice fencing bobs along, and a wooden picket gate. There are so many white plastic gallon milk jugs that when the flood ultimately recedes, they are left on the grassy banks looking from a distance like a flock of white geese.

  I expect to see anything at all. In this one way, the creek is more like itself when it floods than at any other time: mediating, bringing things down. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see John Paul Jones coming round the bend, standing on the deck of the Bon Homme Richard, or Amelia Earhart waving gaily from the cockpit of her floating Lockheed. Why not a cello, a basket of breadfruit, a casket of antique coins? Here comes the Franklin expedition on snowshoes, and the three magi, plus camels, afloat on a canopied barge!

  The whole world is in flood, the land as well as the water. Water streams down the trunks of trees, drips from hat-brims, courses across roads. The whole earth seems to slide like sand down a chute; water pouring over the least slope leaves the grass flattened, silver side up, pointing downstream. Everywhere windfall and flotsam twigs and leafy boughs, wood from woodpiles, bottles, and saturated straw spatter the ground or streak it in curving windrows. Tomatoes in flat gardens are literally floating in mud; they look as though they have been dropped whole into a boiling, brown-gravy stew. The level of the water table is at the top of the toe of my shoes. Pale muddy water lies on the flat so that it all but drowns the grass; it looks like a hideous parody of a light snow on the field, with only the dark tips of the grass blades visible.

  When I look across the street, I can’t believe my eyes. Right behind the road’s shoulder are waves, waves whipped in rhythmically peaking scallops, racing downstream. The hill where I
watched the praying mantis lay her eggs is a waterfall that splashes into a brown ocean. I can’t even remember where the creek usually runs—it is everywhere now. My log is gone for sure, I think—but in fact, I discover later, it holds, rammed between growing trees. Only the cable suspending the steers’ fence is visible, and not the fence itself; the steers’ pasture is entirely in flood, a brown river. The river leaps its banks and smashes into the woods where the motorbikes go, devastating all but the sturdiest trees. The water is so deep and wide it seems as though you could navigate the Queen Mary in it, clear to Tinker Mountain.

  What do animals do in these floods? I see a drowned muskrat go by like he’s flying, but they all couldn’t die; the water rises after every hard rain, and the creek is still full of muskrats. This flood is higher than their raised sleeping platforms in the banks; they must just race for high ground and hold on. Where do the fish go, and what do they do? Presumably their gills can filter oxygen out of this muck, but I don’t know how. They must hide from the current behind any barriers they can find, and fast for a few days. They must: otherwise we’d have no fish; they’d all be in the Atlantic Ocean. What about herons and kingfishers, say? They can’t see to eat. It usually seems to me that when I see any animal, its business is urgent enough that it couldn’t easily be suspended for forty-eight hours. Crayfish, frogs, snails, rotifers? Most things must simply die. They couldn’t live. Then I suppose that when the water goes down and clears, the survivors have a field day with no competition. But you’d think the bottom would be knocked out of the food chain—the whole pyramid would have no base plankton, and it would crumble, or crash with a thud. Maybe enough spores and larvae and eggs are constantly being borne down from slower upstream waters to repopulate…I don’t know.

  Some little children have discovered a snapping turtle as big as a tray. It’s hard to believe that this creek could support a predator that size: its shell is a foot and a half across, and its head extends a good seven inches beyond the shell. When the children—in the company of a shrunken terrier—approach it on the bank, the snapper rears up on its thick front legs and hisses very impressively. I had read earlier that since turtles’ shells are rigid, they don’t have bellows lungs; they have to gulp for air. And, also since their shells are rigid, there’s only room for so much inside, so when they are frightened and planning a retreat, they have to expel air from their lungs to make room for head and feet—hence the malevolent hiss.

  The next time I look, I see that the children have somehow maneuvered the snapper into a washtub. They’re waving a broom handle at it in hopes that it will snap the wood like a matchstick, but the creature will not deign to oblige. The kids are crushed; all their lives they’ve heard that this is the one thing you do with a snapping turtle—you shove a broom handle near it, and it “snaps it like a matchstick.” It’s nature’s way; it’s sure-fire. But the turtle is having none of it. It avoids the broom handle with an air of patiently repressed rage. They let it go, and it beelines down the bank, dives unhesitatingly into the swirling floodwater, and that’s the last we see of it.

  A cheer comes up from the crowd on the bridge. The truck is here with a pump for the Bowerys’ basement, hooray! We roll away the metal drums, the truck makes it over the bridge, to my amazement—the crowd cheers again. State police cruise by; everything’s fine here; downstream people are in trouble. The bridge over by the Bings’ on Tinker Creek looks like it’s about to go. There’s tree trunk wedged against its railing, and a section of concrete is out. The Bings are away, and a young couple is living there, “taking care of the house.” What can they do? The husband drove to work that morning as usual; a few hours later, his wife was evacuated from the front door in a motorboat.

  I walk to the Bings’. Most of the people who are on our bridge eventually end up over there; it’s just down the road. We straggle along in the rain, gathering a crowd. The men who work away from home are here, too; their wives have telephoned them at work this morning to say that the creek is rising fast, and they’d better get home while the gettin’s good.

  There’s a big crowd already there; everybody knows that the Bings’ is low. The creek is coming in the recreation-room windows; it’s halfway up the garage door. Later that day people will haul out everything salvageable and try to dry it: books, rugs, furniture—the lower level was filled from floor to ceiling. Now on this bridge a road crew is trying to chop away the wedged tree trunk with a long-handled ax. The handle isn’t so long that they don’t have to stand on the bridge, in Tinker Creek. I walk along a low brick wall that was built to retain the creek away from the house at high water. The wall holds just fine, but now that the creek’s receding, it’s retaining water around the house. On the wall I can walk right out into the flood and stand in the middle of it. Now on the return trip I meet a young man who’s going in the opposite direction. The wall is one brick wide; we can’t pass. So we clasp hands and lean out backward over the turbulent water; our feet interlace like teeth on a zipper, we pull together, stand, and continue on our ways. The kids have spotted a rattlesnake draping itself out of harm’s way in a bush; now they all want to walk over the brick wall to the bush, to get bitten by the snake.

  The little Atkins kids are here, and they are hopping up and down. I wonder if I hopped up and down, would the bridge go? I could stand at the railing as at the railing of a steamboat, shouting deliriously, “Mark three! Quarter-less-three! Half twain! Quarter twain!…” as the current bore the broken bridge out of sight around the bend before she sank….

  Everyone else is standing around. Some of the women are carrying curious plastic umbrellas that look like diving bells—umbrellas they don’t put up, but on; they don’t get under, but in. They can see out dimly, like goldfish in bowls. Their voices from with in sound distant, but with an underlying cheerfulness that plainly acknowledges, “Isn’t this ridiculous?” Some of the men are wearing their fishing hats. Others duck their heads under folded newspapers held not very high in an effort to compromise between keeping their heads dry and letting rain run up their sleeves. Following some form of courtesy, I guess, they lower these newspapers when they speak with you, and squint politely into the rain.

  Women are bringing coffee in mugs to the road crew. They’ve barely made a dent in the tree trunk, and they’re giving up. It’s a job for power tools; the water’s going down anyway, and the danger is past. Some kid starts doing tricks on a skateboard; I head home.

  On the same day that I was standing on bridges here over Tinker Creek, a friend, Lee Zacharias, was standing on a bridge in Richmond over the James River. It was a calm day there, with not a cloud in the skies. The James River was up a mere nine feet, which didn’t look too unusual. But floating in the river was everything under the bright sun. As Lee watched, chicken coops raced by, chunks of houses, porches, stairs, whole uprooted trees—and finally a bloated dead horse. Lee knew, all of Richmond knew: it was coming.

  There the James ultimately rose thirty-two feet. The whole town was under water, and all the electrical power was out. When Governor Holton signed the emergency relief bill—which listed our county among the federal disaster areas—he had to do it by candlelight.

  That night a curious thing happened in the blacked-out Governor’s mansion. Governor Holton walked down an upstairs hall and saw, to his disbelief, a light bulb glowing in a ceiling fixture. It was one of three bulbs, all dead—the whole city was dead—but that one bulb was giving off a faint electrical light. He stared at the thing, scratched his head, and summoned an electrician. The electrician stared at the thing, scratched his head, and announced, “Impossible.” The governor went back to bed, and the electrician went home. No explanation has ever been found.

  Later Agnes would move on up into Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, killing people and doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage. Here in Virginia alone it killed twelve people and ruined 166 million dollars worth of property. But it hit Pennsylvania twice, coming and going. I
talked to one of the helicopter pilots who had helped airlift ancient corpses from a flooded cemetery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The flood left the bodies stranded on housetops, in trees; the pilots, sickened, had to be relieved every few hours. The one I talked to, in a little sandwich shop at the Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway, preferred Vietnam. We were lucky here.

  This winter I heard a final flood story, about an extra dividend that the flood left the Bings, a surprise as unexpected as a baby in a basket on a stoop.

  The Bings came home and their house was ruined, but somehow they managed to salvage almost everything, and live as before. One afternoon in the fall a friend went to visit them; as he was coming in, he met a man coming out, a professor with a large volume under his arm. The Bings led my friend inside and into the kitchen, where they proudly opened the oven door and showed him a giant mushroom—which they were baking to serve to guests the following day. The professor with the book had just been verifying its edibility. I imagined the mushroom, wrinkled, black, and big as a dinner plate, erupting overnight mysteriously in the Bings’ living room—from the back, of an upholstered couch, say, or from a still-damp rug under an armchair.

  Alas, the story as I had fixed it in my mind proved to be only partly true. The Bings often cook wild mushrooms, and they know what they’re doing. This particular mushroom had grown outside, under a sycamore, on high ground that the flood hadn’t touched. So the flood had nothing to do with it. But it’s still a good story, and I like to think that the flood left them a gift, a consolation prize, so that for years to come they will be finding edible mushrooms here and there about the house, dinner on the bookshelf, hors d’oeuvres in the piano. It would have been nice.