Pilgrim

by Steve Wing

Pilgrim

My friend Cary once remarked that back in the ‘70s I’d occasionally declare a desire to make love to the Earth itself. I remembered having that notion, but hadn’t quite realized I’d ever said anything about it out loud (though people were making proclamations right and left in those days.)  Maybe I said it while stretching out on the fresh spring grass of the Oval at the University of Montana, my libido in a slow, shimmery simmer, as though I could feel the sunlight in my blood. Or maybe I was meditating on the connection between chlorophyll and hemoglobin illuminated by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 

 I’d never paid too much attention to the natural world as such when I was growing up in the copper-mining town of Butte, but the Green Wave had been rising. And then at the University, I fell in with a gang of guys who wandered out into the wild at every chance, backpacking the Mission Mountains and the Tobacco Roots, wandering Yellowstone and Glacier, hiking and camping and abusing substances, and figuring out ways to save it all.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek came out in early 1974, and the timing had certainly been right.  A Walden for our time, Pilgrim was called. A Green Bible. The Pulitzer committee was dazzled enough to give Dillard a prize in ‘75 (Gary Snyder got the Pulitzer for poetry the same year for Turtle Island, another green marvel.)  I knew a guy who was planning his own book in response, Love Letters to Annie Dillard.  So I wasn’t the only one to fall for Pilgrim, and for Annie Dillard.  Just her spacious view of the world would have done it, for me. Plus, as far as I could tell from the photos I’d seen, she was a looker (as well as a looker).        

Pilgrim was the first hardcover book I ever purchased of my own free will. The book wasn’t cheap for a student, or for someone like me who kept dropping in and out of being a student.  But it was beautiful and well-made, and I was so impressed by the writing I might have dipped the entire book in a vat of highlighter fluid if I’d had one handy.  Or maybe not. I usually loved my books roughly, dog-earing, coffee-ringing, spine-cracking, but I took care of Pilgrim. I even used bookmarks.

 Though I almost did get Pilgrim wet once, reading it aloud to friends at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs. In late winter, we’d travelled south from Missoula on Highway 93 and then west on 12 over Lolo Pass into Idaho. We parked where the Lochsa River met Warm Springs Creek, took the pack bridge over the river, and hiked up the creek trail for about a mile before picking our way down the steep hillside, still snowy.  There the hot water tumbled down and welled up to be impounded by boulders, forming pools, and there we soaked, steaming, naked as snow monkeys, more naked, with the occasional slender trickle of ice water sneaking over from the creek to thrill our toes.

We’d bundled our clothes and piled them onto a handy flat-topped boulder within arm’s length above the waterline, along with the matches and the marijuana and the wine, with the slab of sharp cheddar and the summer sausage. And the book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, there it was in a plastic bag, and I took it out and gave my reading right there in the hot springs, holding forth amid plumes and flourishes of steam.

I read from the second chapter, “Seeing,” inspired by Space and Sight, by Marius von Senden, a book about how people blind since birth reacted to their new vision after cataract surgery.  The newly sighted tended to fall in love with colors immediately, but had trouble with shapes and space and sizes, and sometimes that trouble never went away. I read aloud about how one man described lemonade as square since it prickled his tongue, reminding him of the way a square shape pricked his fingers. I looked up from the book and around at my pals, and said, Got that? Square lemonade.  I read how another patient described a human hand as “something bright and then holes.”  I raised my hand into the air, and waved it back and forth, slowly, repeating, Bright, and then holes.

Some of the formerly blind were overwhelmed by their first sights of the world and never did take to vision. One young woman finally had to shut her eyes and keep them shut for two weeks.  And so, for my bang-up finish, I read about her at last opening her eyes again and looking around.  She couldn’t identify anything now, but the more she gazed, the more “an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”

With those words, I tried to make my voice echo around the canyon a bit.  And the guys seemed to like the reading okay. 

My idea was that with “Seeing,” Dillard was quite simply telling us to Wake up!  Shed your work-a-day assumptions, blink away the scales, dump that dull routine. I wasn’t totally sure what I meant, or even semi-sure.  But see the world, the universe!  See in your heart that heaven’s here, as my friend Mark used to sing. See what the Establishment is trying to do to us. Has done. Will continue to do.  See what’s going on, see how everything is connected….

See the beauty of this place where we are right now. The snow and the rocks and the pines, the interweave of wet heat and wind on our skin.  And, My God, isn’t that sky overhead?  Sky!  Up there, curving over this place, where we are right now. 

Years later, I heard Dillard came close to abandoning Pilgrim while writing the “Seeing” chapter, maybe because she had trouble keeping track of all that vision. Maybe that’s why in the book she breaks seeing down into two major categories that remind her of “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.”

That’s what I want, I’d said to myself.  Yes!  The light of the moment printing on my own silver gut!  I’d been very taken with Dillard’s metaphor, and even considered it as a kind of prescription.  Down with cameras!  I’d never owned a camera anyway, but now Dillard had given me a justification of sorts for my irritation during wanderings when my shutter bugging friends slammed on the brakes and whipped out their instruments. 

With Dillard’s first way of seeing, the way that echoes walking with a camera, she roams and reads. She reads books – quite a few books – and when she wanders around Tinker Creek, she reads the weather, reads the landscape, reads the creatures, the sycamores, the copperheads, the praying mantises.

When she comes home, it’s back to the bookshelf, and her various readings and ramblings drift and diffuse through one another, and she makes notes in one of her many journals. Eventually, she delivers a quirky fact or secretes a lapidary description.  She tells us in the book that “water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.”  She tells about the intimate housekeeping of a den of muskrats: “They strew the floor with plant husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped up and soaking, huddled into balls.”       

Dillard sees – or imagines seeing – things quickening and bubbling, kindling and burgeoning. Yet she knows “it’s rough out there.”  She says, “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.”  Out in the wild world, it seems to be “chomp or fast,” she says.  Leaning and peering, she admires autumn leaves, and then realizes there’s not an unblemished leaf in the bunch. All, all are “half-eaten, rusted, blighted, blistered, mined, snipped, smutted, pitted, puffed, sawed, bored, and rucked.”  (Sometimes I thought her secret was in her verbs.)  

Dillard’s second way of seeing, the silver gut way, seems to work like this: She’s doing the first kind of seeing and then something breaks through, strikes like a random sacrament.  There’s a letting go, an emptying, an opening, a filling. She bursts into her highest-flying poetry and resounds “like a beaten bell.”  Or she sees herself float away, as “flesh-flake, feather, bone.”

Whew. For me, that poetry seemed to be the point, enough and more than enough.  After all, I was the guy who’d once postulated that life just might be “a sweet hot rose edged with diamond-flake design.”  (Hey, I was seventeen.).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek famously starts with a bang:

“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest…  He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood… arching his back as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.… I’d awake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.”

What a hook!  There’s fighting and jumping and purring, and blood and piss and the intimation of mother’s milk, there are claws and paws and a naked body painted with roses. And after that opening jam-packed with the physical, Dillard amps up her grand spiritual rhetoric: “What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth….”

For all that, Pilgrim turned out to be an oddly bodiless book. Dillard does play softball and pinochle, but only off-stage. She wanders around in the woods, but for much of the time she could be almost any disembodied sprite. She doesn’t so much as stub her toe or blow anyone a kiss in the whole book. She had a husband at the time, Richard, and she dedicated her book to Richard, but that’s all we know about the man.

She sips coffee and has an occasional smoke.  She talks about sex, but not in a human way.  She has a nightmare of a Luna moth “hunching repeatedly with a horrible animal vigor,” and then there are those rutting muskrats. When her tomcat was out there in the night brawling and spraying and yowling, he was presumably pursuing in his own way the rose of union.

She tells of the flirtations of Pliny’s mares, who raised their tails to the wind and later gave birth to the swiftest of foals.   

I guess I was reading this stuff around the time I was talking about my yearning to make love to the Earth. Now I didn’t really have some sort of fetish for the planet, or even just the biosphere. Though what would you call it if I had?  Geophilia? Terramory? 

Still, I wrote a story called “Planets,” and there was a guy who had actual sex with a planet similar to our Earth. Well, you probably couldn’t have told the two apart. But this guy claimed that he’d landed on this planet and was just wandering around whatever this place had for backwoods, just minding his own business when he was “caressed by presumptuous vines, kissed by rain, drawn down to the ground where he plunged right into a bed of warm wet moss up to the hilt, drawing blood as his groin was striated and scored by grit and green stars in a net of roots….” 

Ultimately, I decided I was probably not the one to accuse Dillard of overwriting.

I eventually did learn to contend with Dillard, mildly enough at first. A friend had told her that sycamore is the most intrinsically beautiful word in English, so Pilgrim riffed for a while on sycamore.  But I’d say, No, the word tamarack is more beautiful, and a tamarack is a pretty good tree in its own right, and eminently riffable.

Pilgrim affected me in ways I’m sure Dillard never could have imagined. Near the end, pretty much in passing, she offhandedly lists the botanical names of various fruits: achene and drupe and samara and legume and berry and nut and capsule and pome. An apple is a pome, and a maple key is a samara.  For instance.

I had no idea there were so many names, and I was inspired to look up more.  When I discovered silique (a pod of radish seeds is a silique), I started writing another story, a tale of a triangular summer romance that begins with two whimsical young women introducing themselves as Silique and Samara to a somewhat unwhimsical young man, a visitor to their domain. They refuse to tell him their real names, and tell him he needs to come up with his own botanical name if he wanted to play with them at all.  The kid wavers and dithers, and finally allows that he’s willing to be called Berry, but it’s too late and they tag him with Schizocarp (the fruit of a carrot or geranium or mallow). I never did finish the story, but I had the feeling that things wouldn’t have worked out so well for old Schizocarp. 

For a long time, I hesitated to reread Pilgrim in its entirety, afraid that it might not move me as much as it had in the early years.  And of course, there was no way it could have.  But I hung on to that book through eight or nine changes of household, dipping into it now and again.

But it was fairly late in the game when realized I’d been missing one of Dillard’s major points: she was looking for God.  And finding Him. Sneaking Him in the back door, or so it seemed to me.  Except, I couldn’t really say sneaking because she’d been saying so all along, starting right there on the front cover flap: “I am no scientist…. I am a wanderer with a background in theology.” Then as the book proceeds, she throws in quotes from Ezra and Elijah and Ecclesiastes, along with oracular and gnomic sayings of Sufis and Hassidim and the medieval scholastics, and she even occasionally says stuff like Alleluia and Thanks be to God.

And then I realized that despite Dillard’s Christian slant, I’d been cherry picking Pilgrim from the get-go and coming up with my own quite nice green existential biophilic pagan package.

 Heaven help me, I’d thought she was being metaphorical.  And why wouldn’t I think that?  All through Pilgrim, Dillard heaves up these heaps and heaps of steaming, jittering metaphors.  She says things like, “I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky….” 

Sometimes it seemed that practically everything in Pilgrim was a metaphor, even Dillard’s imaginary bloody dead cat.

I say dead because later in the book Dillard mentions that the cat died, and I say imaginary because as it turned out, the cat had never been hers in the first place. That bloody story had never been hers. Someone had said to her something like, My cat used to get into fights at night and I’d find these bloody pawprints on my body.  Dillard apparently jumped on the story right away and asked if she could use it, and the person said, Okay. Probably whoever it was didn’t use the phrase painted with roses, but Dillard has a gift for transformation. 

Does it matter that the story wasn’t really hers?  Well, sure it does. But I could see why she found it irresistible, that tomcat story. It was the perfect setup for what she was trying to do in the book. 

In a way, Annie Dillard must have been as surprised as anybody when Pilgrim at Tinker Creek became such a big hit.  She’d caught the Green Wave without fully realizing it, maybe, for the book doesn’t always seem quite in sync with the times.  When she talks about Rachel Carson, she talks about barnacle skins rather than DDT.  The early Big Blue Marble photographs of the Earth from space jacked up the energy of the environmental movement with their suggestions of interconnection and fragility.  But when Dillard admires one of those photos, she’s taken by how it’s “so startlingly painterly and hung.”  She’s looking for an artist, a decorator.  Her collected slants of light and her cagy sleights of hand proliferate into intricately fluted and fringed arguments from design. Thus, it is demonstrated: there must be a Designer.

But she makes another argument, one that might be called an argument from… un-design?  A theodicy. Dillard works at justifying the existence of pain, trouble, death…  a justification of Godly power. Again, she rarely talks about human evil or the destruction of the natural world.  She mentions the “black burgeoning of disease, the dank baptismal lagoon into which we are dipped by blind chance,” and she doesn’t care much for that sort of thing.  She seems to reserve a special ire for icky parasites (chomp!) and comments that “there is something that profoundly fails to be exuberant about these crawling lice and white, fat-bodied grubs.”  Not to mention these leeches and kissing bugs and special lice that live in wart hog bristles. 

A theodicy involves reconciliation with God, and in Dillard’s case reconciliation by mystical transport.  Mystery does heavy lifting for Dillard.  She says, “Now, it would be too facile to pull everything out of the hat and say that mystery vanquishes knowledge.”  Too facile, but she does it anyway.  For Dillard, a power holy and secret and fleet is in charge: “There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.” 

Well, no, I said to myself one day.  There’s other stuff to do.  It’s not a simple either/or.  Catch it if you can, Dillard says.  She says this more than once.  Or chants it. Or proclaims it.

But what if you can’t?  What if you’re just not that agile a catcher, or not always capable of astonishment, or can’t draw the same mystical conclusions as Annie Dillard?  Once in a flash of exasperation, I jotted down the following:

That Ann-Who-Can! That Ann-Who-Can!

Can she, when she reads a book?

Can she, will she, with a long rich look?

Oh, yes she can!

She’s… Ann-Who-Can!

When I moved to Spokane right before the turn of the millennium, I looked around for somewhere to run. I didn’t have a lot of time – I had a family by then, I had a job (as an environmental consultant, oddly enough) – and Lincoln Park was handy. Lower Lincoln was a nice enough standard residential neighborhood park – playground, picnic tables, softball field – but Upper Lincoln was an odd island in the heart of the city, a billion-ton jumble of basalt crowned by Ponderosa pine.    

Upper Lincoln has a pond, a hollow in the rock fed by springs, with cattails and lily pads and ducks. There’s a blacktop path around the pond – sometimes they hold bike races – and a prospect overlooking the city.  I knew this, but I was still startled the first time I ran Upper Lincoln in the dark when I came around the corner and saw the lights down below, so many, as though the Spokane River had greatly overflowed its banks and frozen into stars.

Sometimes when I made my rounds, I’d pick up litter, Snickers wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups. Once I found a loose roll of bills on the ground (thirty-five dollars!).  And once I found a small inflatable turtle.

Still, wild creatures wander in and out and out of the park.  There were those ducks, and once I spotted a great blue heron sipping goldfish from the pond. In spring, I’d been divebombed by red-winged blackbirds.  There are quail and nuthatches and chickadees, turkeys and chipmunks. I’ve seen the raccoon tracks, I’ve smelled skunks, I’ve heard bullfrogs.  I haven’t seen deer, yet, but I know they visit.

There are coyotes. Once I talked to someone who claimed to have been so near a coyote they could tell she was a nursing mother. A theory arose that she was making a living for herself and her young by preying on the neighborhood’s soft and dull-brained housecats.  Supposedly a den had been discovered in the park, snugly lined with pelts, calico, tortoiseshell, tiger tabby. (Lincoln Park is full of legends.)

When I first started running in the park, I could identify a few things, plants and animals, but I soon found myself glancing and wondering. So then when I came home from the wild, such as it was, I began cruising my bookshelves and looking stuff up, sometimes even before my shower. And then I’d grab a notebook and scribble away.

One day I realized, Why, I’m Dillardizing!  On my own modest scale. As with Dillard, I was rambling and reading and maintaining a journal or two (she’d apparently loaded up twenty journals for Tinker Creek). And like Dillard, I’d eventually pluck pieces from the journals to revise and polish, with the hope of placement in some periodical or other.  

I didn’t have time to stalk or skulk or lurk or diligently throw myself into the path of a bolt of grace, but I was trying to catch something, if I could, or catch on to something, at least. 

If you have to observe wildlife on the run, wildflowers are ideal.  They can’t run, and can’t hide. In fact, they advertise.  So I’d pick a flower I was curious about – one flower at a time and only a flower growing in a particularly lavish patch of its own kind.  Really.  Sometimes my picks were clean, but other times I’d have to raggedly twist the flower free of its mooring.  I’d hold a flower as if it were a pen to minimize the wind of motion, upper stem and blossom reposing on the juncture of thumb and forefinger – the anatomical flower rest – and cut stem facing out. I’d scribble arabesques of flower juice all over the air as I ran. At home, I’d plunk the flower into a jar, and try to find it in a book.

After I gave up picking, my runs grew full of stops and stares and starts so I could memorize the flowers as best I could.  I’d squat down and peer at a flower and inventory the features and fix them fiercely into my brain (since I did NOT have a camera, and my silver gut just didn’t seem up to the task.). And then I’d take off again, chanting, say, spike or raceme or panicle, for the configurations of the flowers. Or maybe orbicular or lanceolate or deltoid, for the shapes of the leaves.

  And so, I learned that there are avalanche lilies in the park and arrowleaf balsamroot, wartberry fairybell, and prairie smoke.  Plus, a mix of some pretty nice weeds: chicory… yellow salsify… Dalmatian toadflax…. And garden escapees: rogue iris… renegade hydrangea…  daisy gone-a-dingo….  Sometimes if I was stumped, I’d assign placeholder names to plants until further notice:  skewer-wort… rock daisy… mystery cress….

But do I see? In Lincoln Park?  

I see enough.  Once as dawn was about end, I was running up the shadowy blacktop path to the top of the park, and when I made the turn west, where the path falls sharply away again, at that moment, the sun went off behind me, a flash flood shooting my shadow down and out and on and on, a silhouette on spindle sticks, a hopalong homunculus on black stilts two hundred feet tall, tilting darkly down the hill….

One day, running, I heard a burst of ducks take off from the pond and fly right over my head.  I’d never been so near before. I could imagine that with the tremendous effort each mallard heart beat in one harmony with the wings lest conflicting rhythms tear the marvelous streamlined structure of the duck apart. With each wingbeat, I could hear a sort of tuneful tapping, slim sharp crescents of sound as of a bow pattering strings, a spiccato.

The writing of Pilgrim was apparently fueled by Dillard’s consumption of chocolate milk and coffee and Vantage cigarettes, but sometimes I tasted things in the park, wild things (maybe because of my tendency to run before breakfast.)  For instance, I once nibbled a perfect little pearl of a puffball mushroom (yes, I knew exactly what I was doing).

And then I finally realized – after a bit of bookwork – that the plant I’d tagged skewer-wort was in fact Miner’s Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata).  So, one gray spring day while taking a turn around the path I snatched and devoured a handful of Miner’s Lettuce dressed with fresh rain.  My timing was right. My handful was excellent, young and tender.

I did learn to leave things alone in Upper Lincoln, eventually. I tried to follow Spokane Parks and Recreation General Rule #13: Do not disturb any living thing in a park. That was why I gave up picking the flowers, after all, and so I stopped eating things, too.

Except for serviceberries.  Or as some call them, sarvisberries. Or juneberries. Or shadblow.  Or saskatoons.  Amelanchier alnifolia, anyway.  Now are these berries actually living things when they are on the verge of falling from the tree anyway?   

So I still eat serviceberries, in season. Their taste reminds me of blueberries, though they are gamier, darker, grainier. They ripen unevenly, so the best way to eat them is to dash a handful into your mouth and whirl a cavalcade around, skins slipping, seeds popping, juices spurting, now brighter, now more raisin-y. I usually leave it at that, a handful, or two, leaving plenty for the birds. Sometimes, while I’m taking a break to forage, another runner or a dog walker will approach, and I’ll immediately try to camouflage my reaching and plucking by taking a look at my imaginary watch or stretching my bones or wiping sweat from my brow, just doing the serviceberry shuffle, a primate guarding by misdirection a food source.

Early in Pilgrim – that beautiful book – Annie Dillard says that she is keeping “what Thoreau called a meteorological journal of the mind.”

I know what she means. Sometimes the smell of the airy fall rain in Lincoln Park reminded me of an old used book store, with that touch of mildew and dust and vanilla, all those flakes and fibers of drying vegetable matter, of a complexity unfolding, both a foreshadowing and a reminiscent smell, rich and ticklish. The air smells not so much wet as awakened, aromatic and yet musty, of seasons weaving through one another, the dry and lightly-spun dust of October contending with the long ferment that will become April.

On another day, the quality of the light leaking over the top of the window shade in our bedroom told me — even before I looked outside — that snow had been falling and was still falling and flying and drifting deeper, a gift I could open myself out into.

And I went out and ran through the park, through the snow, one of the most beautiful physical things I’ve ever done. I felt tension ease and shrug and flake away, felt my shoulders settling down and the corners of my mouth floating up.   

Have you entered the treasuries of the snow? So the Lord asked Job, with such a snort and a flounce and a strut that Job found it hard to reply.  But all I could say was, You bet.

    

    

Author Steve Wing studied at the University of Montana with Richard Hugo, William Kittredge and Rick DeMarinis. He has published essays and fiction in The Iowa Review, Under the Sun, Salon, Terrain.org, Concho River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Under the Gum Tree, and Catamaran Literary Reader. He currently lives in Spokane, Washington.

Artist Matthew Fertel is a Sacramento-based abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. His work focuses on the shapes, textures, and colors of his subjects, creating compositions that encourage an implied narrative easily influenced by the viewer and open to multiple interpretations. More of Matthew’s work can be seen on his website and Instagram.