[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
and say now, as men plant flags on the ice and snow and say,
here. But it occurred to me that I could no more catch spring
by the tip of the tail than I could untie the apparent knot in the
snakeskin; there are no edges to grasp. Both are continuous loops.
I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recur-
rence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What
would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days
and nights? You could say, it s cold again; it was cold before,
but you couldn t make the key connection and say, it was cold
this time last year, because the notion of year is precisely the
one you lack. Assuming that you hadn t yet noticed any orderly
progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live
on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one
particular long period of cold would, in fact, end? While the
earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and
summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease : God
makes this guarantee very early in Genesis to a people whose
fears on this point had perhaps not been completely allayed.
It must have been fantastically important, at the real beginnings
of human culture, to conserve and relay this vital seasonal inform-
ation, so that the people could anticipate dry or cold seasons, and
not huddle on some November rock hoping pathetically that
spring was just around the corner. We still very
76 / Annie Dillard
much stress the simple fact of four seasons to schoolchildren;
even the most modern of modern new teachers, who don t seem
to care if their charges can read or write or name two products
of Peru, will still muster some seasonal chitchat and set the kids
to making paper pumpkins, or tulips, for the walls. The people,
wrote Van Gogh in a letter, are very sensitive to the changing
seasons. That we are very sensitive to the changing seasons
is, incidentally, one of the few good reasons to shun travel. If I
stay at home I preserve the illusion that what is happening on
Tinker Creek is the very newest thing, that I m at the very van-
guard and cutting edge of each new season. I don t want the same
season twice in a row; I don t want to know I m getting last week s
weather, used weather, weather broadcast up and down the coast,
old-hat weather.
But there s always unseasonable weather. What we think of
the weather and behavior of life on the planet at any given season
is really all a matter of statistical probabilities; at any given point,
anything might happen. There is a bit of every season in each
season. Green plants deciduous green leaves grow everywhere,
all winter long, and small shoots come up pale and new in every
season. Leaves die on the tree in May, turn brown, and fall into
the creek. The calendar, the weather, and the behavior of wild
creatures have the slimmest of connections. Everything overlaps
smoothly for only a few weeks each season, and then it all tangles
up again. The temperature, of course, lags far behind the calendar
seasons, since the earth absorbs and releases heat slowly, like a
leviathan breathing. Migrating birds head south in what appears
to be dire panic, leaving mild weather and fields full of insects
and seeds; they reappear as if in all eagerness in January, and
poke about morosely in the snow. Several years ago our October
woods would have made a dismal colored photograph for a
sadist s
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 77
calendar: a killing frost came before the leaves had even begun
to brown; they drooped from every tree like crepe, blackened
and limp. It s all a chancy, jumbled affair at best, as things seem
to be below the stars.
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly
overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending
spiral if you will, like a child s toy Slinky. Of course we have no
idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop
itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky
so uncannily walks.
The power we seek, too, seems to be a continuous loop. I have
always been sympathetic with the early notion of a divine power
that exists in a particular place, or that travels about over the face
of the earth as a man might wander and when he is there he
is surely not here. You can shake the hand of a man you meet in
the woods; but the spirit seems to roll along like the mythical
hoop snake with its tail in its mouth. There are no hands to shake
or edges to untie. It rolls along the mountain ridges like a fireball,
shooting off a spray of sparks at random, and will not be trapped,
slowed, grasped, fetched, peeled, or aimed. As for the wheels,
it was cried unto them in my hearing, O wheel. This is the hoop
of flame that shoots the rapids in the creek or spins across the
dizzy meadows; this is the arsonist of the sunny woods: catch it
if you can.
6
The Present
I
Catch it if you can.
It is early March. I am dazed from a long day of interstate
driving homeward; I pull in at a gas station in Nowhere, Virginia,
north of Lexington. The young boy in charge ( Chick at oll? ) is
offering a free cup of coffee with every gas purchase. We talk in
the glass-walled office while my coffee cools enough to drink.
He tells me, among other things, that the rival gas station down
the road, whose FREE COFFEE sign is visible from the interstate,
charges you fifteen cents if you want your coffee in a Styrofoam
cup, as opposed, I guess, to your bare hands.
All the time we talk, the boy s new beagle puppy is skidding
around the office, sniffing impartially at my shoes and at the wire
rack of folded maps. The cheerful human conversation wakes
me,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 79
recalls me, not to a normal consciousness, but to a kind of ener-
getic readiness. I step outside, followed by the puppy.
I am absolutely alone. There are no other customers. The road
is vacant, the interstate is out of sight and earshot. I have hazarded
into a new corner of the world, an unknown spot, a Brigadoon.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]