Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

First published: 1974

Type of work: Nature writing

The Work:

Annie Dillard is no mere “nature writer,” and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, is more than a book about simply “walking around the woods.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek blends spirituality, environmentalism, awe, and wonder with narrative, research, questions, and answers. Although the work is set at Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, it could be a story about any natural place, experienced anew by any person journeying through, like a pilgrim.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is organized into fifteen chapters, each with simple titles such as “Seeing” or “The Present.” The chapters move chronologically through the seasons, starting with winter in January. No chapter, however, is limited to what is happening at Tinker Creek in a given month. Rather, the chapters are thematic, as indicated by their titles. There is a larger theme of spirituality, as the book explores the two routes to God in the tradition of neoplatonic Christianity. The first half of the book shows the positive route, via positiva (celebrating a creator’s glory, reveling in balance and existence, knowing that a god exists and is good); the second half shows the negative route, via negativa (acknowledging God’s unknowability, as well as the bizarre fecundity and voraciousness of the natural world, where eventually everything will die and nothing can ever really be known).

The book starts with what is perhaps its best-known scene: Dillard’s old tomcat returns from a night of prowling and traverses her body and bed, leaving bloody footprints across her chest that look like roses. She showers away the scarlet marks, musing on what it means to wake to beauty and violence from unknown adventures. The scene sets the tone for the rest of the book, which treads a tightrope between opposites.

Dillard says that a partial inspiration for the book comes from writer Henry David Thoreau, who, in composing Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854), wanted to find a way to keep a journal of mind; Dillard, like Thoreau, is certainly a Transcendentalist. However, before the first chapter ends, Dillard has turned Walden on its head and redefined “nature writing.” In the course of a basic description of Tinker Creek and the surrounding landscape, she slips in paragraphs written in second person, references an obscure story about a canary, tells readers about the habits of giant water bugs, quotes Albert Einstein and Blaise Pascal, and grapples with the concepts of grace, death, spirituality, and wonder.

Dillard maintains this whirlwind style throughout the book. She is a storyteller, and she realizes the story of the land is more than just the recollections of daily walks through the land—it includes all the writing and research that has come before, from folklore to religion to small-town news. She often refers to what she is reading or has read or wants to read, leading to chapters that form encyclopedias of the sublime. For example, in “Seeing,” she uses an anecdote to tell about her childhood ability to see insects at a distance, tying sight to the following topics: drawing, brain circuitry, perception, amoebas in river water, cataracts, internal monologues, and various medical triumphs related to surgery for the blind. Her prose moves effortlessly and with exuberance, as if she is encountering all these ideas the same way she encounters critters and plants on her walks along the creek.

By the middle of the book, Dillard starts to link new observations to metaphors and philosophies from the beginning of the book. She has already established that the creek represents mystery. An earlier chapter examines sight, while a later chapter muses on shadows. In “The Fixed,” she combines the two ideas: She is startled by a strange bird’s shadow on the frozen river—she looks up and sees a magnificent woodpecker. Mystery solved. The river, the mystery, and the shadow merge in one moment, leading to clarity, and Dillard is spiritually charged by the sudden understanding.

Dillard also wants to show her readers her conception of spiritual glory as it relates to nature, and this desire takes the form of many anecdotes, biological facts, passages from religious texts (including the Qur՚ān), and simple questions. Ultimately, by chapter 8, “Intricacy,” she has pared down her quest, to two questions: Should humans concern themselves with the question of who created the planet? Should humans be concerned with why the planet was created? Her mood takes a darker turn as she quips about how amazing it is that there can exist in nature anything beautiful at all.

The delights of mystery and understanding cannot last uninterrupted. Chapter 9, “The Flood,” is the bridge between the via positiva and via negativa. Readers notice an immediate tonal shift as Dillard watches the swollen river and remembers the catastrophic flooding from tropical storm Agnes in 1972. Recollecting how the meager creek soon topped a bridge and threatened her neighbors’ homes, she imagines drowning. She describes horrific things caught in the flood water, like dead horses. She recounts a fantastic urban legend about how one electric light bulb still worked at the governor’s house, and how electricians could not figure out why it still worked. At the end of the chapter, in quintessential Dillard style, she convinces herself that a flooded neighbor’s house is now sprouting amazing edible mushrooms in its living room, including on its bookshelves, and even on the kitchen table.

From any flood comes fecundity, the title of chapter 10. Staying with her cynical view of nature, Dillard creates a litany of instances where growth is astonishing and scary and seemingly illogical. She touches on her usual odd cases—the tenacity of cockroaches, the horrors of parasitic wasps, the peculiar barnacle. She also includes her fascination with the number of miles of roots one plant produces; how lacewings eat their own eggs, even as they lay them; and how planarians feast upon their discarded tails. She refers to all these life cycles as ordained yet infused with the luck of survival.

The book next examines stalking, which is clearly an analogy to meditation. To stalk a muskrat, Dillard has to wait in one place for the animal to come to her. She invokes Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, which states that humans cannot know a particle’s position and velocity at the same time. No matter how much is known, Dillard is saying, there forever remains the unknown—the essence of via negativa.

The next few chapters cover copperhead snakes, leeches, snapping turtles, and parasites, all things that Dillard has encountered and feels compelled to discuss with the same wonder she applied to muskrats, water bugs, and woodpeckers from the first half of the book. This wonder, however, is tinged with revulsion and, in the case of the copperhead, an awareness of danger. Dillard asserts that a marvelous creator must have dreamed up these things, even if the result is tattered butterflies, maimed spiders, and scarred turtles.

The final two chapters, “Northing” and “The Waters of Separation,” document the fall and the coming winter, the restlessness of migration, and offerings. She brings back the image of her tomcat’s roselike paw prints when she tells a story about how starving people can get rosy splotches on their skin. Circling back to a metaphor to extend this story, she talks about avoiding starvation; she cites Ezekiel, who told people to explore the gaps—the little places, the low-down crevices, the cracks too easily ignored. Dillard implores readers to stalk these gaps, as she has done in this book.

Dillard’s writing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a stunning example of how to make intellectual connections and delight readers with lyrical language. Also, her writing is environmental writing of a different breed. Unlike environmentalists Bill McKibben, Rachel Carson, and Edward Abbey, for example, Dillard is not a polemicist. Her focus is not on industrialization, pollution, or rampant progress, nor is it a defense of one endangered species or place. There is no doubt, however, that she is concerned about the environment and knows the dangers of modern consumption. She has chosen, however, to engage readers with the sheer mystery, beauty, terror, and even humor of one creek in one state. That this book won the Pulitzer Prize shows how desperately readers needed, and continue to need, her viewpoint.

Bibliography

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Memoir of Dillard’s childhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Includes discussion of the origins of some ideas explored in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Johnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992. Scholarly work that focuses on the epiphanies inherent in Dillard’s works. Also examines the particular influence of Romantic poet William Wordsmith on Dillard.

McClintock, James. Nature’s Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Illustrates how a variety of writers, including Dillard, had interacted with nature and come away changed, deeply influencing their writing.

Parrish, Nancy C. Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. A volume of the Southern Literary Studies series, this work examines the Hollins Group, made up of women, including Dillard, who graduated from Hollins College in 1967 and achieved literary fame.

Smith, Linda. Annie Dillard. Boston: Twayne, 2002. Part of the Twayne American Authors series, this work includes scholarly essays and biographical material on Dillard.