Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Author:Annie Dillard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Essays
ISBN: 9780061233326
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: 1974-01-01T04:00:00+00:00

9

Flood

It’s summer. We had some deep spring sunshine about a month ago, in a drought; the nights were cold. It’s been gray sporadically, but not oppressively, and rainy for a week, and I would think: When is the real hot stuff coming, the mind-melting weeding weather? It was rainy again this morning, the same spring rain, and then this afternoon a different rain came: a pounding, three-minute shower. And when it was over, the cloud dissolved to haze. I can’t see Tinker Mountain. It’s summer now: the heat is on. It’s summer now all summer long.

The season changed two hours ago. Will my life change as well? This is a time for resolutions, revolutions. The animals are going wild. I must have seen ten rabbits in as many minutes.

Baltimore orioles are here; brown thrashers seem to be nesting down by Tinker Creek across the road. The coot is still around, big as a Thanksgiving turkey, and as careless; it doesn’t even glance at a barking dog.

The creek’s up. When the rain stopped today I walked across the road to the downed log by the steer crossing. The steers were across the creek, a black clot on a distant hill. High water had touched my log, the log I sit on, and dumped a smooth slope of muck in its lee. The water itself was an opaque pale green, like pulverized jade, still high and very fast, lightless, like no earthly water. A dog I’ve never seen before, thin as death, was flushing rabbits.

A knot of yellow, fleshy somethings had grown up by the log.

They didn’t seem to have either proper stems or proper flowers, but instead only blind, featureless growth, like etiolated potato sprouts in a root cellar. I tried to dig one up from the crumbly soil, but they all apparently grew from a single, well-rooted corm, so I let them go.

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

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