Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf)

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At the apogee of the road s curve grew an enormous oak, a
massive bur oak two hundred years old, one hundred and fifty
feet high, an oak whose lowest limb was beyond the span of the
highest ladder. I looked up: there were clothes spread all over
the tree. Red shirts, blue trousers, black pants, little baby
smocks they weren t hung from branches. They were outside,
carefully spread, splayed as if to dry, on the outer leaves of the
great oak s crown. Were there pillowcases, blankets? I can t re-
member. There was a gay assortment of cotton underwear, yellow
dresses, children s green sweaters, plaid skirts& . You know roads.
A bend comes and you take it, thoughtlessly, moving on. I looked
behind me for another split second, astonished; both sides of the
tree s canopy, clear to the top, bore clothes. Trompe!
But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We
are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for
information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our own
pasts.
Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched
assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for
86 / Annie Dillard
all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each
one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own
unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time
out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the
present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a
jolt older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. You
quit your seat in a darkened movie theater, walk past the empty
lobby, out the double glass doors, and step like Orpheus into the
street. And the cumulative force of the present you ve forgotten
sets you reeling, staggering, as if you d been struck broadside by
a plank. It all floods back to you. Yes, you say, as if you d been
asleep a hundred years, this is it, this is the real weather, the lav-
ender light fading, the full moisture in your lungs, the heat from
the pavement on your lips and palms not the dry orange dust
from horses hooves, the salt sea, the sour Coke but this solid
air, the blood pumping up your thighs again, your fingers alive.
And on the way home you drive exhilarated, energized, under
scented, silhouetted trees.
II
I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. It is early spring,
the day after I patted the puppy. I have come to the creek the
backyard stretch of the creek in the middle of the day, to feel
the delicate gathering of heat, real sun s heat, in the air, and to
watch new water come down the creek. Don t expect more than
this, and a mental ramble. I m in the market for some present
tense; I m on the lookout, shopping around, more so every year.
It s a seller s market do you think I won t sell all that I have to
buy it? Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his
Gethsemane journals: Suggested emendation in the Lord s
Prayer: Take out Thy Kingdom come and substitute
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 87
Give us time! But time is the one thing we have been given,
and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep
waking from a dream we can t recall, looking around in surprise,
and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake,
keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.
Before me the creek is seventeen feet wide, splashing over
random sandstone outcroppings and scattered rocks. I m lucky;
the creek is loud here, because of the rocks, and wild. In the low
water of summer and fall I can cross to the opposite bank by
leaping from stone to stone. Upstream is a wall of light split into
planks by smooth sandstone ledges that cross the creek evenly,
like steps. Downstream the live water before me stills, dies sud-
denly as if extinguished, and vanishes around a bend shaded
summer and winter by overarching tulips, locusts, and Osage
orange. Everywhere I look are creekside trees whose ascending
boles against water and grass accent the vertical thrust of the land
in this spot. The creek rests the eye, a haven, a breast; the two
steep banks vault from the creek like wings. Not even the syca-
more s crown can peek over the land in any direction.
My friend Rosanne Coggeshall, the poet, says that sycamore
is the most intrisically beautiful word in English. This sycamore
is old; its lower bark is always dusty from years of flood waters
lapping up its trunk. Like many sycamores, too, it is quirky, given
to flights and excursions. Its trunk lists over the creek at a dizzying
angle, and from that trunk extends a long, skinny limb that spurts
high over the opposite bank without branching. The creek reflects
the speckled surface of this limb, pale even against the highest
clouds, and that image pales whiter and thins as it crosses the
creek, shatters in the riffles and melds together, quivering and
mottled, like some enormous primeval reptile under the water.
88 / Annie Dillard
I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to
the subject of the present moment. There are many created things
in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I
can t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under
our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite
convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and, in addi-
tion, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down,
shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out
of reach. A blind man s idea of hugeness is a tree. They have their
sturdy bodies and special skills; they garner fresh water; they
abide. This sycamore above me, below me, by Tinker Creek, is a
case in point; the sight of it crowds my brain with an assortment
of diverting thoughts, all as present to me as these slivers of
pressure from grass on my elbow s skin. I want to come at the
subject of the present by showing how consciousness dashes and
ambles around the labyrinthine tracks of the mind, returning
again and again, however briefly, to the senses: If there were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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