Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a Treasure

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. NY: Harper & Row, 1974.

There's been a lot of talk this week about groundhogs. I have nothing against those critters, and in spring I'll be seeing many in my neighborhood. I've often said that those groundhogs rule my neighborhood. They make it impossible to grow any vegetables in my yard because they will sit on the deck and eat whatever they find. It's insulting. But enough about groundhogs. What about muskrats? Have you considered the muskrat lately?

Annie Dillard spent ten pages describing muskrats in Tinker Creek. Her descriptions are vivid enough to call up in my mind that mysterious animal that Fred and I saw in a pond in Cape May Point. Our mystery animal glided rather than swam through the water, just as Dillard described, with its little brown head above the surface facing forward, just as she described. Her discussion of the muskrats in Tinker Creek caused me to pull up my Cape May Point memory while I was reading, and once I realized the memory was conjured, to recognize what I had seen was a muskrat.

Those ten pages of muskrat talk reminded me of another memory, buried far deeper than the creature swimming in the Cape May Point pond. Many years ago, when I was in my twenties and my mother was well enough to sift through old things in her house, she showed me a fur coat. I’d never seen that thing before and I was quite surprised she owned it. She explained it belonged to her Aunt Mattie and found its way to her even though she didn’t want it and never wore it. (Great Aunt Mattie had no children, so many of her belongings found their way to us.) Was I interested in the coat? She asked me this knowing I’d say no; I wasn’t about to wear antique dead animal fur. In a last-ditch effort to find the coat a home, she told me it was “Hudson seal.” Still no, I said, although I appreciate the coat as a family antique. Why did Annie Dillard’s pages on muskrats bring up this memory, I wondered, until I got to the tenth page where she writes about muskrat pelts and their value (five dollars per pelt in 1974), and how fur dealers call this fur anything but “muskrat,” and usually, “Hudson seal.” I must have known once that muskrat furs were called Hudson seal, but that knowledge was long-forgotten until I read Annie Dillard.

The muskrat pages were part of a chapter called “Stalking,” in which Dillard describes her own stalking of the waterborne muskrats, animals stalking their prey, and the possibility that unseen animals were stalking her. Each chapter is built upon a theme like this, examined from multiple angles. The themes fall in chronological order, starting with a January day and moving through the year to the beginning of another winter.

Throughout the book, Annie Dillard appears as a character, or, more specifically, Dillard represents herself via an interior monologue which braids together her environmental observations, her spiritual and mystical thoughts, and her knowledge of nature and mysticism. She examines her knowledge and ideas, and I think this analysis inspired me to compare my own experiences in nature to hers. That’s why my synapses connected to my long-dormant muskrat experiences. They were brought forth for me to examine as she was riffing on her muskrat knowledge while stalking the “unstalkable” swimming muskrat in Tinker Creek.

While writing a thoughtful email to a good friend, I caught myself unintentionally copying her writing style (and admitted it to him). Has reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek also influenced my thinking style?

Dillard’s observations of nature are not all bright and shiny, baby ducks and wildflowers. She writes about the grotesque in great detail, too: the waterbug who sucks out the innards of a frog. The frog’s body caves in gradually and finally the eyes, terror-struck during the process, lose their emotive quality altogether and join the collapsed skin. The scene must be horrifying, especially to a person who, like me, cannot remove a dead mouse from the house. Dillard gives us the waterbug-and-frog story as one of a series of carefully-chronicled, unpredicted observations.

Dillard often uses what I’ll call the Second-Person-Hypothetical where a passage begins with “If you were a…” and then goes on to describe what you as that thing would do. On page 170, she suggests that the reader is an ichneumon, a type of wasp. The reader as ichneumon is carrying around a cache of fertile eggs and must find a caterpillar on which to lay their eggs so that they don’t starve. If the reader as ichneumon does not find a caterpillar host, the eggs will eat the reader from the inside. The Second-Person-Hypothetical is an engaging device for adding tension to the “Fecundity” chapter.

Dillard tells us she “blooms indoors like a forced forsythia,” in winter, reading and writing in response to and in advance of the nicer spring/summer/fall weather where she will be observing nature. She calls upon that reading often during the book to reinforce her musings and observations. After reading Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight, she sees color patches in nature (p. 29). The writings of British astronomer and physicist Sir James Jeans inspired her to think of the universe as a “great thought” rather than a “great machine” (p. 144). Woven into the narrative, these great thinkers’ thoughts give the reader more to ponder.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek relies on Annie Dillard’s interior monologue which is a synthesis of her observations, readings, knowledge, dreams, and acute self-awareness. The combination reveals subtly to the reader a sense of where we are with Dillard. Our scene is revealed in small increments, and is more vivid as a result. Would I recognize Tinker Creek? The author is included as a character we know well thanks to her personal revelations. Dillard-as-character fades out when the focus turns to nature or spiritualism.

The book, another “great thought,” is captivating from start to finish.