I’ve been reading Annie Dillard. It’s my first time in her world. When I bought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the guy at the used bookstore gave me a dollar discount because he likes that book so much. “I’ve tried to read that book three times, and each time I’ve gotten so inspired that I had to stop. I can’t finish it!” he said. I get it now – a month, and only 91 pages, in. It’s so good sometimes it hurts. Instead of inspiring expectations, though, it leaves a satisfied trail. Nuggets of light and airiness within the pages, images that bring you soaring alongside her and the banks of her creek.
She is enthralled by the natural world, and will explain for five or ten or fifteen pages the excitement she feels when she finds the egg cases of praying mantises and watches them hatch, and grow, and mate. When I read her prose, the awe she feels drips into me like honey, and I want to go outside and practice seeing.
Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the Delaware River, tubing. A small group of us, two cars full, drove up there and paid our thirty bucks to be bused to and from the river. We snuck in beers and meandered lazily up to the floating hot dog stand halfway down the six-mile stretch of river we were on. Hamburgers and pepsi. A juvenile bald eagle and swallows.
The swallows hovered in two packs along the course of our five-hour ride. We came at them slowly, idly in our rafts, so they didn’t notice and instead went about their business. ‘Cigars with wings’ Matt would say, but they weren’t Chimney Swifts, but Bank Swallows, I discovered later. White belly, brown above, each wing longer than the stout little body they propelled together. I could feel a breeze now and then on the river in my tube, but they could feel it first. I would watch a tiny bird swoop across in a straight line and then rise and turn, suddenly swept into the air current. These birds were perfectly in tune to the movement of the wind, that invisible substance of earth and sky. I realized acutely the fact that all of us – every element and creature in my immediate surroundings – were going in the direction we desired. Rock stood firm as water fell over it, resisting in places but always bending. Bird flew true and then flexed a wing and dove, depending on the texture of the wind on which it hovered. We humans bumbled along on our rafts.
Annie Dillard wrote this of sitting by Pilgrim Creek, watching swallows and all manner of other elements. “I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast.”
Read that last bit again. Doesn’t that just lift you up?
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| Not my swallows. From telegraph.co.uk. |
