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the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery, coded down.
How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed,
I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the
pleasure of being so purely played.
The thistle is part of Adam s curse.  Cursed is the ground for
thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. A terrible
curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle,
or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed.
If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. This
crown of thorns sits light on my skull, like wings. The Venetian
Baroque painter Tiepolo painted Christ as a red-lipped infant
clutching a goldfinch; the goldfinch seems to be looking around
in search of thorns. Creation itself was
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 219
the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real.
The goldfinch here on the fringed thistletop was burying her
head with each light thrust deeper into the seedcase. Her fragile
legs braced to her task on the vertical, thorny stem; the last of the
thistle down sprayed and poured. Is there anything I could eat
so lightly, or could I die so fair? With a ruffle of feathered wings
the goldfinch fluttered away, out of range of the broken window s
frame and toward the deep blue shade of the cliffs where late
fireflies already were rising alight under trees. I was weightless;
my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that
if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off.
Alleluia.
Later I lay half out of my sleeping bag on a narrow shelf of flat
ground between the cottage porch and the bank to the dam. I lay
where a flash flood would reach me, but we have had a flood;
the time is late. The night was clear; when the fretwork of over-
head foliage rustled and parted, I could see the pagan stars.
Sounds fell all about me; I vibrated like still water ruffed by
wind. Cicadas which Donald E. Carr calls  the guns of Au-
gust  were out in full force. Their stridulations mounted over
the meadow and echoed from the rim of cliffs, filling the air with
a plaintive, mysterious urgency. I had heard them begin at twi-
light, and was struck with the way they actually do  start up,
like an out-of-practice orchestra, creaking and grinding and all
out of synch. It had sounded like someone playing a cello with a
wide-toothed comb. The frogs added their unlocatable notes,
which always seem to me to be so arbitrary and anarchistic, and
crickets piped in, calling their own tune which they have been
calling since the time of Pliny, who noted bluntly of the cricket,
it  never ceaseth all night long to creak very shrill.
220 / Annie Dillard
Earlier a bobwhite had cried from the orchardside cliff, now
here, now there, and his round notes swelled sorrowfully over
the meadow. A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn;
he has never found a mate. When I first read this piece of inform-
ation, every bobwhite call I heard sounded tinged with despera-
tion, suicidally miserable. But now I am somehow cheered on
my way by that solitary signal. The bobwhite s very helplessness,
his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged
pluck. God knows what he is thinking in those pendant silences
between calls. God knows what I am. But: bobwhite. (Somebody
showed me once how to answer a bobwhite in the warbling,
descending notes of the female. It works like a charm. But what
can I do with a charmed circle of male bobwhites but weep? Still,
I am brutalized enough that I give the answering call occasionally,
just to get a rise out of the cliffs, and a bitter laugh.) Yes, it s tough,
it s tough, that goes without saying. But isn t waiting itself and
longing a wonder, being played on by wind, sun, and shade?
In his famous Camping and Woodcraft, Horace Kephart sounds a
single ominous note. He writes in parentheses:  Some cannot
sleep well in a white tent under a full moon. Every time I think
of it, I laugh. I like the way that handy woodsy tip threatens us
with the thrashings of the spirit.
I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no
moon at all; along the world s coasts the sea tides would be
springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides: I lay still.
Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an an-
swering knock in my lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every
minute on a square mile of this land on the steers and the
orchard, on the quarry, the meadow, and creek one ten thou-
sandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 221
percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and
arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as
waves? Straining after these tiny sensations, I nearly rolled off
the world when I heard, and at the same time felt through my
hips and legs bones on the ground, the bang and shudder of
distant freight trains coupling.
Night risings and fallings filled my mind, free excursions car-
ried out invisibly while the air swung up and back and the star-
light rained. By day I had watched water striders dimple and jerk
over the deep bankside water slowed by the dam. But I knew
that sometimes a breath or call stirs the colony, and new forms
emerge with wings. They cluster at night on the surface of their
home waters and then take to the air in a rush. Migrating, they
sail over meadows, under trees, cruising, veering towards a steady
gleam in a flurry of glistening wings:  phantom ships in the air.
Now also in the valley night a skunk emerged from his under-
ground burrow to hunt pale beetle grubs in the dark. A great
horned owl folded his wings and dropped from the sky, and the
two met on the bloodied surface of earth. Spreading over a dis-
tance, the air from that spot thinned to a frail sweetness, a tinc-
tured wind that bespoke real creatures and real encounters at the
edge& events, events. Over my head black hunting beetles [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]