It is past time to write of Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek again, and I can't do it justice. There's a
force of nature going on in this book and yes, that's a play on
words.
Who knows this much about nature? Annie
did her homework, wedding observation with research and notes and
long musing. The detail of insects and plants is mind-numbing if
you're in a hurry, which is no doubt the easily-missed point.
Of a newt (I wasn't even sure what a
newt is) she speaks thus: “The concave arch of her spine stretched
her neck past believing; the thin ventral skin was a bright taut
yellow.” And that's one of many
sentences on newts, these creatures around us in spring that we never
see or imagine it matters whether we do.
This
does remind me of
something like newts in my own life. We called them tadpoles and they
lived in mud puddles in Big Bow, Kansas. I never examined their “thin
ventral skin” but we would sometimes catch them in a jar for
who-knows-why. I remember wondering how they became frogs – or did
they? And what happens if the mud puddle dries up too soon? Western
Kansas is a long ways from lush Tinker Creek.
But Annie is far
from done with the newts. Did she never tire of being in nature? I
can believe the long time in the middle of it all, seeing instead of
taking pictures, made awareness possible. Of course it did, but who
does it, and what is the benefit?
Chapter
Seven – Spring –
gives a veritable catalog of nature scarcely imagined by the layman,
which accounts, I suppose, for most of us. It wearies my dull mind
but I dive in, needy.
Flowers:
redbuds, sassafras, tulips, catawbas, and pawpaws. Who knows these
things by name?
The
leafing of trees, Annie insists, is a thing. Surely, though, the
leaves just appear. How could it possibly matter how it happens or
how they look up close? Leaves give rise to words like etiolate,
translucent, lambent, minute, pale.
And that's all in one sentence.
The seal in
the Bering Strait gets audience in Annie's imagination and reading,
and she shares: the hunt, the seal habits, the hunter's success find
their place in the telling of all the wild scenes we knew not, of
glaciers calving and “water sky.”
She spends
time with algae required by its reality, which is a lot. The frogs
try to jump out of the algae-covered pond and can't quite. They
become “jumping green flares” about the pond until finally they
find an open place and break free.
And when the
happily unobservant are ready to move on already, Annie takes us
deeper in the pond: midges, snails, turtles, herons, muskrats,
bladderwort, diatoms, insect larvae, nymphs are there she says. Who
knew?! And there was more, much more.
Annie isn't done
until the microscope comes out and the smallest life is known to the
eye. And one wonders – maybe – if this is going too far. How
would I know? I wouldn't.
In it all there is
slight tribute to the forest of the trees. She says, for example,
“There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the
spiritual energy of wind.” Few things are larger in our life than
sun, so I rejoice for relief from the tiny things. And she speaks
plainly of the necessity of this sun “fashioning a new and sturdy
world,” always, so that the pond can be “popping with life.”
It's a
delightful, mysterious read: an American treasure. And more than once
in this chapter she throws a bone to those who ignore the proverbial
trees because we imagine we already know the forest. And she does it
when speaking of trees no less.
Trees transform
dirt, gravel and water into beauty. A large elm can make six million
leaves in a season, she says. “I can't make one.” A tree may use
a ton of water in one day. And these mysterious creatures live among
us by the millions, replenishing the earth, doing their thing
quietly, unheard, unnoticed, vital.
Makes me wonder
what we can do – the human body, soul and spirit. We often have to
make much of naught, work with faults and pains and confounding
nonsense. And then enter other people. Can we make something
beautiful? That's the dream, and if I go there I land in a place to
which Annie amply alludes: I land in life itself and the gift of
children.
This
almost undoes me as I try to reflect humbly on the amazing work of
art that is Tinker Creek.
Friends might say I just leapt to the most obvious. But induction
lets things rise to the surface and this rises. Trees make leaves in
miraculous ways. People make people, and the miracle is beyond
wonder.
It is the gift of
life that sneaks in when we ask ourselves, “What can I do that is
beautiful? What gravel and dirt can I turn into something that
answers the unspeakable gift of life?” I may be able to create a
life to bless the world – that is, I may become a parent, and then
game on!
Perhaps more
fundamentally – for not all can or will become parents – we can
dare to believe, paraphrasing Solzhenitsyn as he reflected on the
dirt and gravel of his imprisonment, that “the object of life is to
become a beautiful person.”
Are you becoming
beautiful? Am I? I wondered what benefit there was in Annie's
minutia. It leads me to this question and inspires a hopeful answer.
I think life itself
does that if we stop long enough to listen and learn. And that's more
than enough benefit for today.
