I first read Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in my 20s. Finally, I thought, someone I understood.
I imagined looking for muskrats with her on the troll bridge across Tinker Creek or squatting down on the gravel bar watching plants grow. Annie and I could have hung out together, except that naturalists and philosophers need to be alone to truly see, and by then, I was stuck in the Midwest, and she was on an Island off Washington State.
Annie’s writing stayed with me throughout the years, reminding me to be like the dog, sniffing blades of grass and heads of asters for clues as to what in the world is going on here. She showed me to look closely for the tree with lights in it and the painted turtles under the frozen pond “cloacal breathing.” She was amazed and repulsed at the natural world’s fecundity and death and showed that we are just one tiny part.
We lost Annie Dillard this month, and around the same time, I lost my cinnamon-colored, silky-haired Annie dog, whom, 11 years ago, I had named after Annie Dillard and Ann Lamot, two of my favorites. Luka, my little beagle-dachshund and I are still figuring out how to be just two. This mostly looks like staying very close, just in case the one of us who is left might suddenly disappear.
Late September seems to be the time of leaving — birds, insects, groundhogs, poets. The chilly air and yellow leaves slap our faces, waking us up after months of green gentleness, for there is wood to stack and plants to bring in, pipes to drain and food to put by. Birds stop their mating and territorial singing as they molt and migrate — now the Ompompanoosuc seem loud.
A murder of crows in the just-cut hayfield screams harsh crow songs as they peck on the newly dead or mob the hawk who wants to join. The hummingbird feeder sits unused with no tiny green-and-black acrobats buzzing our heads. Bees and wasps hide inside flowers until the day warms. Sparrows quietly work the dirt under goldenrods and asters for bugs or seeds. Even the red-eyed vireo, whom we thought would never stop, grows still. Loons on the pond have given up and left for the coast. Overhead, three dozen wild geese are circling wildly, honking at their people to join the southern flight.
I look up and thank Mary Oliver for having been born. Fall is a time of leaving but also of giving. Mushrooms are pushing up through the leaf litter like the dead rising on Halloween. They are everywhere I step. If I am lucky, I’ll have bear’s tooth or chicken of the woods for dinner.
I wonder if those who look closely at nature may be leaving us too. Answers are now easily found by pulling out the little flat black box from our back pocket and asking it anything. But what, I wonder of the great “seers” of things, the Annie Dillards and Mary Olivers? What about Leonardo da Vinci discovering anatomy and fluvial geomorphology and mechanics by looking and drawing? What about Alexander von Humbolt learning about ecological changes with elevation by climbing 19,000 feet up Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, dragging scientific equipment, observing, and sketching, and nearly freezing to death? Or what about the University of Vermont’s own Bernd Heinrich who, when wondering about the behavior of an insect, might climb a tree with a sketchbook and a thermos of coffee, sitting, watching, and drawing for hours and days until he finds a possible answer?
What will happen to empirical knowledge that questions the accepted if all knowledge is already found in the thin black box? I ponder this question as Luka and I work on staying close, not running off, sleeping together in the tent by the river, staying warm, and cherishing each day.
Micki Colbeck is a writer and naturalist. She chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com