Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
By Annie Dillard
C
hapter
O
ne:
H
eaven and
E
arth in
J
est
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by
my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his
skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my
bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws,
or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my
body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted
summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It
could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the
blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an
emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never
knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd
purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all,
to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . "Seem like we're just set down here," a
woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."
These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the
sand to the bright fight and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you
rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand;
you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the
leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.
I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep
with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the
memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see
a new thing. If I'm lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a
hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood
duck, down at the creek. It flew away.
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge. An anchorite's
hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the
side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of
Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek
itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of
light pouring down. It's a good place to live; there's a lot to think about. The creeks-
Tinker and Carvin's -- are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of
the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the
horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of
fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains-
