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time you care to get in your car and drive across the country and
over the mountains, come into our valley, cross Tinker Creek,
drive up the road to the house, walk across the yard, knock on
the door and ask to come in and talk about the weather, you d
be welcome. If you came tonight from up north, you d have a
terrific tailwind; between Tinker and Dead Man you d chute
through the orchardy pass like an iceboat. When I let you in, we
might not be able to close the door. The wind shrieks and hisses
down the valley, sonant and surd, drying the puddles and dis-
mantling the nests from the trees.
52 / Annie Dillard
Inside the house, my single goldfish, Ellery Channing, whips
around and around the sides of his bowl. Can he feel a glassy
vibration, a ripple out of the north that urges him to swim for
deeper, warmer waters? Saint-Exupéry says that when flocks of
wild geese migrate high over a barnyard, the cocks and even the
dim, fatted chickens fling themselves a foot or so into the air and
flap for the south. Eskimo sled dogs feed all summer on famished
salmon flung to them from creeks. I have often wondered if those
dogs feel a wistful downhill drift in the fall, or an upstream yank,
an urge to leap ladders, in the spring. To what hail do you hark,
Ellery? what sunny bottom under chill waters, what Chinese
emperor s petaled pond? Even the spiders are restless under this
wind, roving about alert-eyed over their fluff in every corner.
I allow the spiders the run of the house. I figure that any
predator that hopes to make a living on whatever smaller
creatures might blunder into a four-inch square bit of space in
the corner of the bathroom where the tub meets the floor, needs
every bit of my support. They catch flies and even field crickets
in those webs. Large spiders in barns have been known to trap,
wrap, and suck hummingbirds, but there s no danger of that here.
I tolerate the webs, only occasionally sweeping away the very
dirtiest of them after the spider itself has scrambled to safety. I m
always leaving a bath towel draped over the tub so that the big,
haired spiders, who are constantly getting trapped by the tub s
smooth sides, can use its rough surface as an exit ramp. Inside
the house the spiders have only given me one mild surprise. I
washed some dishes and set them to dry over a plastic drainer.
Then I wanted a cup of coffee, so I picked from the drainer my
mug, which was still warm from the hot rinse water, and across
the rim of the mug, strand after strand, was a spider web.
Outside in summer I watch the orb-weavers, the spiders at
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 53
their wheels. Last summer I watched one spin her web, which
was especially interesting because the light just happened to be
such that I couldn t see the web at all. I had read that spiders lay
their major straight lines with fluid that isn t sticky, and then lay
a nonsticky spiral. Then they walk along that safe road and lay
a sticky spiral going the other way. It seems to be very much a
matter of concentration. The spider I watched was a matter of
mystery: she seemed to be scrambling up, down, and across the
air. There was a small white mass of silk visible at the center of
the orb, and she returned to this hub after each frenzied foray
between air and air. It was a sort of Tinker Creek to her, from
which she bore lightly in every direction an invisible news. She
had a nice ability to make hairpin turns at the most acute angles
in the air, all at topmost speed. I understand that you can lure an
orb-weaver spider, if you want one, by vibrating or twirling a
blade of grass against the web, as a flying insect would struggle
if caught. This little ruse has never worked for me; I need a tuning
fork; I leave the webs on the bushes bristling with grass.
Things are well in their place. Last week I found a brown, co-
coonlike object, light and dry, and pocketed it in an outside, un-
lined pocket where it wouldn t warm and come alive. Then I saw
on the ground another one, slightly torn open, so I split it further
with my fingers, and saw a pale froth. I held it closer; the froth
took on intricacy. I held it next to my eye and saw a tiny spider,
yellowish but so infinitesimal it was translucent, waving each of
its eight legs in what was clearly threat behavior. It was one of
hundreds of spiders, already alive, all squirming in a tangled
orgy of legs. Not on me they won t; I emptied that pocket fast.
Things out of place are ill. Tonight I hear outside a sound of going
in the tops of the mulberry trees; I stay in to do battle with what?
Once I looked into a little wooden birdhouse hung from a tree;
it had a pointed roof like an Alpine cottage, a peg perch, and a
54 / Annie Dillard
neat round door. Inside, watching me, was a coiled snake. I used
to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride cleaning fluid va-
por and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was
many years ago: I quit when one day I opened a cigar box lid and
saw a carrion beetle, staked down high between its wing covers,
trying to crawl, swimming on its pin. It was dancing with its own
shadow, untouching, and had been for days. If I go downstairs
now will I see a possum just rounding a corner, trailing its scaled
pink tail? I know that one night, in just this sort of rattling wind,
I will go to the kitchen for milk and find on the back of the stove
a sudden stew I never fixed, bubbling, with a deer leg sticking
out.
In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the
air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is
called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in
the creek sublime. A breeze buffets my palm held a foot from the
wall. A wind like this does my breathing for me; it engenders
something quick and kicking in my lungs. Pliny believed the
mares of the Portuguese used to raise their tails to the wind, and
turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead
of natural seed: in such sort, as they become great withal, and
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