Literature

Annie Dillard’s Winter Vision

Annie Dillard’s Winter Vision

Coot. Stephanie Sipp, illustrator

The Literary Gardener

By Carol Howard

It is February. Snow covers the ground in a section of the Blue Ridge Mountains that is Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. The writer Annie Dillard is tiptoeing along the banks of a creek near her house, attempting rather comically to hide behind the naked trees of winter. She is spying on a coot. The coot is a gray-black bird that, to non-birdwatchers, might be confused with a duck, as it sails downstream, foraging for aquatic plants.

Dillard is afraid she will startle the bird. She is conscious of how ridiculous she looks, trying to blend in with the scenery. Eventually, she realizes that the coot has been aware of her presence all along but is ignoring her. Humiliated, she has a fleeting desire to pummel the bird with a snowball. Instead, she continues walking, engrossed in her detection of the bird’s tracks in the snow.

The coot-stalking episode appears in the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), the non-fiction book that launched Dillard’s fame as a leading American nature writer. She was 29 at the time. Unlike other nature writers of her generation, she is not one to make a case for a particular policy on resource or land conservation. Her wry outlook on her own habits as a naturalist and her deadpan humor would seem out of place in an earnest work of environmental ethics.

Nor does Dillard draw definite conclusions about what she studies in nature. She is not a scientist, she says, although she is an intentional and enthusiastic observer of her surroundings. Her priority is to experience nature and to improve her skills of discernment as she hikes along the creek. Her project in the writing is to reflect upon what she learns about herself in relationship to the plants and animals around her.

Especially in the cold months, as the stark landscape opens up new vistas and woodland paths, she becomes aware of how her ability to perceive nature, and to explore it, changes with the seasons. When she learns how to see praying mantis egg cases one winter day, she gushes for several pages about her escapades in search of them, braving elements that would send her less hardy readers indoors.

Like the transcendentalist Thoreau a century before her, Dillard walks outdoors for hours at a time, even in freezing weather, to discover nature in exquisite detail and to bear witness to its sublime mysteries as they manifest themselves. (Thoreau’s Walden had been the topic of her 1968 master’s thesis.) Although she possesses self-deprecating humor and a sense of the absurd, she is a serious pilgrim. Her contemplative journey prepares her to experience nature’s sacred revelations. When she least expects it, Dillard catches a glimpse of something outdoors that fills her with awe: ”a fish flashes, then dissolves into water before my very eyes.” Such moments arrive unbidden, and, like a mystic encountering the divine, she loses herself in the living earth. A deliberate environmentalist or not, she inspires in her reader gratitude for these blessed and surprising gifts of the natural world.

Carol Howard is dean of academics at Warren Wilson College.

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