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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty and Horror
Divinity and Mystery
The Power of Books
Looking vs. Seeing
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Summary
Analysis
As a child, Dillard used to hide pennies along the sidewalk in front of her house for people to find. Now, as an adult, she imagines the world “fairly studded” with pennies—treasures available for anyone on the lookout for them. It’s important to enjoy the things one notices while one still can, because it’s not hard to lose the habit of wonder. And it’s important to stay alert, because one never knows when a treasure might appear.
Dillard once again invokes the idea of childhood’s innate connection to wonder. The fact that she’s retained this sense into adulthood suggests that it’s possible, if not easy, to cling to it over time. It’s important that Dillard invokes pennies, too, because she’s telling readers what they’ll get. Not everything she observes or describes will be grand. Many of the wonders she encounters will be extremely humble, like a penny. But they are, she claims, no less valuable because of their simplicity.
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For instance, the previous September, Dillard flushed a huge flock of red-winged blackbirds from an Osage orange tree in her back yard. At least 300 birds “materialized” from the tree in three successive waves. Before they spread their wings, she didn’t see them in the branches, and after they departed, the tree seemed utterly undisturbed. This incident reminds Dillard think of those hidden-image puzzles for children. It’s like a game: how many secrets can you find in the world around you?
The birds illustrate Dillard’s point about the abundance of wonders, and also the difficulty of seeing those wonders if a person isn’t paying attention. An almost impossible number of birds remained invisible in the leaves of the tree until Dillard got too close and they took flight, revealing themselves. Rather than waiting for Dillard to find them, the birds show themselves to her. This makes her wonder—and ask readers to consider—how many other things go unnoticed.
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A regular person who makes a habit of keeping his or her eyes open can sometimes see magic, but those best placed to find it are the experts, who have trained their eyes to see what most people miss. Or the “lovers.” Dillard remembers visiting family who owned a horse ranch in Wyoming. One night, everyone drew a horse on a passed-around piece of paper. Her aunt’s, uncle’s, and cousins’ horses were beautiful. Hers looked like a deformed moose.
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Part of the problem lies in the way human brains and bodies work. Our eyes only register about 30% of the sun’s light, and our brains mediate what we see according to pathways we establish before we’re capable of much conscious thought. There’s more that we can’t see than we can—especially in the dark. Dillard recalls a summer night she stayed too late on the little island in Tinker Creek, hoping to spy muskrats. As the sun set, the changing light rendered the water of the creek alternately transparent and opaque. And as the dark gathered, she began to feel uneasy, imagining creatures lurking in the shadows. Fish she couldn’t see churned the surface of the stream, and finally one jumped clear of the water into the air, but it was so dark that Dillard could barely make sense of its shape.
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Darkness makes Dillard feel small and disoriented, like she’s falling. But light can blind, too. From a book, Dillard learned about “kayak sickness,” the disorientation some “Eskimo” (Inuit) hunters experience on especially calm days when the sunlight reflecting off the water makes it hard to distinguish between sea and sky. Light can even hide things. During the annual Perseid meteor shower, the light of dawn extinguishes the shooting stars. They’re still falling, of course, just invisibly. Other times, seeing too much has disoriented Dillard, like when she stares into the stream and forgets which way is up or watches birds through her binoculars and is disoriented when she takes the lenses from her eyes.
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Still, it is amazing what one can see with the naked eye, whether that’s primordial light emanating from the stars or the life teeming in a few cups of water from the turbid and swampy parts of Tinker Creek. Looking at these wonders can be disorienting, but it also offers the potential for magic. Who knows what’s there that people just haven’t seen correctly yet?
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In a book called Space and Sight, Dillard read about people who were born blind due to congenital cataracts and who were given sight after the cataract surgeries became more commonplace in the late 1800s. Some of these patients were children; others were adults. Their accounts of suddenly learning how to see are fascinating. They struggled to grasp object permanence; expressed amazement that people have different faces; and were often incapable of grasping distance. Many expressed confusion about shadows— seeing in three dimensions is, apparently, a skill one must learn. Some wished they were still blind. Others saw the world in ways magically inaccessible to people who learn how to see as babies: as a “dazzle of color patches.”
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Immediately after reading that book, Dillard was able to see the world in color patches for a few weeks before her sight reverted to its old, well-worn habits of perspective, dimension, and recognizing objects by name. No one can maintain the undifferentiated sight of the infant for long. Dillard wishes that someone had asked the newly sighted patients in the book to paint the world as they saw it so that there would be a record for the rest of us. For her, as for most people, seeing is a matter of identification. Her brain interprets the visual cues it receives through the language of objects.
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But sometimes, Dillard says, it’s possible to get into a state of just seeing generally, without the ongoing inner monologue. It involves unfocusing the eyes and letting go of looking for anything in particular. When she can get into that place, it’s magic. Unfortunately, this isn’t a state that can be induced. It can only be stumbled into through a combination of practice and luck. Once, Dillard even caught sight of the most enigmatic thing described by a formerly blind patient: “the tree with the lights in it.” Dillard’s was just a backyard cedar she’d seen a thousand times before. But that one time, the magical light of creation illuminated it, and she truly saw it for the first time.
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