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Chapter 2
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
In early February, the starlings are the talk of the valley. Imported to North America in the late 19th century, allegedly by a wealthy New Yorker who wanted America to be home to every bird mentioned in Shakespeare, these songbirds love to winter in southern Virginia, much to the consternation of local humans. The birds flock in large numbers and thus grace their winter homes with copious droppings (and the resulting stink) as well as parasites. But they’re hard to discourage, and even strenuous efforts to kill them or scare them off frequently fail, as Dillard details. In the winter, starlings fill the woods around Tinker Creek, visiting Dillard’s feeders along with the other winter residents.
The starlings illustrate one of the central truths of the book, which is that it’s hard if not impossible to categorize things as “good” or “bad.” The starlings are an invasive species, but their ability to thrive in new environments also testifies to their adaptability and to the powerful life forces that animate the natural world. Readers should note that the story about starlings being imported on account of Shakespeare is romantic (and adds weight to the book’s claim about the power literature has over human culture) but is likely legendary; there were many acclimatization societies in the 19th and 20th centuries that sought to import flora and fauna for both cultural and economic purposes and it is more likely that one of them is responsible for the starlings than an eccentric millionaire.
Active
Themes
When the leaves fall from the trees, the countryside around Dillard’s cabin becomes transparent. For the first time in months, she can see her neighbors in their distant yards and can pick out the birds’ and squirrels’ nests that summer leaves concealed. One afternoon, a flock of starlings sweeps past Dillard as she stands on a hill. There are so many, it’s nearly half an hour between the arrival of the first and last birds. They flow overhead with a whispering sound then settle into the trees, so well camouflaged that Dillard struggles to see them even though she knows they’re there. She imagines them flying through her body just as swiftly and as silently.
Dillard is playing yet again with the habitual assumptions and associations of winter with emptiness, darkness, or death. Those things are present. But the empty woods reveal signs of life that were formerly hidden, just as the darkness of night unveils the stars. Neither the flourishing nor the fallow parts of the year could exist without the other. The balance between them is key to the proper functioning of the world. The image of the birds flying through Dillard’s body illustrates the power of nature to make an impression on the receptive human soul—in other words, it expresses wonder.
Active
Themes
Everyone in the area stockpiles wood against the winter. Dillard is fond of cherry-wood fires, which she burns as she reads newspapers and books. Reading shows her both the charitable side of nature and the wild one. She reads about people carving Valentine’s declarations of love into the snow and rescuing animals trapped in winter ice (even though she knows some, rather than rescue, kill trapped animals for food). She reads about Inuit people in the north building igloos and hunting on the ice and about explorers and frontiersmen like Knud Rasmussen, Sir John Franklin, Jedediah Smith, and Daniel Boone. These books become guideposts leading her through the winter.
It snows. During the day, the ground looks brighter than the sky above, although Dillard knows this is just a trick of the light. On the morning after the snowfall, when she goes outside to look around, she sees a coot (a white-beaked waterfowl) diving for food in the creek. She stalks the bird, ducking from tree to tree and even pretending to be a tree when it catches her in the open. She’s heard coots are notoriously shy. But eventually she realizes that this bird is completely unbothered by her presence.
Active
Themes
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The snow blankets familiar territory and renders it strange. Strange, too, are the ways life persists in the winter. Dillard notes a few of them: turtles absorb oxygen through their cloaca (essentially, their anuses). Fish metabolize oxygen so slowly they need not breathe all winter. Muskrats slide beneath the ice to hunt; aphids, bees, wasps, and ladybugs hibernate or slow their metabolisms to survive the cold.
Active
Themes
In the oxbow of Tinker Creek, there’s a field that has been turning back into a forest over the past several years. It’s one of Dillard’s favorite haunts. Today, among the winter-naked trees, she notices baffling signs indicating human interaction with the landscape. Only as she leaves does she see the sign for the “Martinsville Speedway.” Local teens have carved a motorbike course into the woods, and she’s been enjoying the use of their paths for months without realizing it. But today, the speedway is a “stillnessway” in the golden, late-afternoon light of winter. She thinks about a treatise on the proper way to build a snowman which she recently read. How odd, the things which human beings feel it necessary to record for posterity, she thinks.
Active
Themes
In Dillard’s opinion, the weather ranks high among those things worth talking about. If a person arrived at her door and asked to come in for a talk about the weather, she’d welcome them. Especially on winter nights when the wind howls out of the north so fiercely that the vibration of the walls agitates Dillard’s goldfish, Ellery Channing. Nothing seems to bother the spiders. She tolerates any that make their own way into her home. She finds spiders fascinating to watch, especially when they’re spinning webs. But her tolerance has a limit. Only a week earlier, she found and pocketed an interesting cocoon in the woods, only to realize it was teeming with spiders. She left it outside, where it belongs.
Active
Themes
When the cold winter air is dry enough, snow and ice can phase into water vapor without melting first in a process called sublimation. Dillard looks through her window at a sublime landscape of snow. The wind itself seems alive, reminding her of a story in Pliny claiming that certain Portuguese horses gave birth to unbelievably swift foals engendered by the wind itself. The wind kindles something in her, too.
