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Chapter 8
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
After a long and leisurely spring, a hot and humid summer arrives abruptly on the heels of vicious rainstorm. Dillard goes out for a walk along the rain-swollen creek. The rushing waters pushed a load of muck against the fallen sycamore tree that serves as her bridge to the little island, and horrifying, yellowish “somethings” are growing in the silt. Dillard tries to excavate one, but it’s too firmly rooted. The storm leaves an ominous, “menacing” atmosphere in its wake. The woods are humid and oppressively still, choked with muck and waterborne debris. Then, gunshots ring out. But when Dillard emerges from the woods, she realizes they weren’t shots at all—just garbagemen entertaining returning schoolchildren by making their trucks backfire. Suddenly, the world seems bright and cheerful again.
The abrupt shift in the weather functions to remind Dillard how much of nature is beyond her control, no matter how much she believes she’s starting to get a grasp on what it is and how it functions. But just as quickly as the atmosphere turns ominous, it becomes joyful and light again. Understanding and knowledge—she’s hearing a backfiring engine, not gunshots; it’s a joke not something wrong—change her perspective drastically in the space of a few seconds.
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It was at just this time last year—June 21, the summer solstice—that Hurricane Agnes visited the valley. By the time it arrived, it was no longer a hurricane, just a tropical depression, but it caused massive and devastating flash flooding, nevertheless. In an extended flashback, Dillard recalls that day with clarity. She spends the morning in her kitchen, watching the rain come down and the creek rise. It’s menacing and unfamiliar, turbid with mud and rushing headlong downstream with intense urgency. When she goes outside, she realizes how loud the water is roaring.
Dillard lays out her project in the first chapter: a year-long account of her thinking based on life alongside Tinker Creek. Although she evokes past experiences throughout the book, Chapter 9 stands out in that it focuses almost entirely on the flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, the year before she began the project that turned into the current book. This sets the chapter apart tonally from what preceded it and what comes after. And it turns the chapter into the fulcrum of the book, separating the hopeful and expansive vision of the first eight chapters from the darker images and themes of the final six. Agnes shows that while human beings have a lot of insight into the way the world works—meteorologists were able to accurately forecast the trajectory of the storm—they are still fairly powerless in the face of nature’s true fury.
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It’s still raining when Dillard heads down the road toward the bridge. The bridge, which usually sits 11 feet above the creek, is now several feet under the water. As the flood slowly recedes, Dillard steps onto the bridge gingerly, to help neighbors put up an improvised roadblock. The water has broken one of the supports tethering the bridge to the bank. And still, the water rushes past “like a dragon.” Getting swept away would mean certain death. Looking downstream makes Dillard dizzy; looking upstream is like looking at an oncoming avalanche. Debris—children’s toys, whole trees, building materials, and more—speeds past. Dillard can’t imagine what she’ll see next. There’s so much water covering the land that it no longer looks even remotely familiar.
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Dillard wonders what animals do during floods. She knows many of them—from muskrats and livestock to birds and fish down to microscopic plankton—must die, must drown, wash downstream, or become unable to hunt in the turbid waters. Some must always survive. But where? And how? The discovery of a snapping turtle by a group of children draws Dillard’s attention. It’s huge—and agitated. The children lure it into a tub and try to get it to snap a broom handle in half with its powerful jaws. But it’s in no mood to cooperate.
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When a pumping truck appears, to empty a neighbor’s basement of water, the crowd cheers and moves the roadblock so it can pass. There’s a sort of holiday atmosphere as people arrive, summoned home by family members before the flood makes the roads impassable. Word goes around that the Bings’ house—the lowest sited one in the valley—is flooding and Dillard wanders down the road with others to see. Water has reached the top of the first floor, but as it recedes, the Bings’ house sitters (they themselves are away) haul out many salvageable items.
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Dillard walks along the brick wall that usually holds the creek back from the road. Now that the water is going down, it’s trapping the floodwater on the roadside instead. A road crew is trying to cut away a tree that’s jammed up against one of the road’s supports and which threatens to knock it out. Women bring them coffee and stand around, chatting under umbrellas. The water continues to recede.
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Meanwhile, downstream, Dillard’s friend Lee is standing on a bridge over the James River in Richmond, Virginia. At this moment, the water is only nine feet above its usual level, but it’s already bearing strange items: chicken coops, bits of houses and outbuildings, dead livestock. By the end of the day, it will have risen 32 feet above normal, flooding nearly the entire city and knocking out the electricity. The Virginia governor will sign the emergency relief bill by candlelight. An urban legend holds, however, that he found one light still faintly glowing that night in the governor’s mansion.
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Agnes swept on to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, leaving dozens dead and millions of dollars of destruction in her wake. Afterward, Dillard met a helicopter pilot who helped to retrieve corpses that flood waters washed out of a Pennsylvania cemetery and deposited in trees and on rooftops. He said it was worse than what he experienced during the Vietnam War. All in all, she and her neighbors were lucky that the flooding affected them as lightly as it did.
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There’s one more flood story, which Dillard heard in the winter between that summer and this one. Allegedly, a friend went to the Bings’ house one afternoon in the fall to find them roasting a mushroom which (the friend implied) had grown in their flooded house. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t quite true. The Bings did often cook mushrooms, but they foraged that one in the woods. It’s too bad, Dillard thinks. It was more poetic to imagine the water leaving them a consolation prize for the damage to their home.
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