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own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent,
learning the strange syllables one by one.
It is spring. I plan to try to control myself this year, to watch the
progress of the season in a calm and orderly fashion. In spring I
am prone to wretched excess. I abandon myself to flights and
compulsions; I veer into various states of physical disarray. For
the duration of one entire spring I played pinochle; another spring
I played second base. One spring I missed because I had lobar
pneumonia; one softball season I missed with bursitis; and every
spring at just about the time the leaves first blur on the willows,
I stop eating and pale, like a silver eel about to migrate. My mind
wanders. Second base is a Broadway, a Hollywood and Vine; but
oh, if I m out in right field they can kiss me goodbye. As the sun
sets, sundogs, which are mock suns chunks of rainbow on either
side of the sun but often very distant from it appear over the
pasture by Carvin s Creek. Wes Hillman is up in his biplane; the
little Waco lords it over the stillness, cut-
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 109
ting a fine silhouette. It might rain tomorrow, if those ice crystals
find business. I have no idea how many outs there are; I luck
through the left-handers, staring at rainbows. The field looks to
me as it must look to Wes Hillman up in the biplane: everyone
is running, and I can t hear a sound. The players look so thin on
the green, and the shadows so long, and the ball a mystic thing,
pale to invisibility& . I m better off in the infield.
In April I walked to the Adams woods. The grass had greened
one morning when I blinked; I missed it again. As I left the house
I checked the praying mantis egg case. I had given all but one of
the cases to friends for their gardens; now I saw that small black
ants had discovered the one that was left, the one tied to the mock-
orange hedge by my study window. One side of the case was
chewed away, either by the ants or by something else, revealing
a rigid froth slit by narrow cells. Over this protective layer the
ants scrambled in a frenzy, unable to eat; the actual mantis eggs
lay secure and unseen, waiting, deeper in.
The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light
pooled between the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished
on the path, since a third of the trees I walked under were still
bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and
another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves. The snakes
were out I saw a bright, smashed one on the path and the
butterflies were vaulting and furling about; the phlox was at its
peak, and even the evergreens looked greener, newly created and
washed.
Long racemes of white flowers hung from the locust trees. Last
summer I heard a Cherokee legend about the locust tree and the
moon. The moon goddess starts out with a big ball, the full moon,
and she hurls it across the sky. She spends all day retrieving it;
then she shaves a slice from it and hurls it again,
110 / Annie Dillard
retrieving, shaving, hurling, and so on. She uses up a moon a
month, all year. Then, the way Park Service geologist Bill Well-
man tells it, long about spring of course she s knee-deep in
moon-shavings, so she finds her favorite tree, the locust, and
hangs the slender shavings from its boughs. And there they were,
the locust flowers, pale and clustered in crescents.
The newts were back. In the small forest pond they swam bright
and quivering, or hung alertly near the water s surface. I dis-
covered that if I poked my finger into the water and wagged it
slowly, a newt would investigate; then if I held my finger still, it
would nibble at my skin, softly, the way my goldfish does and,
also like my goldfish, it would swim off as if in disgust at a bad
job. This is salamander metropolis. If you want to find a species
wholly new to science and have your name inscribed Latinly in
some secular version of an eternal rollbook, then your best bet is
to come to the southern Appalachians, climb some obscure and
snakey mountain where, as the saying goes, the hand of man
has never set foot, and start turning over rocks. The mountains
act as islands; evolution does the rest, and there are scores of
different salamanders all around. The Peaks of Otter on the Blue
Ridge Parkway produce their own unique species, black and
spotted in dark gold; the rangers there keep a live one handy by
sticking it in a Baggie and stowing it in the refrigerator, like a
piece of cheese.
Newts are the most common of salamanders. Their skin is a
lighted green, like water in a sunlit pond, and rows of very bright
red dots line their backs. They have gills as larvae; as they grow
they turn a luminescent red, lose their gills, and walk out of the
water to spend a few years padding around in damp places on
the forest floor. Their feet look like fingered baby hands, and they
walk in the same leg patterns as all four-footed creatures dogs,
mules, and, for that matter, lesser pan
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 111
das. When they mature fully, they turn green again and stream
to the water in droves. A newt can scent its way home from as
far as eight miles away. They are altogether excellent creatures,
if somewhat moist, but no one pays the least attention to them,
except children.
Once I was camped alone at Douthat State Park in the Alle-
gheny Mountains near here, and spent the greater part of one
afternoon watching children and newts. There were many times
more red-spotted newts at the edge of the lake than there were
children; the supply exceeded even that very heavy demand. One
child was collecting them in a Thermos mug to take home to
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to feed an ailing cayman. Other children
ran to their mothers with squirming fistfuls. One boy was mis-
treating the newts spectacularly: he squeezed them by their tails
and threw them at a shoreline stone, one by one. I tried to reason
with him, but nothing worked. Finally he asked me, Is this one
a male? and in a fit of inspiration I said, No, it s a baby. He
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