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into the water.
No one but me disturbed the newts here in the Adams woods.
They hung in the water as if suspended from strings. Their spe-
cific gravity put them just a jot below the water s surface, and
they could apparently relax just as well with lowered heads as
lowered tails; their tiny limbs hung limp in the water. One newt
was sunning on a stick in such an extravagant posture I thought
she was dead. She was half out of water, her front legs grasping
the stick, her nose tilted back to the zenith and then some. The
concave arch of her spine stretched her neck past believing; the
thin ventral skin was a bright taut yellow. I should not have
nudged her it made her relax the angle of repose but I had to
see if she was dead. Medieval Europeans believed that salaman-
ders were so cold they could put out fires and not be
112 / Annie Dillard
burned themselves; ancient Romans thought that the poison of
salamanders was so cold that if anyone ate the fruit of a tree that
a salamander had merely touched, that person would die of a
terrible coldness. But I survived these mild encounters my being
nibbled and my poking the salamander s neck and stood up.
The woods were flush with flowers. The redbud trees were in
flower, and the sassafras, dully; so also were the tulip trees,
catawbas, and the weird pawpaw. On the floor of the little woods,
hepatica and dogtooth violet had come and gone; now I saw the
pink spring beauty here and there, and Solomon s seal with its
pendant flowers, bloodroot, violets, trillium, and May apple in
luxuriant stands. The mountains would be brilliant in mountain
laurel, rhododendron, and flame azalea, and the Appalachian
Trail was probably packed with picnickers. I had seen in the
steers pasture daisies, henbits, and yellow-flowering oxalis; sow
thistle and sneeze weed shot up by the barbed-wire fence. Does
anything eat flowers? I couldn t recall ever having seen anything
actually eat a flower are they nature s privileged pets?
But I was much more interested in the leafing of trees. By the
path I discovered a wonderful tulip-tree sapling three feet tall.
From its tip grew two thin slips of green tissue shaped like two
tears; they enclosed, like cupped palms sheltering a flame, a tiny
tulip leaf that was curled upon itself and bowed neatly at the
middle. The leaf was so thin and etiolated it was translucent, but
at the same time it was lambent, minutely, with a kind of pale
and sufficient light. It was not wet, nor even damp, but it was
clearly moist inside; the wrinkle where it folded in half looked
less like a crease than a dimple, like the liquid dip a skater s leg
makes on the surface film of still water. A barely concealed,
powerful juice swelled its cells, and the leaf was uncurling and
rising between the green slips of tissue. I looked around for more
leaves like it that
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 113
part of the Adams woods seems to be almost solely tulip
trees but all the other leaves had just lately unfurled, and were
waving on pale stalks like new small hands.
The tulip-tree leaf reminded me of a newborn mammal I d seen
the other day, one of the neighborhood children s gerbils. It was
less than an inch long, with a piggish snout, clenched eyes, and
swollen white knobs where its ears would grow. Its skin was
hairless except for an infinitesimal set of whiskers; the skin
seemed as thin as the membrane on an onion, tightly packed as
a sausage casing, and bulging roundly with wet, bloody meat. It
seemed near to bursting with possibilities, like the taut gum over
a coming tooth. This three-foot sapling was going somewhere,
too; it meant business.
There s a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn
gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to
bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower.
Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given
tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its
living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred
and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave
a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make
as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging
an inch; I couldn t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating
deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes;
it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them
out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the
dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it
runs on rain and air.
John Cowper Powys said,  We have no reason for denying to
the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely
semi-consciousness. He may not be right, but I like his adjectives.
The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains,
114 / Annie Dillard
but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake. The trees es-
pecially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the
real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.
We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world
turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing green
and clean.
I looked away from the tulip leaf at the tip of the sapling, and
I looked back. I was trying to determine if I could actually see the
bent leaf tip rise and shove against the enclosing flaps. I couldn t
tell whether I was seeing or merely imagining progress, but I
knew the leaf would be fully erect within the hour. I couldn t
wait.
I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as
though I d stepped not through the forest, but on it. I left the
wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened. I ll go to the
Northwest Territories, I thought, Finland.
 Why leap ye, ye high hills? The earth was an egg, freshened
and splitting; a new pulse struck, and I resounded. Pliny, who,
you remember, came up with the Portuguese wind-foals, must
have kept his daughters in on windy days, for he also believed
that plants conceive in the spring of the western wind Flavonius. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]