Annie Dillard has died. her best book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek changed my life. I read it for the first time for a graduate course at Montana State University in the summer of 1977. I was 23.
For six weeks a class of 12 read and wrote and talked and spent 3 straight weeks in the Beartooth Wilderness hiking and climbing.
That class changed my life. I had never been to the West. I had never felt such light and space. I had never been above timberline or climbed big mountains or canoed on a western river. I had never learned how to slow down and or how to see. Those three weeks in the Beartooth’s taught me to appreciate the walking, not the ending and Dillard’s book taught me how to stop, how to look closely at the smallest details, how to listen in the woods, how to begin to give names to insects, flowers, birds, clouds.
Whenever I walk, whether in the city or on a country road or on a trail, I remember her wisdom – go slowly, be still, watch carefully, set aside the turmoil of your mind and be present – “At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world: Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.”
I grieve for her and for wilderness and for a way of being in nature.
Read Pilgrim. Maybe she will change your life too.
Our 1977 Syllabus:
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (I taught Pilgrim to high school students for years)
The Man Who Walked Through Time, Colin Fletcher
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
The Far Field, Theodore Roethke
Turtle Island, Gary Snyder
Walden, Thoreau
