Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Fertility can be gross and often cruel. The narrator dreams that she is watching two luna moths mate. The male dominates the female in the act of reproduction. In the dream, the narrator watches, unable to look away. The female luna moth produces eggs that then hatch into thousands of fish, squirming in the water. She watches the fish and feels complicit. She wakes and reprimands herself, feeling responsible for not stopping the moths and the torturous lives of the fish. Animals are riddled with the grotesque. The narrator feels that she has been offering a lopsided view of nature, leaning too heavily on its beauty. Nature is as much about death as it is about life, and fertility is ugly and complicated.

While plants do not necessarily deal in brutality, humans and animals are rife with it. Barnacles, for example, hatch from a million larvae. God seems indifferent to the lives of the barnacles, and the narrator wonders if God feels the same way about people. Parasitic wasps, praying mantises, and fish all reproduce in vast numbers only for most of their offspring to die. The urge to reproduce is itself a gnawing and insatiable hunger, and the brutality continues throughout life. Flatworms are cannibals, and gall gnats hatch live larvae within their bodies. She describes in detail the life of a horsehair worm, an existence that is riddled with perils. The worm is entirely dependent upon its hosts and a series of chances that could all go awry.

As she meditates upon the brutality of nature, she realizes that death is as much a part of existence as life. Evolution only proceeds through death. She presents two theories. The first is that the world is a monster, dealing in cruelty. The second is that human emotions are an anomaly. They impede a holistic understanding of the nature of existence and God.

In the summer, the narrator visits the creek to stalk muskrats and other creatures. She compares this experience to the hunting practices of Inuit peoples. In one example, the narrator describes how Inuit people at St. Lawrence Island thread live birds with heavy needles and attach the flying animals to their boat. The flapping attracts the attention of other birds, which are consequently threaded as well. The narrator claims there are two ways to stalk—by standing still and by walking. Often, the act of trying to see something obscures the ability to witness it. For example, when she tries to watch three bluegills in the water, she finds it difficult to spot them, but when she focuses on something else, they come into view.

Even while stalking, the narrator finds it difficult to observe what she is trying to capture. A green heron feeds on fish in the water, but only when the narrator’s head is slightly turned. Only insects seem oblivious to her presence, joyfully going about their business. She watches a dragonfly dip its abdomen in the creek, dropping eggs. She witnesses a water strider disorient and consume a waterlogged fly. It took the narrator years of fine-tuning her stalking practices to carefully observe muskrats. These creatures are notoriously skittish—rightfully so, as they are highly preyed upon by predators. Their lives are extremely dangerous. Even their mothers may put them in peril by dropping them and forgetting about them.

The narrator recalls watching muskrats from a nearby bridge. She learned that she must stay very still. If she spotted a muskrat on one side of the bridge, she had approximately five seconds to reposition herself on the other side of the bridge to observe it emerging. Whatever position she was in when the muskrat emerged must be held. Once, while watching the water for signs of the creature, she realized that a muskrat had emerged onto the bridge beside her. She watched it, unmoving, for 40 minutes. During this time, the narrator lost her self-consciousness and was wholly engrossed in the actions and movements of the animal.

In September, the narrator packs a bag and treks to a nearby property to stay the night in an old, abandoned cabin. She walks through a meadow where grasshoppers explode from the grass at each step. Locusts—known as an insect of plague and famine—are merely grasshoppers that have experienced extreme droughts. They obscure all light as they fly through the sky and destroy crops. The narrator delights at how her steps send the grasshoppers flying, calling herself the “King of the Meadow” (212).

The Lucas property feels like a secret sanctuary. Aside from the meadow, it is filled with cliffs, valleys, terraces, and caves. The narrator feels once again like an infant, experiencing everything with wonder. While peering through the window of the one-room cottage, she spots a female goldfinch land on a thistle and begin extracting its contents, eating the seeds and littering the ground with thistledown. In the Bible, thistle is part of the curse of the Garden of Eden. God tells Adam that the ground will be covered in thorns and thistles. Yet the goldfinch happily eats the contents of the thistle’s pod, munching on its seeds. Once more, the narrator feels that she has experienced something spiritual.

At night, she is surrounded by noise. Cicadas and frogs fill the air with their shrill calls. Somewhere a bobwhite calls its own name. The night is another mystery, a lesson in shadow. The narrator wonders why God did not let the animals name man. She compares herself to thistle, the thorny weed of the earth.

In mid-September, the narrator visits the quarry and sees a copperhead. She stomps on the ground a few times and checks to see that she has her snake-bite kit. Then she sits down and observes the serpent, which does not move. She recalls talking to a woman who tells her about her brother, who was bitten by a snake when he was four. His mother did not realize what had happened until the boy could no longer see and his leg was as big around as his body. As the narrator watches the snake, the sun begins to fall. A mosquito keeps trying to bite the narrator, and she swats it away. The mosquito lands on the snake, just below its head. It sucks the snake’s blood for several minutes. The snake never moves.

Parasitic creatures make up approximately 10% of all animals on Earth. The narrator details many of these species, including the leech. She remembers coming across a small boy by the creek one day who was carrying a large snapping turtle at arm’s length. He showed her leeches that were stuck to the turtle and asked if it would be okay. She assured him that it would be fine. Fleas, lice, flies, and mosquitoes all exemplify the parasitic lifestyle of insects. One scientist found five orders of parasitic wasps, all feeding on one another.

One night during the summer, while watching muskrats by Tinker Creek, the narrator noticed a small green insect that had flown directly into a spider’s web. The insect shook violently and managed to escape. Since then, the narrator has kept a list of insects and animals that have survived such encounters. Her list includes grasshoppers and killdeer, as well as a tailless squirrel and a muskrat. All living animals, including humans, are survivors. The narrator examines her own life and considers the ways in which she has survived.