May Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest

by Bill Peak

A friend emailed me today to tell me Annie Dillard has died. Annie Dillard. Annie.

Not long after I arrived at Hollins College, where I would receive my Master’s Degree, I discovered the pick-up games of softball played on sunny afternoons in a field just south of campus. The games were organized, as it happened, by a professor’s wife, a baseball fanatic who appeared at each game decked out in a complete Pittsburgh Pirates uniform, long blond hair flowing out from beneath a regulation ball cap. Little did any of us know that by the end of the year the professor’s wife, Annie Dillard, would be world-famous, her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, serialized in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated, and that the book would then go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.

As luck would have it, my best friend in the graduate program, Steve Pett—who pitched for our team—became close to Annie. Which meant I became close to Annie. We began to meet regularly in the school’s snack bar to drink coffee and debate the usual suspects: literature, the war in Vietnam, God, the meaning of life. The snack bar looked out over a wooded bend in a small stream that ran through campus, Tinker Creek. A family of muskrats lived beneath the stream’s far bank and, swimming to and fro on their many muskrat errands, entertained us as we talked.

The three of us began to go camping together. There was a place up in the Jefferson National Forest west of Hollins called the Cascades that we liked. The geology of the place was interesting. A mountain stream poured down over successive shelves of granite that were separated from one another by successive shelves of limestone. As it descended, this stream had carved out bowl-shaped valleys in the limestone shelves, each of which featured, along its upper rim, the waterfall that had created it. We would hike up through fragrant stands of hemlock and rhododendron, passing one waterfall after another, till we came to one of the largest and most dramatic. On the high ground above this fall, we would make camp.

At night, sitting around the fire, we took turns telling stories. Mine, I’m sure, were pretty lame—I was only twenty-one—but Annie and Steve were six or seven years older and seemed immensely more experienced than I. Steve, who had once lived with a band of gypsies in Ireland, had an impressive repertoire of stories both Irish and Western, while Annie’s tales were just as entertaining, though more parochial. She had spent the last year studying the riparian environment of Tinker Creek, and she was such a close and patient observer that the seemingly inconsequential things she had witnessed—a snake, a tadpole—grew fascinating and occasionally grotesque there before our fire, strange images that danced in the night.

I still remember one of those stories. Annie had been camping somewhere and had lit a candle to read by. As she read, a moth began to circle the tiny flame. Closer and closer it flew until, inevitably, it flew too close, singed its wings, and fell into the candle’s wax. Through some sort of thermal osmosis the moth’s body now drew candlewax up into its flesh and veins, whereupon it ignited and, glowing chrysalis-like, became the candle’s second wick.

As our first semester at Hollins bled into our second, Annie received news that the manuscript she had been working on had been accepted for publication. Not long after that I found myself sitting next to her in the snack bar as she went over galleys. Truth be told, I had never heard the word “galleys” before, and, for a would-be-published author, the idea that I was with such an author as she went over hers was a little intoxicating.

Shortly thereafter the book came out to rave reviews and the promise of the magazine serializations. People were calling it a revelation, referring to Annie as the decade’s new wunderkind. When the New York Times gave it a front-page review in its Book Review section, a front-page review written by Eudora Welty, Annie’s apotheosis seemed complete. The pretty young blonde I had camped and philosophized with was famous, wined and dined by the power elite of the literary world.

And reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the first time, I was pleased to discover she deserved it. One of the book’s most famous sections describes the results of an eye operation that, when it was first performed, began to give sight to people who had been functionally blind all their lives. Some of the newly sighted, accustomed to a world that heretofore had been touchingly close, were appalled by the size and dimension of the world now revealed and, closing their eyes, refused to open them again. But one young girl rejoiced at what her new eyes displayed. When someone pointed at a sunlit tree and asked if she could make it out, she cried, “Oh yes! The tree with all the lights in it!”

Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I felt like that little girl. My eyes had been opened. For the first time I could see what words were capable of, how life could come to life on a page full of letters. Somehow the fact that I knew the person that had managed this trick made it all the more real. This can really be done. I might someday be able to accomplish something similar.

Of course I haven’t. Though I have tried. The example of Annie’s prose has been before me all my life now, haunting me, imploring me to do better, achieve something a little better. I owe her a great deal. As does Steve. He must have been similarly influenced, for he went on to a distinguished career as an author and teacher. His newest book, a collection of short stories called This Impossible Vertical World, came out in the spring. It won the W. S. Porter Prize.

All of which, I hope, goes some way toward explaining the sense of loss I’ve been feeling since I found out Annie died on the 15^th of September. Time and distance had long since separated us. A few letters, one brief visit thirty years ago, but otherwise I wouldn’t have expected to be so moved by her passing. But I am. I feel as if I should be wearing a black armband.

And I am desperate, of course, to resurrect her in the only way now available to me: her words. My favorite books by Annie are Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, For the Time Being, and, of course, Pilgrim. I will be checking them all out from the Talbot County Free Library soon. I hope you will too.