Dillard’s Moving Mountain: Mapping a Landscape in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Throughout Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the author uses a number of techniques and devices to create images of particular landscapes that are both vivid and unique. Dillard’s language in descriptions of the landscape suggests space and shape, assigns color and likeness, and at times, implies motion and vitality. One particularly striking example of Dillard’s crafting the landscape occurs when she famously “pat[s] the puppy” (79) and becomes completely aware of her present sensory experiences, describing a mountain before her in such terms as these:

“Shadows lope along the mountain’s rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it tricks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retract, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The ridge’s bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment” (79).

Dillard’s use of images, words and figurative and lyrical language in her description of mountain together create a sense of motion and vitality, as if the landscape she depicts is actively alive, shaping and forming itself before her. The vitality of this particular landscape, as observed during her moment of transcendence, perhaps suggests that such life may only be observed but at rare and ...

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... alive. Dillard’s language in her description of the landscape not only makes it vivid for the reader, but mimics the sense of rhythmic movement which she assigns to the land as well. Dillard’s use of repetition, sound devices, metaphor, images and active verbs create for the reader a sense of fluid, changing language on a page, which in turn describes an apparently fluid and changing landscape. The final image of the oscillograph, while indicative of an inorganic process, measures the activity witnessed by Dillard, reflecting itself upon the image of the forest. Perhaps an oscillograph of Dillard’s writing in this passage during her transcendent moment would also generate rhythmic waves and currents, progressing and yet doubling back, continues and full of movement and life.

Works Cited

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.