Exploring the Neighborhood

Written March-May 2020

Sometimes in March when I look at the creek, it seems empty. There’s the water. There’s the plants. There’s the birdcalls. But everything seems somehow static and predictable. It doesn’t seem like enough to count — not as nature, not as life. I try to remind myself of the manifold microorganisms which are undoubtedly before me. I try to remind myself that what looks dead may not be. But I just don’t see this place as teeming with life. It’s green and brown; green and brown.

In these times when the creek seems empty, I wonder if the creek is inadequate, or if I am. It’s Annie Dillard in my head. I keep finding myself thinking about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard considers every scale. Annie Dillard learns to see. Sometimes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek seems like a template: instructions for being-in-the-world. Consider every scale. Learn to see. In March, at the creek, I feel self-conscious. There is no Annie Dillard in Tinker Creek. There is just an “I” and an eye. Even little bursts of anecdote barely grant that “I” a past or personality. It has attitude, sure. But even within the commentary and the theorizing, sometimes it seems like all the “I” really does is see. — Can’t I be that “I”? Oughtn’t I be that “I”?

When I see brush and hillside and current all dull green and brown, when the creek seems empty: I sink down, my knees pressing into the cool earth, and I stare at the dirt. If there is so much to see, let me see. Sometimes, the dirt gives easy answers. A jolt passes through me as I see movement. There’s a tiny bug scurrying about on the side of a rock, mica-like. Its back is metallic. Its hue is blue-green. I am amazed by the intricacy of its pattern, all mosaic. It’s exciting to see. As I look around, I see more of them. They’re everywhere.

I don’t want to write an essay about learning how to see. Yet one day, in my nature notebook, I write that sometimes I think I am attending more to myself learning how to attend to nature than I am the nature itself. I write, I think this is the opposite of being a transparent eye. I write, I think this is rather self-absorbed. I write, but also: what a vivid and intense experience it is!

I don’t have a grand point to make about the nature of things, from the nature of that mica-like bug. All I know is that the next time I visit the creek, I sit on a stone and watch the water flow, and in the current, I catch sight of another of those creatures, and I greet it as a friend.

Truth be told, I don’t know a lot about nature. I had mostly forgotten this fact about myself, living in Cambridge, but it became clear last fall, once I started taking walks with Max.

Max is in my year at school. We shared a recitation together, junior fall, and after falling out of touch, we somehow stumbled back into each other’s lives. Max was an excellent companion for walks. Conversation was straightforward. He didn’t mind the cold or rain. And he was patient.

Max grew up watching animal documentaries and spending his summers hiking in the wilderness. He was fond of raccoons and porcupines, and he was always matter-of-fact. Sometimes on our walks, he would stop, and we would look at a squirrel, prowling about or digging in the ground. Sometimes we stopped for minutes at a time — still talking, but also watching. He had a patience with nature and a patience with me. Walking with Max wasn’t about conversation; it wasn’t about moving or getting from one place to another; walking with Max was about being present, together, in the world.

Walking with Max, though, did bring to light my ignorance of even elementary-school level animal identification. There was a kind of bird we would walk past — it was sometimes alone, and sometimes in flocks — and while “goose” was the word that came to mind, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really know if they were geese. I wasn’t sure that I knew what a goose was. One day, of course, Max pointed out some goose-behavior, and he called the birds geese, confidently as anything. Right.

During one of our last walks, Max and I stopped to watch some geese bobbing around in the Charles. A little silly, I asked Max how he would feel if he were told, in no uncertain terms, that that evening, once he had fallen asleep, he would turn into a goose.

Max didn’t much like that question. “Wouldn’t that just be death?”, he asked. He does not like thinking about his own death, he told me. He rather likes life, and does not want his life to end, not any time soon. He does not want his life to become the life of a goose, either. It was only later that he got to questioning how his life could even become the life of a goose. I guess I feel differently. If there really were no help for it, if really, I was just going to become a goose: so be it. Maybe it’s just that I have a young person’s view of death. But sometimes it seems like a goose could carry on being me as well as I could. Certainly if what is important is seeing, a goose could continue seeing, well as I.

I miss Max. Once, we planned to walk at a marsh. He would bring binoculars and bird guides, he said. We would visit that alien marsh, together, we said, and we would see what we could see.

But the marsh is hundreds of miles away, now, and so is Max, and we never visited the marsh together. In a time of rupture, I was picked up and set back down. I’m dizzy to find myself in Terrace Park, Ohio. It’s a place both familiar and lonely.

It’s idyllic, in Terrace Park. The houses range in size from normal to very large. They’re a little eclectic: some are Victorians, some are ranches, one or two are even architectural. They’re spaced, not too close, but not so far apart, along tree-lined streets. In Terrace Park, there are twice as many trees as people. Oak, sweetgum, yellow-poplar; the species are varied, and the air is clean and sweet. Every street has a sidewalk. I grew up here. I learned that when you pass by someone on the street, you say, “Hello!”

In 2019, the median income of a household in Terrace Park was $160,000. There’s a handsome brick elementary school nestled in among the houses, and all the children walk or bike to school. Terrace Park is 98.6% white. Growing up, my parents told me that if I ever felt unsafe, I could knock on the door of any house. I never felt unsafe. Terrace Park is a neighborhood. It is a neighborhood I have held mixed feelings about for a long time. It is a neighborhood that sometimes feels like a caricature of itself. But it is a neighborhood full of neighbors. It is tidy houses on a grid of tree-lined streets.

I found the creek when I was in high school. It crosses under Route 50 into Terrace Park, flows just around the town church, and soon joins the Little Miami River. It is not a popular natural feature of Terrace Park. Shrubs and trees hide the creek from view, and the way down to it is steep; the creek is maybe forty feet lower than the rest of town. Most people don’t realize it’s there. But there’s a creek, alright. A creek: water, rocks, rusty beer cans, lost lacrosse balls, and all.

On April first, at the creek, a tiny bird on a low tree branch catches my eye. Mostly, it is grey, with a nice round belly. But there’s white around its face, and its head is capped with black. I watch it sing, its little beak and belly vibrating. A strain of birdsong shifts into salience. I am stopped short. It’s not just that there’s birdsong; it’s not just that this bird is singing; this bird is singing that song!

It’s a revelation. There were times the chatter of birds didn’t make the creek seem any less empty. I am coming to realize, though, that I never truly registered that it was birds making those sounds. The noise was as much sky-noise or tree-noise as it was bird-noise; it seemed to just emanate from the environment. When I looked up, I saw mostly branches. I suppose, occasionally, there were bird-silhouettes. Maybe I recognized them as birds, but I did not recognize them as creatures. I did not recognize them as singing and calling to each other and making a ruckus.

I start learning about birds. At first, I think I’m being silly. One night, exhausted, I study a Quizlet set on common Ohio birds to procrastinate. It seems pointless and absurd. But the next day, when I go for a walk, I don’t just see American robins and the occasional cardinal: I see blue jays, mourning doves, a Carolina wren, grackles, and a brown-headed cowbird. I had never so much as heard of a grackle or a cowbird till the night before, but here they are, just around the block. It’s like reading a fantasy novel and learning the next day that magic is real.

I download an app, Larkwire, that promises to teach me to identify birdsongs if I am patient and persistent. In practice, it feels a little like using Duolingo, but somehow stranger. I can’t form these songs on my own lips. Indeed, even as I start to recognize the calls, I still often can’t reproduce them in my head. This complexity is not a kind I know how to handle. But Larkwire includes tips on how to recognize the sounds from Michael O’Brien, who is apparently a top North American “ear birder.” For example:

Carolina Chickadee: (Song) Four or five short, pure-toned whistles, last one lowest. Fee-bee fee-bay.

With time, mnemonics of songs that once seemed like nonsense start to match the noises I hear. I still don’t know quite what is burry and what is buzzy, what is a warble and what is a trill, but I’m getting there. Slowly, tenuously, I start to connect bird names, song descriptions, and the song recordings all together.

Going for walks becomes a different experience. Instead of hearing bird-noise, I hear cheer-up phrases and bubbling chatter and two-syllable whistles. Except for cardinals, I can rarely identify birds by their songs — but I am ever-aware that there are birds in these trees.

I start taking binoculars with me. It is difficult to locate visually a bird I have heard, but when I am able to, I am ecstatic. There’s a mourning dove on the electrical wire, giving its distinctive, slow coo. There’s a chipping sparrow in that tree. Sometimes I am walking along and I’ll hear a noise, and I’ll look around, and keep looking, and then — I see! There are two chickadees, right in front of me.

With binoculars around my neck, I get in the habit of looking for birds. They’re everywhere. And sometimes, even when I’m not searching, sky-movement catches my eye. Oh: it’s a red-bellied woodpecker, in branches far away. I see other things, too, now. There are nests all over the place. Sometimes, there are two nests in a single tree! I never noticed the nests, before. I never noticed any of these birds. I lived in this neighborhood for decades seeing only robins, cardinals, and hummingbirds. But all this time, I’ve been sharing the neighborhood with more creatures than I ever imagined.

In the mornings, from the bathroom window, I can see a house finch. It perches on the side of the house and chirps, and I watch its red-pink head twitch this way and that as I brush my teeth. The finch and its mate have taken up nest in the curve of the downspout of the garage. I hear them all day, singing and calling. The house finches live here; here at the house in which I live.

The only cultural touchstone I have for birds, really, is Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. It is the first book I loved as a child, and I still re-read it; I think it is a masterpiece. In the book, Sam Gribley, having run away from New York City, makes a home for himself in the Catskill Mountains. He hollows out an old hemlock tree to live in; he takes and trains a falcon he calls “Frightful”; he sews clothing for himself out of deer hide; he gathers food and firewood for winter. He figures out how to take care of himself with what he has access to. With all his preparations made, he gets to know the land and the creatures on it.

The events of “IN WHICH I Learn About Birds and People” take place in December amid feet of snow. Sam explores the mountain, and he watches the birds. The cold, dark months of winter are not lonely. He watches the birds for hours. There’s a banditry of chickadees which live in Sam’s tree. They remind him of people on Third Avenue, the street in New York City he had run away from, and he names several chickadees after characters on Third Avenue: Mr. Bracket, Mrs. O’Brien, Mrs. Callaway, Mrs. Federio. He gets to know the routines of their lives: their favorite routes to food supplies, their resting perches, their tree-cavity homes (118). He gets to know the chickadees as neighbors. Mr. Bracket, the chickadee, is not so different from Mr. Bracket of Third Avenue; all the chickadees are not so different from their Third Avenue counterparts. We’re all just living. What I love most is how Sam writes about himself in relation to the birds:

Around four o’clock we would all wander home. The nuthatches, the chickadees, the cardinals, Frightful, and me. (114)

The nuthatches, the chickadees, the cardinals, Frightful, and Sam: the usual crowd. The birds are living their lives, and Sam is living his life, and all of them are living their lives together. There is no bird-scape superimposed on a human-scape. There is just the landscape. There is just this life all together.

To see all, you have to be nothing. This is the transparency of the transparent eye. But what a promise! to see all! — Nature, or God, laid bare. Isn’t it tempting? Don’t you think you could? Annie Dillard will give an attempt:

And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not? (138).

Why not, indeed. Poet and physicist, integrating all the parts.

To be a transparent eye, you lose yourself: all sense of perspective, gone. There is no near and far; there is no center; you are not at the center. “The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental,” Emerson says. Are you a person? Are you a goose? Are you wandering home with the chickadees?

Maybe the reason why it feels like there is no Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is that the “I” of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has no friends. The book is all sight and emotion and metaphysics. In contrast, Sam Gribley has friends. His relationship with Frightful, his falcon, is tender and intimate: he loves her and she loves him. Sam becomes friends with a raccoon, a weasel, and several humans. Indeed, the central tension in the book is the number of humans Sam comes to spend time with; My Side of the Mountain ends with Sam’s family joining him in the Catskills. I am coming to think that I’d rather be Sam Gribley than the “I” of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Can’t I befriend a nuthatch, instead of posing her as an object of my sight and theory?

There is an unusual addendum at the end of Tinker Creek, after the Afterword. Titled “More Years Afterward,” it is a note from an Annie Dillard thirty-five years in the future. It is two paragraphs. She describes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and then she describes her then-new novel, The Maytrees. She comments on style and content. She writes:

The Maytrees are a woman and a man both simplified and enlarged. Everyone and everything represents itself alone. No need for microcosms or macrocosms. The Maytrees’ human tale needs only the telling.

Annie Dillard of 2007 has stepped away from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I think. No more sight, emotion, metaphysics. She is concerned with the human. When I read the “More Years Afterward,” I think of Sam Gribley. My Side of the Mountain is a human tale, isn’t it? It at least is a tale straightforwardly told. Everyone and everything represents itself alone. Is that what we’ll all get to in the end? The human-scale and spare prose? I order The Maytrees online.

What is it that’s so distinctively human? We are conscious of ourselves. We have episodic memory. And we find ourselves faced, again and again, with the task of deciding what to do. A goose has knowledge of the world around her and instincts to action. She may have some awareness of her self. I’m like the goose: but I have this broad capacity to hold myself reflexively. Shall I do what I am inclined to do? — what shall I do? how shall I live? A goose is conscious, but she does not have to decide how to live.

Humanity introduces the good. We have ethics — what ought I do? how ought I live? We have social codes that teach us, at least in some ways, to hold regard for others. And we have a persistent problem. Always, I perceive myself as being at the center of my experience. Always, I perceive myself as if I were at the center of the world. I’m not. Things get perverted.

My walks home from the creek have turned into wanderings. Listen close, be surprised. A sequence of whistles catches my attention. Three notes, repeated. It’s pure, barely melodic, and surprisingly loud. I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but I try to walk towards it. I move forward, slowly, and then cross the street. Each note dips a little in the middle; each whistle is a bright, silvery crescent. My gaze is focused up at the trees now. It’s mid-April. The tree I’m scanning is still mostly branches and twigs, but it is studded with bundles of green, slowly spreading open. Oh! There, in the branches, I see her: a little bird, with a grey back and white chest, dark eyes, and a tuft of feather at the very top of her head. A tufted titmouse, I recognize, and hear the whistle: peter peter peter. I smile.

Terrace Park seems to have gotten taller, these last weeks. Many of the trees are tall. Decades old, they reach up to the sky, not two-or-three-stories tall, but towering. They’re in stranger shapes, too, than I had ever realized: trunks crooked, limbs unruly. A few have taken these odd forms through human intervention. People cut off the parts of trees which get too close to electrical wires: one enormous pine tree is wholly flat on its street-facing side! There is much to see, with my neck craned up. When I walk the streets of Terrace Park, the town seems large and full of mystery.

I don’t care about identifying birds, not really. I’m no closer to the chickadees if I can rattle off the words Poecile carolinensis upon seeing one. The question that matters to me is, Who is it? — Who is it singing? Who is it whistling? I hear a ha-ha-ha from a nearby bush: Who is that, laughing?

It would be easy to slip into writing an essay about God. God is in me and God is in the chickadees; don’t you know. And maybe there’s something to it. If God is in Nature, and Nature is in God, then isn’t writing about Nature writing about God? I could wax theistic for a long time.

Spring turns along in Terrace Park. I show up to the creek and see it teeming with life. Fish swim in slow, deep waters; a yellow-rumped warbler flitters on the ground; plants grow in the dry rocks of the creekbed, some low to the ground with red veins and large, floppy dark green leaves, and some shooting up tall, with thick stems and golden flowers. There are spiders skittering in the sun and metallic, emerald green tiger beetles on the side of a log. There are bees and butterflies and roly-polies. The surface of the creek is filled with water striders. As I walk, I’m even pestered by gnats.

What traces of this extravagance could I have seen in February or early March, if I had known where to look?

Of course in late spring the creek is full of floating, darting, writhing, flying. You can’t miss the movement, and you can’t miss the life. If you stay still, you may get to see the iridescent shimmer of wood ducks before they flap away. And yet! are not eggs and cocoons so exciting as the ducks? are not fallen maple keys, keys to life? There are saplings, by the creek. When on sunny days, I walk on the rocks of the dry creek-bed, I am joyful.

Water coursing along the creek-path burbles and bubbles. The day is warm, almost hot. I’m in shorts and carefree. I make a creek-crossing, leaping from stone to stone. Look at what my body can do! I look where I want to go, and I go there. My limbs don’t always land quite as I intend. Sometimes I slip, and water seeps into my sneakers. But here I am: making my way in the world.

There’s a low, ceramic clunk of rocks shifting underfoot as I walk. It’s noon. The church bells toll, and the sun caught behind a tree-trunk is a blinding white circle in the blue, blue sky. Burbling, skittering, golden, melodic, green, brown, green, brown! The cliffside is verdant, and everything is alive and shining. Oh, presence! There is a whole school of fish in the creek. Sometimes as they dart about, their narrow bodies turn to angle, and the sun flashes silver off their sides.

I don’t need to be able to see God. I don’t need to be able to see Nature. God is there. The fish and I, we’re in the presence of each other. We accompany each other.

There is a moment in The Maytrees when Toby Maytree returns to Provincetown. After fourteen years of marriage, Toby Maytree left Lou. He ran away to Maine with their friend Deary. He did not speak, he did not write to Lou, not for twenty years. Till they all were old; and Deary was dying, and in an accident he had broken half the bones in his body. Then he returned to Provincetown. Someone needed to take care of Deary. Their friend. There is a moment in The Maytrees when Toby Maytree returns to Lou. Empty sleeves dangle from his jacket; his arms are both in casts. She bids him inside. Dillard writes, “—Take off your hat, she said, and plucked it up for him, handless as he was”(163). When Lou sees that Toby Maytree cannot take off his jacket, she unbuttons it for him.

It is bare human intimacy. She is matter-of-fact and he is drained (198). It stopped me short. The fabric in Lou’s hands, as her fingers slip each button out of its buttonhole—

It starts to seem that the houses in Terrace Park are incidental. They are scattered through this landscape; there are moles under the ground, there are birds in the trees, and there are humans in their houses. Terrace Park is moles and birds and humans, grass and mud and stone, dandelions and wasps and squirrels, all here together, all here in mystery. The trees you planted aren’t growing because you told them to. No blooming flower is owned. I can’t shake the fact that this house is home to the earthworms and the finches, just as well as me. I can’t shake the fact that this town is home to pavement and chickadees and chipmunks, just as well as me.

Nature is subversive. You landscaped for a purpose, but the robins are using your trees for their own means. Electrical wires don’t have to be for electricity; they can be for bird-perching. And when you pick strawberries off the vine, you’re the one disrupting a seed dispersal cycle. Teleology doesn’t stick to objects. Nothing can lay claim to anything. It’s all just movement, object, interaction. Sometimes that interaction is symbiosis. Sometimes it’s parasitism. But whether we’re cooperating or not, whether we’re paying attention or not, we’re all at this level together. We are all some world together.

Sometimes, I think that’s what God is: this world of us altogether. God is substance and God is emergence. God is absolute and God is relational. God is a verb and God is a noun. But God is big. Whenever I mistake myself to have a grasp on God, I think, God is bigger than that. God is bigger than that.

There are many things I share in common with Annie Dillard. She is a white woman from a well-to-do family. She was raised Presbyterian, although her parents were not so pious; as an adolescent, she quit. In college, she attended an Episcopalian church. She knew (but did not like knowing) she would end up Catholic; sure enough, later in life, she converted. At one point, she identified herself as a “panentheist” — believing that nature is in God, although God is bigger than nature. She is not a Christian still. Yet those ideas still circle round her. Is it such a surprise I find her writing so tempting? This is my life, at least the part of it I have lived, nearly word-for-word. Annie Dillard is concerned with the absolute. She is concerned with eternity. She could not give less of a damn about society. Why bother being concerned with the ephemeral details of this messy, fraught world when you can be concerned with God? Annie Dillard is concerned with the sacred; and for Annie Dillard, the problems and potentials of society are not the sacred.

The absolute is alluring. Sometimes, I can slip like Annie Dillard into seeing triviality in the details of this time and place. What are the next fifty years compared to eternity? What were the last two hundred, compared to eternity? — But I can’t hold that perspective long. The times when I think society doesn’t matter at all feel as wrong as the times when I think society is the only thing that matters. I’m wary of the lure of Annie Dillard’s absolute.

Often, I think of a remark Niebuhr makes in Moral Man and Immoral Society. He observes that, frequently, privileged classes hold religious views which identify God and nature, while lower classes have more dualistic views which separate nature from God. The privileged classes explain their beliefs in terms of rationality, claiming that dualistic views of God are irrational. Niebuhr doesn’t contest that dualistic views are, in fact, irrational. But he asserts, that irrationality isn’t why the privileged classes believe what they believe. Instead, he says, those beliefs in the unity of God and nature result from the lesser suffering of the privileged classes. That is: you don’t have to believe that this world is broken and God is elsewhere if your life on earth is comfortable. If your life on earth is comfortable, it’s pretty easy to look out at the world around you and think, God is here. If you’re rich, you can afford panentheism. When I go to church, too often I am sitting in a room full of well-educated white people. It makes me feel sick. But I don’t know what I am right now, if not an Episcopalian. Yet don’t I only hold the views I hold because I am a white woman from a well-to-do family?

Max is a white man from a well-to-do family. He studies computer science and supported Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg for president. He is straightforward and self-assured. He ignores his own death. I have wondered whether I like walking with Max less because I feel strongly about Max, than because I like walking, and he is a pleasant person to walk alongside. I don’t trust his judgement. I am fond of him. Is this ridiculous or not? I keep walking. Max kept pace with me those months I walked slow with a cast on my foot. I don’t know what I can do but keep walking.

The Maytrees took my breath away. It is familiar. It is everything I hope of old age. Layered through the book are the thoughts of Lou, Toby Maytree, and their son, Pete. I read my thoughts, and I read thoughts I can imagine having in old age, if I am careful, if I am lucky.

But there are ways of knowing I don’t have a grasp on — ways of looking at this world that are wholly unfamiliar to me. There are human ways of knowing, that I don’t have a grasp on. Most ways of human knowing I don’t know. The same goes for Annie Dillard: this I believe. I can slip into seeing The Maytrees as one more piece of writing by a white woman. I can slip into being sick of it. And then I can re-read a paragraph and slip right back into its spell.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard claims, is a human tale. Sure enough: Lou and Toby Maytree are a woman and a man. Little else matters about them. They are figurines sculpted in fondness. The story is large and hollow and it rings deep and loud when you strike it.

The Maytrees is beautiful. That I can’t deny. But I have to be careful. Writing about the human, as such, is a way of writing about the absolute. And the absolute is as messy and fraught a topic to write about as anything.

There is reference to the human from inside the story. It is soon after Deary’s death. Toby Maytree is out on the beach, and Lou is watching him, unseen. And there comes a question:

This winter before Maytree came with Deary, Lou had been orbiting one galaxy of ideas as close as she dared. Could a person hold all people past and present in awareness? She further wondered if doing so was, by some errant chance, the point — toward what end she had no clue. The bravest foray would be to try it, to hold all human consciousness, past or present, etc., in awareness…. (190)

Maybe it’s beautiful. Maybe it’s a path to overcoming our self-centeredness. But — what is this fanatical obsession with the human? “All human consciousness”: and what of the rest of consciousness? what of the geese? — “All human consciousness”: but there are ways of knowing, ways of human knowing, that Lou Maytree does not know.

You think God lives within the microcosm and the macrocosm, but God does not. Quantum physics and cosmology do not explain all. God is bigger than that. God is bigger than that. There are still geese. There is still seeing. And there are still these structures of society.

I can’t hold God. I can’t eat the world as an apple. I can’t hold all human consciousness, past or present. I’m finite. The radical part of learning to see is that you recognize the bounds to your vision. The world is bigger than this. However large you think it is, it’s larger.

Here’s what I know. A tiny, mica-like bug comes coursing down the creek, and I greet it as a friend.