The First Pilgrims at Tinker Creek

Chapters 1-7

Call me crazy, but I've spent an awful lot of time around creeks. I grew up on the Yellowstone River, with catfish holes and gumbo slides filling my siblings' and my summer with scraped knees, lost fishing rods, and sunburns. Behind our house, running from the prairie badlands to the river, was Harris Creek. It's murky waters, from the spillway of irrigation water from our farming community made for a redneck playground -- one where we could run under the old railroad bridge and hide our tackle boxes and snacks we had snuck out of the house. We made a fort of it -- running out of the yard, through the corn field and down the 1/2 mile stint to the railroad bridge, bare feet padding on the silt.

As a college student, I spend my summers doing riparian seasonal work for BLM, hiking water systems all over Eastern Montana. We walk over 250 miles of stream every summer, but that doesn't include the cross-country miles to get to the stream. I started learning county names with familiarity. Grass names, sedge families, rushes, snake types, thunderstorm indicators, and gas station jackpots. After three years, there became a point where people at BLM could list an allotment name and I could rattle off the systems. Riparian -- Non-Riparian. Proper Functioning Condition, Functioning At Risk, Non-Functioning. I could scan streams from the highway and make a plant list. I could pick up dirt and know whether it contained modeling or gleying. I learned the names of the streams, the types of birds, the tree names, the ranch names, the family politics.

I became so utterly familiar with the landscape of Eastern Montana that once I was out of the prairie, I was a fish out of water. The mountains became strange, with their dense trees, strange grasses, and crystal clear creek water. I missed the familiarity of cactus, sagebrush, and cow shit.

Reading Annie Dillard's first part of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reminded me of my own sense of alienation from the landscape. At first, I felt a tourist to the land -- someone that would occupy it for only a short time before disappearing again. But, now, like Dillard begins to in the book, I feel like the sway of the grass is a movement of my arm -- the crack of thunder a sneeze from my chest.

While at times her lack of dialogue seemed monotonous, I think her writing functions well to discuss the very human presence we feel in nature.