Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

by Annie Dillard

  No one is about. Although our island cabin is right on the beach, so we can see many miles of shoreline, in winter we see only a single human light. At dusk, someone in Canada lights a lamp; it burns near the shore of Saturna, a Canadian island across Haro Strait, seven nautical miles away. We look at this lone light all winter, wondering if the people there are as cheered by our light as we are by theirs. We plan to visit them in the summer and introduce ourselves, but we never do. In winter there is nobody, nothing. If you see a human figure, or a boat on the water, you grab binoculars.

  But in summer everything fills. The day itself widens and stretches almost around the clock; these are very high latitudes, higher than Labrador’s. You want to run all night. Summer people move into the houses that had stood empty, unseen, and unnoticed all winter. The gulls scream all day and smash cockles; by August they are bringing the kids. Volleyball games resume on the sand flat; someone fires up the sauna; in the long dusk, at eleven o’clock, half a dozen beach fires people the shore. The bay fills up with moored boats and the waters beyond fill with pleasure craft, hundreds of cruisers and sailboats and speedboats. The wind dies and stays dead, and these fierce waters, which in winter feel the strongest windstorms in the country, become suddenly like a resort lake, some tamed dammed reservoir, the plaything of any manjack with a motor and a hull. Surely this is mirage. The heat is on, and the light is on, and someone is pouring drinks. On the beach we dip freshly dug clams in hot butter; we eat raw oysters from their shells. We play catch or sail a dinghy or holler; we have sand in our hair, calluses on our feet, hot brown skin on our arms. This is the life of the senses, the life of pleasures. It is mirage on the half shell. It vanishes like any fun, and the empty winds resume.

  So much for the moral. The story is even simpler, a matter of gross physics and the senses. It is just that mirages abound here.

  When winter’s cloud cover vanishes, the naked planet lies exposed to marvels. The heated summer air, ground under cold northern air, becomes lenticular, shaped like a lentil or a lens. When the very air is a lens, how the mind ignites! We live among high heaps of mirages, among pickets and pilings and stacks of waving light. We live in a hall of mirrors rimmed by a horizon holey and warped.

  Even now as I write, a mirage is pulling Saturna island like taffy. The island’s far shores are starting to yawn and heave from the water. What had been a flat beach has become a high cliff. I wonder: are the people still there, the people whose lamp we could see in the winter? Have they been stretched too, and pulled out of shape? If we went to meet them now, would we find them teetering in their garden like giraffes, unable to reach the ground and tend to their peas?

  Few others see the mirages. I certainly never saw them until an article in Scientific American alerted me. Mirages, like anything unusual, are hard to see. The mind expects the usual. If a tanker appears to be plying ten yards above the surface of the water, the mind will pour in enough water to float the tanker properly, and deceive the eyes, and hush them with their Chicken-Little message for the brain. Brain never knows. “What mirages?” everyone says.

  There are two other unexpected things about mirages, both of which, incidentally, are true of rainbows as well. One is that they photograph very well; the Scientific American article included a print which showed people walking about in the middle of a sailing fleet. The other is that enlarging lenses—telescopes, telephoto lenses, binoculars—far from betraying the shabbiness of the illusions, instead confirm and clarify them. I always look at mirages through binoculars; the binoculars’ magnification adds both detail and substance to the vision. Great shimmering patches of color appear over the water, expanding and contracting in slats like venetian blinds; the binoculars enlarge the sight. The elongate cliffs of Saturna Island, rearing enormously from where no cliffs have ever been—these high palisades have a certain translucent, faked look to the naked eye, as if their matter, being so pulled, had stretched thin; but through binoculars they are as opaque as other cliffs, cliffy, solid, true headlands, and doubly mysterious.

  Yesterday I stood on the beach and watched two light shows at once. It was fair and calm and hot; I faced a string of islands to the west. To the south I saw, spanning a wide channel between islands, a long crescendo-shaped warp, into which innocent little sailboats would wander and be wholly transformed into things glorious. A twenty-foot sloop entered the narrow end of the mirage. Before my eyes the sloop began to expand. Its mast grew like a beanstalk; its sails rose up like waterspouts. Soon the reckless boat, running down the light air and down the warp’s widening crescendo, was flying a 150-foot spinnaker! There was a fleet of such boats in the sound. They were gigantic, top-heavy dream-sailers, mythic big ships sailing solar wind and stringing their dwarfed hulls after them like sea anchors. Now there, into the crescendo, went a white cabin cruiser, sport fishing for salmon; and here, at the other end, emerged a wedding cake, a wedding cake leaving a wake and steered by God knows what elongate gibbon of a vacationer at the wheel.

  While these boats to the south were blooming transfigured over calm water, to the north the water itself was apparently erupting and bending into hills and valleys. The water itself, I say, had grown absurd, sloping this way and that in long parallel ridges like those of a washboard. There were no waves; instead the smooth water itself lay seemingly jagged and rucked as Appalachians, as enormous stairways, pleated into long lines of sixty-foot ridges and valleys. In this mess of slopes a host of white cabin cruisers was struggling uphill and down. The boats crawled up and over the pitches like tanks over earthworks and trenches; or their bows aimed at heaven, their hulls churning directly up ridges so steep I thought they would all flip over backward like so many unicycles. It was flat calm. Only that one patch of water was berserk, as if it had wearied of the monotony of being a seascape year after year and was now seeking coarsely to emulate the ranged bumps of land.

  Then the show pulled out. In the south the giant sails and the wedding cake cruisers emerged from the dazzle suddenly ordinary in proportion and humble. Nevertheless, from their masts and over their cabins hung some remembered radiance, some light-shot tatters of their recent glory. They continued across the horizon as creatures who had been touched, like the straggling and shining caravans of the wilderness generation as it quit Sinai. In the north the little cruisers I had watched now steered from the canyons and found regular waters, which looked mighty dull. Other boats still hazarded into the ridges, but the heights were no longer so fearsome; gradually, over the space of an hour, the mountains sank back to the water, and the water closed over them in the way that water has always closed over everything, in literature and in fact: as if they had never been.

  Sojourner

  IF SURVIVAL IS AN ART, then mangroves are artists of the beautiful: not only that they exist at all—smooth-barked, glossy-leaved, thickets of lapped mystery—but that they can and do exist as floating islands, as trees upright and loose, alive and homeless on the water.

  I have seen mangroves, always on tropical ocean shores, in Florida and in the Galápagos. There is the red mangrove, the yellow, the button, and the black. They are all short, messy trees, waxy-leaved, laced all over with aerial roots, woody arching buttresses, and weird leathery berry pods. All this tangles from a black muck soil, a black muck matted like a mud-sopped rag, a muck without any other plants, shaded, cold to the touch, tracked at the water’s edge by herons and nosed by sharks.

  It is these shoreline trees which, by a fairly common accident, can become floating islands. A hurricane flood or a riptide can wrest a tree from the shore, or from the mouth of a tidal river, and hurl it into the ocean. It floats. It is a mangrove island, blown.

  There are floating islands on the planet; it amazes me. Credulous Pliny described some islands thought to be mangrove islands floating on a river. The people called these river islands the dancers, “because in any consort of musicians singing, they stir and move at the stroke of the feet, keeping time and measure.”


  Trees floating on rivers are less amazing than trees floating on the poisonous sea. A tree cannot live in salt. Mangrove trees exude salt from their leaves; you can see it, even on shoreline black mangroves, as a thin white crust. Lick a leaf and your tongue curls and coils; your mouth’s a heap of salt.

  Nor can a tree live without soil. A hurricane-born mangrove island may bring its own soil to the sea. But other mangrove trees make their own soil—and their own islands—from scratch. These are the ones which interest me. The seeds germinate in the fruit on the tree. The germinated embryo can drop anywhere—say, onto a dab of floating muck. The heavy root end sinks; a leafy plumule unfurls. The tiny seedling, afloat, is on its way. Soon aerial roots shooting out in all directions trap debris. The sapling’s networks twine, the interstices narrow, and water calms in the lee. Bacteria thrive on organic broth; amphipods swarm. These creatures grow and die at the trees’ wet feet. The soil thickens, accumulating rainwater, leaf rot, seashells, and guano; the island spreads.

  More seeds and more muck yield more trees on the new island. A society grows, interlocked in a tangle of dependencies. The island rocks less in the swells. Fish throng to the backwaters stilled in snarled roots. Soon, Asian mudskippers—little four-inch fish—clamber up the mangrove roots into the air and peer about from periscope eyes on stalks, like snails. Oysters clamp to submersed roots, as do starfish, dog whelk, and the creatures that live among tangled kelp. Shrimp seek shelter there, limpets a holdfast, pelagic birds a rest.

  And the mangrove island wanders on, afloat and adrift. It walks teetering and wanton before the wind. Its fate and direction are random. It may bob across an ocean and catch on another mainland’s shores. It may starve or dry while it is still a sapling. It may topple in a storm, or pitchpole. By the rarest of chances, it may stave into another mangrove island in a crash of clacking roots, and mesh. What it is most likely to do is drift anywhere in the alien ocean, feeding on death and growing, netting a makeshift soil as it goes, shrimp in its toes and terns in its hair.

  We could do worse.

  I alternate between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner” occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.”

  We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures—from whom and with whom we evolved—seems a mockery. Their ways are not our ways. We seem set among them as among lifelike props for a tragedy—or a broad lampoon—on a thrust rock stage.

  It doesn’t seem to be here that we belong, here where space is curved, the earth is round, we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge. It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead. It is not, frankly, the sort of home for people one would have thought of—although I lack the fancy to imagine another.

  The planet itself is a sojourner in airless space, a wet ball flung across nowhere. The few objects in the universe scatter. The coherence of matter dwindles and crumbles toward stillness. I have read, and repeated, that our solar system as a whole is careering through space toward a point east of Hercules. Now I wonder: what could that possibly mean, east of Hercules? Isn’t space curved? When we get “there,” how will our course change, and why? Will we slide down the universe’s inside arc like mud slung at a wall? Or what sort of welcoming shore is this east of Hercules? Surely we don’t anchor there, and disembark, and sweep into dinner with our host. Does someone cry, “Last stop, last stop”? At any rate, east of Hercules, like east of Eden, isn’t a place to call home. It is a course without direction; it is “out.” And we are cast.

  These are enervating thoughts, the thoughts of despair. They crowd back, unbidden, when human life as it unrolls goes ill, when we lose control of our lives or the illusion of control, and it seems that we are not moving toward any end but merely blown. Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end. Even nature is hostile and poisonous, as though it were impossible for our vulnerability to survive on these acrid stones.

  Whether these thoughts are true or not I find less interesting than the possibilities for beauty they may hold. We are down here in time, where beauty grows. Even if things are as bad as they could possibly be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and wing.

  The planet is less like an enclosed spaceship—spaceship earth—than it is like an exposed mangrove island beautiful and loose. We the people started small and have since accumulated a great and solacing muck of soil, of human culture. We are rooted in it; we are bearing it with us across nowhere. The word “nowhere” is our cue: the consort of musicians strikes up, and we in the chorus stir and move and start twirling our hats. A mangrove island turns drift to dance. It creates its own soil as it goes, rocking over the salt sea at random, rocking day and night and round the sun, rocking round the sun and out toward east of Hercules.

  Aces and Eights

  I

  I AM HERE against my good judgment. I understood long ago just what it would be like; I knew that the weekend would be, above all, over. At home at my desk I doodled on tablets and imagined myself and the child standing side by side on the riverbank behind the cottage in the woods, standing on the riverbank and watching the blossoms float down, or the dead leaves float down, or just the water—whatever it would be—and thinking, each of us: remember this, remember this now, this weekend in the country. And I knew that instead of seeing (let alone remembering) the blossoms, or the leaves, or whatever, the child and I would each see and remember some dim picture of our own selves as figures side by side on the riverbank, as figures in our own future memories, as focal points for some absurd, manufactured nostalgia.

  There was no use going. At best, we would miss the whole thing. If any part of the weekend should prove in the least pleasant, and worth trying to remember on that account, or on account of its never-to-be-repeated quality, it would be unbearable. Who would subject a child to such suffering? On the other hand, maybe it would rain.

  I decided, in short, not to go. The child is nine, and already morbidly nostalgic and given to wringing meaningful moments out of our least occasions. I am thirty-five; my tolerance for poignancy has diminished to the vanishing point. If I wish, and I do not, I can have never-to-be-repeated moments, however dreadful, anywhere and anytime, simply by calling that category to mind.

  But we are here: the child, and I, and the dog. It is a weekend in mid-July. We will leave here Sunday morning early.

  The cottage is in the Appalachians, in a long-settled river valley. The forest is in its ninth or twelfth growth: oak-maple-hickory, with hemlock and laurel in the mountain gorges. It is the same everywhere in the Appalachians, from Maine to Georgia. There is no place else in the fifty states where you could build a 2,050-mile linear trail through country that changes so little.

  The ridges are dry—blackjack oak, berry bushes, and pine—and steep. Near here there is a place on a steep mountain called Carson’s Castle. One summer many years ago a neighbor, Noah Very, took me and my cousins on an outing to this Carson’s Castle. It is nothing but a cave in the mountaintop with a stone ledge in front of it. The ledge overhangs the next valley so far that you have to look behind you, between your feet, to see the stream far below. In the eighteenth century, this stream became part of the state line.

  Mr. Very walked us children up there and told us that when the Indian
s chased Mr. Carson—some time ago—he ran up the mountain and hid in the cave. And when the Indians, who were naturally conducting their chase Indian file, attained the cliff edge, each paused to wonder where Mr. Carson might have gone. Mr. Carson took advantage of their momentary confusion by pushing them, one by one, from the ledge—from the ledge, from the mountain, and as it would happen, out of state. He pushed them until there were none. That, at any rate, is the legend. An old Indian legend, I believe.

  Literalist and begrudger as I was and am, I expected to see a rather fancy castle on the mountaintop that day, and was disappointed. But now I choose to remember this outing as a raging success, and am grateful to “Count” Noah Very, and intend to bake him a cake while we are here, although he has long since turned into an old, disagreeable coot.

  The ridges are dry, I say, and the bottomlands are wet. There are sycamores on the riverbanks, and tulip poplars, willows, and silver maples; there is jewelweed in the sun and rhododendron in the shade. The cottage is in a small clearing in the woods on a riverbank.

  The child has discovered the blackboard in the children’s room. She wheels it into the living room where I sit and writes on it, “I love Francis Burn.” She says that Francis Burn is a boy in her school, going into the sixth grade. When I ask her what it is about Francis Burn that she loves, she answers that he is cute.