An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [0]
ANNIE DILLARD
for my parents
PAM LAMBERT DOAK
and
FRANK DOAK
A grant from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
aided this work.
I have loved, O Lord, the beauty
of thy house and the place
where dwelleth thy glory.
PSALM 26
Contents
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Part One
THE STORY STARTS BACK IN
THE INTERIOR LIFE
OUR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS
THERE WAS A BIG SNOW
JO ANN SHEEHY
THESE ARE THE FEW
NEXT TO ONE OF OUR SIDE YARDS
I WALKED
SOME BOYS TAUGHT ME
OUR PARENTS WOULD SOONER HAVE
OUR FATHER’S PARENTS LIVED IN PITTSBURGH
WE HAD MOVED WHEN I WAS EIGHT
Part Two
WE LIVED IN A CLEAN CITY
WHILE FATHER WAS MOTORING
THE INTERIOR LIFE EXPANDS AND FILLS
AMY WAS A LOOKER
A TORNADO HIT OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
AT SCHOOL
THE ATTIC BEDROOM
BUT HE SAID UNTO JESUS
I GOT MY ROCK COLLECTION
AFTER I READ The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE
YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE NO SENSE OF WONDER
I INTENDED TO LIVE
WE WERE MOVING THAT SPRING
SINCE WE HAD MOVED
THE BOYS WERE CHANGING
THAT MORNING IN CHURCH
YEARS BEFORE THIS
Part Three
PITTSBURGH WASN’T REALLY ANDREW CARNEGIE’S TOWN.
AS A CHILD I READ HOPING TO LEARN
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I FELT IT COMING
I QUIT THE CHURCH
NOW IT WAS MAY
DURING CLASSES ALL MORNING
Epilogue
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Annie Dillard
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE HAS GONE from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding. At sunset a red light like housefires shines from the narrow hillside windows; the houses’ bricks burn like glowing coals.
The three wide rivers divide and cool the mountains. Calm old bridges span the banks and link the hills. The Allegheny River flows in brawling from the north, from near the shore of Lake Erie, and from Lake Chautauqua in New York and eastward. The Monongahela River flows in shallow and slow from the south, from West Virginia. The Allegheny and the Monongahela meet and form the westward-wending Ohio.
Where the two rivers join lies an acute point of flat land from which rises the city. The tall buildings rise lighted to their tips. Their lights illumine other buildings’ clean sides, and illumine the narrow city canyons below, where people move, and shine reflected red and white at night from the black waters.
When the shining city, too, fades, I will see only those forested mountains and hills, and the way the rivers lie flat and moving among them, and the way the low land lies wooded among them, and the blunt mountains rise in darkness from the rivers’ banks, steep from the rugged south and rolling from the north, and from farther, from the inclined eastward plateau where the high ridges begin to run so long north and south unbroken that to get around them you practically have to navigate Cape Horn.
In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains’ lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.
The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along