An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [60]
Often I imagined the solitary Mr. Downey, that invisible man from my grandparents’ rarefied street of executives and lawyers. Every few years he had unearthed from the cellar his loose khaki pants and his tight hiking boots. He clambered into a pickup truck concealed in his ivy-grown garage, and took off for Oklahoma, where he scouted the lonesome hills with a hammer. He filled his stout sack with moss agate, chalcopyrite, and petrified roses. For reasons unimaginable, he drove back to hushed old Pittsburgh, pulled into his secret driveway, changed his clothes, and sat for years on end at his library desk to study his rocks. When he felt something inside him pulling him down, he called to him the black-haired paper boy, who was collecting quarters on his black bike.
Maybe he hadn’t died at all. Maybe he’d simply escaped underground. He cracked open Pittsburgh like a geode. Who knew what lay inside the streaked hillsides under the highporched workers’ houses, under the streetcar tracks, under the flat or sloping greens of the country-club golf courses, under the dancing-school building, the trout-stocked streams in the highlands or the dried-out stream under the bridge in Frick Park, under the sled-riding hills, the Ellis School, the stained opened cuts on the boulevard roadsides into town—who knew? He had screwed in wedges here and there, tapped them each once or twice, and laid bare the invisible city: crystal-crusted cavities lined with fire opals and red plume agates, where cobalt bloomed and onyx and jacinth grew sharp. He visited the underground corridors where spinel crystals twinned underfoot, and blue cubes of galena cut his hands, and carnelian nodules hung wet overhead among pale octahedrons of fluorite, among frost agates and moonstones, red jasper, blue lazulite, stubs of garnet, black chert. Of course he hadn’t come back. Who would?
AFTER I READ The Field Book of Ponds and Streams several times, I longed for a microscope. Everybody needed a microscope. Detectives used microscopes, both for the FBI and at Scotland Yard. Although usually I had to save my tiny allowance for things I wanted, that year for Christmas my parents gave me a microscope kit.
In a dark basement corner, on a white enamel table, I set up the microscope kit. I supplied a chair, a lamp, a batch of jars, a candle, and a pile of library books. The microscope kit supplied a blunt black three-speed microscope, a booklet, a scalpel, a dropper, an ingenious device for cutting thin segments of fragile tissue, a pile of clean slides and cover slips, and a dandy array of corked test tubes.
One of the test tubes contained “hay infusion.” Hay infusion was a wee brown chip of grass blade. You added water to it, and after a week it became a jungle in a drop, full of one-celled animals. This did not work for me. All I saw in the microscope after a week was a wet chip of dried grass, much enlarged.
Another test tube contained “diatomaceous earth.” This was, I believed, an actual pinch of the white cliffs of Dover. On my palm it was an airy, friable chalk. The booklet said it was composed of the silicaceous bodies of diatoms—one-celled creatures that lived in, as it were, small glass jewelry boxes with fitted lids. Diatoms, I read, come in a variety of transparent geometrical shapes. Broken and dead and dug out of geological deposits, they made chalk, and a fine abrasive used in silver polish and toothpaste. What I saw in the microscope must have been the fine abrasive—grit enlarged. It was years before I saw a recognizable, whole diatom. The kit’s diatomaceous earth was a bust.
All that winter I played with the microscope. I prepared slides from things at hand, as the books suggested. I looked at the transparent membrane inside an onion’s skin and saw the cells. I looked at a section of cork and saw the cells, and at scrapings from the inside of my cheek, ditto. I looked at my blood and saw not much; I looked at my urine and