An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [66]
But now I knew that even rock was interesting—at least in theory. Mr. Pough and Herr Mohs could stand here mightily in the rain, singing songs and swinging picks into the rock cuts by the side of the road. Even I could tap some shale just right, rain or shine, and open the rock to bones of fossil fish. There might be trilobites on the hilltops, star sapphires. Right along these wretched rainy roads, Mohs and Pough could have, as the saying went, a field day.
If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals—then what wasn’t?
Everything in the world, every baby, city, tetanus shot, tennis ball, and pebble, was an outcrop of some vast and hitherto concealed vein of knowledge, apparently, that had compelled people’s emotions and engaged their minds in the minutest detail without anyone’s having done with it. There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth—fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness. There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infielders, detectives, poets, rock collectors, and, I inferred, specialists in things I had not looked into—violin makers, fishermen, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us.
Every least thing I picked up was proving to be the hanging end of a very long rope.
For the sentimental Mrs. McVicker I had written on assignment a paper on William Gorgas—the doctor in charge of workers’ health during the digging of the Panama Canal. Liking that, I wrote another, on Walter Reed. The struggle against yellow fever fired me, and I retained an interest in medicine, especially epidemiology. So now, a few years later, on the couch on the sunporch, I was reading Paul de Kruif’s overwrought Microbe Hunters.
Old Anton Leeuwenhoek looked through his lenses at a drop of rainwater and shouted to his daughter, “Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rainwater!…They swim! They play around!” His microscope “showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enormousness.” My microscope was similar. Since I had found the amoeba, I regularly found little animals. I found them in rainwater. I let a bowl of rainwater sit by the basement furnace for a week. When I examined a drop at low power, sure enough, little animals swam, and played around, with fantastic clear enormousness.
Not only was the roadside rock interesting; even the rainwater that streamed down its cut face was interesting. Mineral crystals made the rock; lively animals made the rain. Now when I traveled the grim highways and saw the dull rock receive the dull rain, and realized there would be nothing else to look at until we got where we were going, and Mother and I were all talked out—now when I felt the familiar restless hatred begin to rise at the stupidity and ugliness of this sight, I bade myself look directly at some streaky rock cut and said to myself, thundered to myself, “Think!”
Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.
At school I saw a searing sight. It turned me to books; it turned me to jelly; it turned me much later, I suppose, into an early version of a runaway, a scapegrace. It was only a freshly hatched Polyphemus moth crippled because its mason jar was too small.
The mason jar sat on the teacher’s desk; the big moth emerged inside it. The moth had clawed a hole in its hot cocoon and crawled out, as if agonizingly, over the course of an hour, one leg at a time; we children watched around the desk, transfixed. After it emerged, the wet, mashed thing turned around walking on the green jar’s bottom, then painstakingly