Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-13

Chapters 14-15

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 14-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 14 Summary: “Northing”

In October, the birds explode in song and activity. They are restless before their long migration. The narrator feels the shift in the wind and notes how all the creatures seem to be swarming and busy. She feels compelled to walk north to visit the woods and observe how the change of season affects everything. The woods are restless too. She sees a squirrel chomping on a mushroom. When it sees her, it rushes to a nearby tree and waves its tail. Another squirrel nearby seems uninterested in her presence and chews on its fur. The woods are littered with wooly bear caterpillars and walking sticks.

While the narrator travels north, all other animals travel south. Caribou and ravens begin their great migration as the weather begins to cool. While walking in the woods beside Tinker Creek, the narrator sees pokeberry juice on sandstone where some animal was eating berries. A dog passes by, holding a deer leg between its teeth. As she approaches a field, 40 robins stop pecking at the ground and look at her.

The narrator wishes she too could set out on a single-minded journey and leave everything behind. She compares the feeling to an empty shell by the sea, long abandoned by its inhabitant. Instead, she sits and stays, waiting to observe. Monarch butterflies show up near her home as they travel south. For five days, she sees them everywhere and finds their wings on the ground. She observes one monarch trudging up a mountainside and wonders at how many more it must climb before it reaches its destination. One butterfly comes close to her face, allowing her to lift it on her finger. It smells like honeysuckle.

At night, she dreams about snow. A killing frost puts an end to the restlessness of the animals; those that travel have left. She feels that the wind has done its job and that the work of summer is over, and she is grateful to approach winter once more.

Chapter 15 Summary: “The Waters of Separation”

The day of winter solstice is unseasonably warm, and the narrator notices a bee. She remembers reading that ancient Romans thought that echoes could kill bees. She visits the quarry and searches for a bee. When she finds one, she tests the theory by shouting, “Hello,” but the bee seems unfazed by the echoed greetings. She then decides to shout, “Goodbye,” a more fitting word for leaving the world, but the bee continues its flight.

At the creek, the grass is brown and dead. She sees the spot where she witnessed the giant water bug sucking the life out of a frog. The memory of comprehension leaving the eyes of the frog sticks with her. The narrator calls out to God in anger, admonishing him for the cruelty of the world. She thinks about brutality, death, and starvation and wonders if beauty is a hoax. An Inuit folk tale describes a man who marries a young woman and moves in with her and her mother. The girl’s mother is jealous and wants the young man for herself, so she strangles her daughter and skins her. She then places the girl’s face over her own and sleeps with her son-in-law. The heat of his body melts the skin off her face, and he runs away. The narrator wonders if the beauty of the world is merely a mask, hiding something terrible.

She remembers that she has followed this train of thought before and always comes to the same conclusion: “[B]eauty is real” (271). In the Bible, priests performed the ritual for the waters of separation by sacrificing a young and beautiful red heifer. The ashes were mixed with water, creating a holy liquid used for healing and cleansing. The narrator sees the woods as the waters of separation, a form of purification. She sees a maple seed floating in the air and is struck by its beauty and form. She urges the reader to occupy space and observe.

Chapters 14-15 Analysis

Much of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek functions in dualities. Dillard explores Cruelty and Beauty in Nature, the darkness and light of God’s nature, and two opposing theologies represented in two halves of the book. Even the creek embodies opposing sides, referred to at times as “Tinker Creek” and others as “Shadow Creek” (277). The narrator’s attempts to kill a bee with echoes exemplifies another duality. She tries first to kill the bee by saying, “Hello.” When this does not work, she tries again, saying, “Goodbye.” These salutations represent the beginning and the ending of a life.

Such dualities carry over into the work’s structure. Chapter 14 works as a companion to Chapter 2: “Seeing.” Each represents a dueling theological principle—via positiva versus via negativa. In contrast to the second chapter’s meditations on the explosion of life and infancy during the season, “Northing” expresses gratitude for an end: the death of summer. This anticipates the narrator’s hypothesis in the final chapter that people who are dying do not plead for their lives. Instead, they cry, “Thank you,” grateful to God as a guest is grateful to their host for the opportunity to sit at the table.

In Chapter 14, however, the narrator is still struggling with the negative and dark side of Faith and the Nature of the Divine. The narrator recalls once more the incident with the giant water bug and the frog. She cannot forget the frog’s loss of consciousness; the very thing that earlier in the book is synonymous with the present, the act of being, is here a sign of death. The narrator’s anger fills her. She struggles to reconcile the lovely memories she has had in nature with the current of viciousness that underscores experience.

As the narrator questions whether beauty is real, she remembers that she knows it is: She has seen it before, many times. Perhaps more importantly, however, she recognizes that the world’s beauty is often (if not always) a function of cruelty. The narrator again draws on imagery of sacrifice to illustrate the idea—in this case, the waters of separation. In the Bible, the waters of separation are created by mixing the ashes of a sacrificed heifer with water. Life comes from death, and purity comes from impurity. Likewise, the narrator closes with the tomcat she references in the first chapter, providing bookends of content. The blood and roses left on her chest represent transfiguration, the appearance of Christ and the marks of blood on his hands where the nails had been placed. She describes waking and tasting salt on her lips. In the Bible, Christ is described as the salt of the earth. The experience with the cat functions as its own version of the waters of separation. The narrator is purified through the cat’s brutality. Just as both cruelty and beauty are necessary for the function of nature, both sides of God are necessary for healing and salvation.

The narrator does not pretend that this is an easy idea to accept, not least because it means accepting the limitations of one’s own perspective. However, she stresses that it is the only way to experience the divine and therefore urges the reader to seek out the “gaps”—the spaces where human knowledge fails and one must surrender to mystery. This idea aligns with the theme The Power of Observation. Whether stalking or seeing, the narrator suggests that looking can uncover truths about the divine, even if that truth speaks to God’s unfathomability.