ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Holy the Firm (1977)
Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)
Living by Fiction (1982)
Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984)
Writing Life (1989)
The Living (1992)
Mornings Like This (1995)
For the Time Being (1999)
The Maytrees (2007)
The Abundance (2016)
An
AMERICAN
CHILDHOOD
ANNIE DILLARD
Special thanks to: Ann Beattie, Marc Chenétier, Cody Rose Clevidence, Ophelia Dahl, Wendy Doniger, Tim Duggan, Paul Farmer, Amy Fields, Lewis Lapham, Will Lippincott, Allison Lorentzen, John Martini, Derek Parsons, Phyllis Rose, David Schorr, Timothy Seldes, Molly Simonds, Lee Smith, and Anne Warner.
Published by Canongate Books in 2016
Copyright © 1987 by Annie Dillard
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 1987 by Harper & Row, Publishers, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
Parts of this book have appeared, in different form, in the New York Times Magazine, American Heritage Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review.
This digital edition first published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78211 776 6
Designed by Suni Manchikanti
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
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 Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.
Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets—red, green, and yellow—nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees’ trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves—but no one heard any of this, no one at all.
In 1753, young George Washington surveyed for the English this point of land where rivers met. To see the forest-blurred lay of the land, he rode his horse to a ridgetop and climbed a tree. He judged it would make a good spot for a fort. And an English fort it became, and a depot for Indian traders to the Ohio country, and later a French fort and way station to New Orleans.
But it would be another ten years before any settlers lived there on that land where the rivers met, lived to draw in the flowery scent of June rhododendrons with every breath. It would be another ten years before, for the first time on earth, tall men and women lay exhausted in their cabins, sleeping in the sweetness, worn out from planting corn.