vaneramos | Caught in the undertow with Annie Dillard

I grew up on the shore of Lake Erie, shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes. Saturated with Southern Ontario heat and humidity, we would play on the beach and in the water all summer. I was a cautious child, picking up unspoken cues to my mother's anxieties, so I didn't take easily to swimming. But I loved the nearness of water: the play of light on its surface, its embracing sensuality.

I am a Pisces, with Pisces rising. Erie seized on my water sign vulnerability and dragged deeply with its allure. I am never fully at peace except around water. I have even become a sufficient swimmer

Sometimes the water becomes treacherous. Certain winds create a deadly undertow that can drag a full-grown man down and away from the beach.

All my life I have looked to water for inspiration. First Lake Erie, then the serenity of Lake Fletcher, and in these last few years the gentle, leading currents of the Eramosa River. I walk there every day and let it tell me tales.

Now I am caught in an undertow. The stories are rolling over my head, sucking me down.

I know the feeling of writing a book. I've drowned myself in it before. It is a dreadful place to go. Somehow the currents always cast me back gasping on the shore. I never managed to reach the mystery at the heart of the lake that would finally make me a creature of the water. For years I have dabbled like a child playing in the sand. I longed to swim but was afraid to give up my security.

The past few days I have taken the plunge with a new level of determination. The deeper I go, the more I have to swallow big gulps of fear. The book has started making unexpected demands of me: more reading and research. I have to pore over old journal entries. Submerged memories rise like mermaids with ethereal songs, sea monsters with rapier teeth. The adventure begins to consume me. I am lost.

One of the things I am required to do is reread my favourite book of all books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It kept me alive and believing in something when life cast me adrift seven years ago.

I don't agree with Dillard's theology anymore. But the book is still a masterpiece of contemporary mysticism and nature writing. Her style has threaded its way into my mind and informed my own writing. Rereading the first chapter this afternoon, I am re-enchanted by her beautiful imagery, the labourious and effortless detail of her recorded observations, and the poetic prose with which she weaves themes and arguments. Here are several passages from the first chapter:

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thrity-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfulred his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floaed onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.

I propose to keep here what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind," telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead....I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.

But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.

I was afraid to wade in because I knew the process would be full of invisible snags and obstacles. But the process is where I belong. Holding back I would remain a dabbling child, unable to swim.