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Where Water Meets Stone
| Article
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20601 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
3,702 Words |
| Author
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Annick Smith
Annick Smith is a writer and filmmaker who lives in the
Blackfoot Valley of western Montana. She is co-editor with
William Kittredge of The Last Best Place, A Montana Anthology.
Her essays have appeared in the anthology Montana Spaces and
in such journals as Poets and Writers and Montana. The
Magazine of Western History. Smith's film credits include
Heartland, a prizewinning feature film about a pioneer family
on the western plains. |
THE LIVING
Annie Dillard
New York: Harper Collins, 1992
416 pp., $22.50
One fact of human experience is sure: We will--every distinct, strange individual among the teeming beings on this planet--all die. Bound to this knowledge like a strand of DNA is a second sure thing: The world we live and die in will change. Accounting for death and change--the how, the why, the when--is the task of storytelling, a work of imagination old as human consciousness. Call it religion, history, fiction, poetry, memory, the process is the same. We demand an explanation. We want to feel significant. We yearn to understand great patterns and small, the design of the web we are inextricably caught up in. We make up stories.
Annie Dillard's first novel, The Living, studies the intricate chains of being in one small path of the Pacific Northwest in much the same way her Pulitzer Prize--winning meditation, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, studied the movements of insects and water life on a small creek in Virginia. Although Dillard has shifted her attention from the natural world to the historical human world, she remains an acute observer who aspires to penetrate the mysteries of living, which is why this large and complex novel takes place, most of the time, inside the minds of her large cast of characters.
The story is set in and around the settlement of Whatcom, on Bellingham Bay ninety miles north of Seattle, Washington. It details fifty years of boom-and-bust history in the town that we recognize as Bellingham. By 1855, when the novel begins, a few fishermen and pioneer loggers had built cabins there, at the edges of a rain-drenched mud flat. The narrow beach where the new comers rowed ashore was backed against a virgin wall of fir and cedar, hemmed in to the east by zigzag mountain peaks and the immense glacier topped volcanic cone, Mount Baker. Opening west without end roll the cloud brimmed expanses of the Pacific Ocean.
It seemed a wilderness in need of taming to those first white pioneers, but to the native peoples who had lived there foreons, the place was as civilized as any home, any ancient city. Lummi Indians welcomed the ill-prepared newcomers. These were Salish canoe people who fished the bay for Chinook salmon and spiced their diets with venison, clams, and berries. The Lummis had been converted to Catholicism and looked to the settlers for protection against aggressive, highly cultured peoples
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