The Living - Annie Dillard

Epic stories expose the arc of life, with all the tucked sorrows and stretched out joys. The Living is no exception.

We've been on a bit of an Annie Dillard kick lately. J's Uncle highly recommends her, "...a fine writer", he'll say, "she lived, for a time, in North Carolina", he'll finish. He's right, she is good. For those of you familiar only with the book most used in college writing classes, Teaching a Stone to Talk, you should know you haven't seen anywhere near her best book. I remember gasping at the opening pages of Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, over a description of an encounter between a bug and a frog. I won't spoil it for you, I will say it's typical of the immediacy she's able to conjure up and the bracing awareness she instills in her characters. J brought home Holy the Firm last year and has been recommending it to other folks who live, as we do, in Western Washington. J's Uncle sent this book to us, along with quilts J's Aunt made and sent that I'm looking to shift out here. It's the first book I've read through in a few years. I finished it tonight & am satisfied.

The story circles around the lives of several pioneers during the mid to late 1800's in Bellingham, Washington. The overwhelming forests and thickly clouded skies that the characters wrestle against still play a roll in daily life here in the Pacific Northwest and so are startlingly familiar. Anyone who has visited the Northwest has likely at least run into images of the huge Doug Firs that grew to improbable heights and were as big as small buildings at their base, the opening chapters catalog the impact of living among such monumental, living things.

In the earliest part of the book, Dillard describes their landing in Whatcom, like this, "It was the rough edge of the world, where the trees came smack down to the stones. The shore looked... as if the corner of the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened. The ocean just filled in the tear and settled down."

There is a type of loneliness that springs purely from being in a land that is dark for some portion of the year. The Living parallels that somber quality, in its beginnings by describing the solitary folks who are the first of what will be many settlers. There are so few folks around at the beginning of the tale that one of the main characters wins the position of midwife by being the only inhabitant with "string and a pair of scissors".

There is a bi-coastal feel to the West Coast now that I did not expect to see mirrored in a story that begins with the difficulties of cross country travel before railroads. Several of the characters make their way back and forth between the East Coast and Washington; to visit family, to become educated and then make their way back to live where they have found themselves. I remember thinking, when I first got here, that people out here needed to see how crowded the East is, to see beyond the dramatic natural landscape that made up their world. It took a while to see how many people are from the East Coast and how often those who were from here were sent back East during their college years.

I had never met indigenous Americans until I moved to San Francisco in the late 80's. In Seattle, I've felt the tearing away of this land from the folks who lived here when the U.S. was forming. It's not hard to meet good people who have come from reservations here, even today. Dillard describes the various relationships that pioneers had with the local tribes and her stories of armed-by-Russian Canadian tribes attacking armed-by-settler Washington tribes have parallel even the most modern warfare.

The West has been populated with a diverse mix of folks. In good times everyone was welcome, when times got tough, not so much. This truth is reflected in a plot thread that involves the changing opinions of white pioneers towards non-white emigrants.

Beyond the breadth of the land, the stories that Dillard chose to tell in this book are appealing to me - productive, against the odds folks and erratic intellectuals. There are enough pages to fit a good amount of time for character development and enough characters to make reading it enjoyable. The similarities to modern day Western Washington, where they exist, definitely added to the story & if you plan on coming out west, even if you've been here before, it'd be worth your time to check this book out.