Read Online Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard - Free Book Online Page A

may lack a thousand things that the rest of the world takes for granted, and because his experience is belated he may feel like an anachronism all his life. But he will know one thing about what it means to be an American, because he has known the raw continent, and not as tourist but as denizen. Some of the beauty, the innocence, and the callousness must stick to him, and some of the regret. The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savageryand freedom of the wild. Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world. And that is true even if the Eden is, as mine was, almost unmitigated discomfort and deprivation.
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    I saw the homestead just once after we left it to go back into town in the bitter fall of 1919. In the spring of 1920 we came past it on our way to Montana and camped in the shack for one night. We did not even take the boards off the windows or roll up the canvas blinds, but went about in the familiar, musty place, breathing the heavy air, in a kind of somnambulism. Our visit was not meant to change anything, or restore for an instant the hope we had given up. We merely passed through, picked up a few objects that we wanted, touched things with our hands in a reminding way, stood looking from the doorway down across the coulee. My brother and I walked up the pasture and saw where a badger had been busy, but did not get out our traps. Our pasture fence was banked high as the posts with tumbleweed blown in from the next farm, two miles west. Our own fields were growing, in addition to spears of volunteer wheat, a solid mat of Russian thistle that by fall would be bounding and rolling eastward ahead of the frolic winds, to scatter their seed broadcast and lodge eventually in someone else’s fences. The gophers that our wheat had allowed to increase prodigiously, and that our traps and poison had kept artificially in check, would thrive a year or two on whatever wheat volunteered in old fields, and then shrink gradually back to a population in balance with the hawks, owls, coyotes, badgers, and weasels that lived on them. And our house would begin—had already begun—its process of weathering and rusting and blowing away.
    When we drove away we closed the gate carefully on our empty pasture, shutting in shack and privy and chickencoop and the paths connecting them, hooking shut three strands of barbed wire around the place we had made there, enclosing our own special plot of failure from the encroaching emptiness. We congratulated ourselves that it was such a tight, firm fence. Wandering stock couldn’t get in and camp in the chicken house, or rub anything down scratchingoff winter hair. We told ourselves that some day we would be back. We memorized the landmarks of five years.
    But we knew, we all knew, that we wouldn’t be back any more than the families of our acquaintance who had already left; and I imagine we obscurely felt that more than our personal hope had died in the shack that stayed in sight all the time we were bumping down along the field to the border. With nothing in sight to stop anything, along a border so unwatched that it might have been unmapped, something really had stopped there; a crawl of human hope had stopped.
    As we turned at the Line, headed for the country road that began at Hydro, we could still see the round roof of the shack lifting above the prairie north of us. There was nothing else in sight up there but empty prairie. My mother drew in her breath and blew it out again with a little laugh, and said the words that showed us how such a departure should be taken. “Well,” she said, “better luck next time!”

KATE