Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online

in the yellow air, and felt the air shiver and saw a dart of wind move like a lizard across the dust and vanish again. My father rushed us to the shallow section holes at the corner, and with ropes he lashed us to the stake and made us cower down. The holes were no more than a foot deep; they could in no sense be called shelter. Over their edge our eyes, level with the plain, looked southward and saw nothing between us and the ominous bent funnel except gopher mounds and the still unshaken grass. Across the coulee a gopher sat up, erect as the picket pin from which he took his nickname.
    Then the grass stirred; it was as if gooseflesh prickled suddenly on the prairie’s skin. The gopher disappeared as if some friend below had reached up and yanked him down into his burrow. Even while we were realizing it, the yellow air darkened, and then all the brown and yellow went out of it and it was blue-black. The wind began to pluck at the shirts on our backs, the hair on our heads was wrenched, the air was full of dust. From the third section hole my father, glaring over the shallow rim, yelled to us to keep down, and with a fierce rush rain trampled our backs, and the curly buffalo grass at the level of my squinted eyes was strained out straight and whistling. I popped my head into my arms and fitted my body tothe earth. To give the wind more than my flat back, I felt, would be sure destruction, for that was a wind, and that was a country, that hated a foreign and vertical thing.
    The cyclone missed us; we got only its lashing edge. We came up cautiously from our muddy burrows and saw the tent collapsed and the sky clearing, and smelled the air, washed and rinsed of all its sultry oppressiveness. I for one felt a little better about being who I was, but for a good many weeks I watched the sky with suspicion; exposed as we were, it could jump on us like a leopard from a tree. And I know I was disappointed in the shack that my father swiftly put together. A soddy that poked its low brow no higher than the tailings of a gopher’s burrow would have suited me better. The bond with the earth that all the footed and winged creatures felt in that country was quite as valid for me.
    And that was why I so loved the trails and paths we made. They were ceremonial, an insistence not only that we had a right to be in sight on the prairie but that we owned and controlled a piece of it. In a country practically without landmarks, as that part of Saskatchewan was, it might have been assumed that any road would comfort the soul. But I don’t recall feeling anything special about the graded road that led us more than half of the way from town to homestead, or for the wiggling tracks that turned off to the homesteads of others. It was our own trail, lightly worn, its ruts a slightly fresher green where old cured grass had been rubbed away, that lifted my heart. It took off across the prairie like an extension of myself. Our own wheels had made it: broad, iron-shod wagon wheels first, then narrow democrat wheels that cut through the mat of grass and scored the earth until it blew and washed and started a rut, then finally the wheels of the Ford.
    By the time we turned off it, the road we followed from town had itself dwindled to a pair of ruts, but it never quite disappeared; it simply divided and subdivided. I do not know why the last miles, across buffalo grass and burnouts, past the shacks we called Pete and Emil, across Coteau Creek, and on westward until the ruts passed through the gate in our pasture fence and stopped before our house, should always have excited me so, unless it was that the trail was a thing we had exclusively created and that it led to a place we had exclusively built. Here is the pioneer root-cause of theAmerican cult of Progress, the satisfaction that Homo fabricans feels in altering to his own purposes the virgin earth. Those tracks demonstrated our existence as triumphantly as an Indian is demonstrated by his