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

handprint in ochre on a cliff wall. Not so idiotically as the stranded Ford, this trail and the shack and chicken house and privy at its end said, “See? We are here.” Thus, in the truest sense, was “located” a homestead.
    More satisfying than the wagon trail, even, because more intimately and privately made, were the paths that our daily living wore in the prairie. I loved the horses for poking along the pasture fence looking for a way out, because that habit very soon wore a plain path all around inside the barbed wire. Whenever I had to go and catch them, I went out of my way to walk along it, partly because the path was easier on my bare feet but more because I wanted to contribute my feet to the wearing process. I scuffed and kicked at clods and persistent grass clumps, and twisted my weight on incipient weeds and flowers, willing that the trail around the inside of our pasture should be beaten dusty and plain, a worn border to our inheritance.
    It was the same with the path to the woodpile and the privy. In late June, when my mother and brother and I reached the homestead, that would be nearly overgrown, the faintest sort of radius line within the fireguard. But our feet quickly wore it anew, though there were only the four of us, and though other members of the family, less addicted to paths than I, often frustrated and irritated me by cutting across from the wrong corner of the house, or detouring past the fence-post pile to get a handful of cedar bark for kindling, and so neglected their plain duty to the highway. It was an unspeakable satisfaction to me when after a few weeks I could rise in the flat morning light that came across the prairie in one thrust, like a train rushing down a track, and see the beaten footpath, leading gray and dusty between grass and cactus and the little orange flowers of the false mallow that we called wild geranium, until it ended, its purpose served, at the hooked privy door.
    Wearing any such path in the earth’s rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities. He lacks the proper mana for it, he is out of touch with the earth of which he is made. Once, on Fifty-eighth Street in New York, I saw an apartment dweller walking his captive deer on a leash. They had not the plea-sure of leaving a single footprint, and the sound of the thin little hoofs on concrete seemed as melancholy to me as, at the moment, the sound of my own steps.
    So we had an opportunity that few any longer can have: we printed an earth that seemed creation-new with the marks of our identity. And then the earth wiped them out again. It is possible that our dam still holds a reservoir behind it, that our family effort has endowed the country with one more small slough for which nesting ducks and thirsty coyotes may bless us. It may be that some of the ground cherries my mother brought as seed from Iowa and planted in the fireguard have grown and fruited and been spread by wind and birds. If so, field mice opening the papery husks and dining on the little yellow tomatoes inside may bless us too. There is not much else that we can be blessed for. Because of us, quite a lot of the homestead’s thin soil lies miles downwind. Because of us, Russian thistle and other weeds that came in with the wheat have filled the old fields and choked out the grass and made much more difficult the job of bringing back the old natural range. But with those exceptions, we are erased, we are one with Fort Walsh. Though it established itself permanently in more favored parts of the region, the wheat frontier never got a foothold in “Palliser’s Triangle,” at whose base our homestead lay, and we ourselves helped corroborate Palliser’s 1858 prediction that agriculture would prove impracticable there. Our dream of a wheat bonanza, or failing that, of a home, is as lost as the night wind that used to blow across the prairie’s great emptiness and, finding a