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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 175
on any grassy shores, but obviously it must occur. Bingo, then,
the grasshopper just happens to eat the encysted worm.
The cyst bursts. The worm emerges in all its hideous length,
up to thirty-six inches, inside the body of the grasshopper, on
which it feeds. I presume that the worm must eat enough of its
host to stay alive, but not so much that the grasshopper will keel
over dead far from water. Entomologists have found tiger beetles
dead and dying on the water whose insides were almost perfectly
empty except for the white coiled bodies of horsehair worms. At
any rate, now the worm is almost an adult, ready to reproduce.
But first it s got to get out of this grasshopper.
Biologists don t know what happens next. If at the critical stage
the grasshopper is hopping in a sunny meadow away from a
duck pond or ditch, which is entirely likely, then the story is over.
But say it happens to be feeding near the duck pond. The worm
perhaps bores its way out of the grasshopper s body, or perhaps
is excreted. At any rate, there it is on the grass, drying out. Now
the biologists have to go so far as to invoke a heavy rain, falling
from heaven at this fortuitous moment, in order to get the
horsehair worm back into the water where it can mate and lay
more seemingly doomed eggs. You d be thin, too.
Other creatures have it just about as easy. A blood fluke starts
out as an egg in human feces. If it happens to fall into fresh water
it will live only if it happens to encounter a certain species of
snail. It changes in the snail, swims out, and now needs to find a
human being in the water in order to bore through his skin. It
travels around in the man s blood, settles down in the blood
vessels of his intestine, and turns into a sexually mature blood
fluke, either male or female. Now it has to find another fluke, of
the opposite sex, who also just happens to have traveled the same
circuitous
176 / Annie Dillard
route and landed in the same unfortunate man s intestinal blood
vessels. Other flukes lead similarly improbable lives, some passing
through as many as four hosts.
But it is for gooseneck barnacles that I reserve the largest
measure of awe. Recently I saw photographs taken by members
of the Ra expedition. One showed a glob of tar as big as a softball,
jetsam from a larger craft, which Heyerdahl and his crew spotted
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The tar had been in the sea
for a long time; it was overgrown with gooseneck barnacles. The
gooseneck barnacles were entirely incidental, but for me they
were the most interesting thing about the whole expedition. How
many gooseneck barnacle larvae must be dying out there in the
middle of vast oceans for every one that finds a glob of tar to
fasten to? You ve seen gooseneck barnacles washed up on the
beach; they grow on old ship s timber, driftwood, strips of rub-
ber anything that s been afloat in the sea long enough. They do
not resemble rock barnacles in the least, although the two are
closely related. They have pinkish shells extending in a flattened
oval from a flexible bit of gooseneck tissue that secures them
to the substratum.
I have always had a fancy for these creatures, but I d always
assumed that they lived near shores, where chance floating
holdfasts are more likely to occur. What are they doing what
are the larvae doing out there in the middle of the ocean? They
drift and perish, or, by some freak accident in a world where
anything can happen, they latch and flourish. If I dangled my
hand from the deck of the Ra into the sea, could a gooseneck
barnacle fasten there? If I gathered a cup of ocean water, would
I be holding a score of dying and dead barnacle larvae? Should
I throw them a chip? What kind of a world is this, anyway? Why
not make fewer barnacle larvae and give them a decent chance?
Are we dealing in life, or in death?
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 177
I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just
think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our
planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknow-
ledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar
stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on
jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep
with a mouthful of blood.
Death: W. C. Fields called death the Fellow in the Bright
Nightgown. He shuffles around the house in all the corners I ve
forgotten, all the halls I dare not call to mind or visit for fear I ll
glimpse the hem of his shabby, dazzling gown disappearing
around a turn. This is the monster evolution loves. How could it
be?
The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes. If an aphid
lays a million eggs, several might survive. Now, my right hand,
in all its human cunning, could not make one aphid in a thousand
years. But these aphid eggs which run less than a dime a dozen,
which run absolutely free can make aphids as effortlessly as
the sea makes waves. Wonderful things, wasted. It s a wretched
system. Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British physicist and astro-
nomer who died in 1944, suggested that all of Nature could
conceivably run on the same deranged scheme. If indeed she
has no greater aim than to provide a home for her greatest exper-
iment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million
stars whereof one might haply achieve her purpose. I doubt very
much that this is the aim, but it seems clear on all fronts that this
is the method.
Say you are the manager of the Southern Railroad. You figure
that you need three engines for a stretch of track between
Lynchburg and Danville. It s a mighty steep grade. So at fantastic
effort and expense you have your shops make nine thou-
178 / Annie Dillard
sand engines. Each engine must be fashioned just so, every rivet
and bolt secure, every wire twisted and wrapped, every needle
on every indicator sensitive and accurate.
You send all nine thousand of them out on the runs. Although
there are engineers at the throttles, no one is manning the
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