When I learned that Annie Dillard died on September 15, I was driving through the Pittsburgh neighborhood she called home during her childhood. I parked on Kinsman Road in Point Breeze, an elegant one-way street setoff at an angle (like so many Pittsburgh roads), lined with peeling-barked sycamores dropping their yellowed leaves. I looked toward Homewood Cemetery, visible at the street’s end, and I thought of the opening to “An American Childhood,” Dillard’s mythopoetic memoir and mystical recollection of her childhood in Pittsburgh:
When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
I don’t believe there is any better way to say Pittsburgh than land as it lay this way and that.
In talking with friends and fellow writers in recent weeks about Dillard’s influence, I realized that many didn’t know she was from Pittsburgh. Unlike the more typical 20th-century Pittsburgh narratives, narratives of poor and working-class immigrants and unionizers toiling in the region’s steel mills, Dillard’s childhood was one of wealth, culture and leisure. Her father, Frank Doak, inherited his family’s American Standard, Inc. business and inspired his daughters by leaving the firm and attempting to sail to New Orleans via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. (He didn’t make it.) Dillard grew up attending the Ellis School for Girls (where high school tuition currently sits at about $39,000 per year), worshipping at Shadyside Presbyterian (where the city’s wealthiest class attended), and living on some of the most prestigious streets in the city (where the smoke from the mills never clouded the air).
I suspect the main reason, though, that many overlook Dillard’s Pittsburgh-ness is the simple fact that she “left Pittsburgh before I had a grain of sense.” Or, immediately following her high school graduation. She never returned to Pittsburgh permanently, so her general readers learned to imagine her elsewhere. By the time she wrote “An American Childhood”(1987), she’d already published the books that continue to solidify her place in American writing: “Pilgrim At Tinker Creek”(1974), “Holy the Firm”(1977)and “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (1982). For all the electrifying descriptions of land in Dillard’s prose, Pittsburgh became something of a utopia, a no place compared to the landscapes she inhabited after she left the city. Tinker Creek. Waldron Island. These are Dillard’s places.
Yet, I believe Dillard knew that every leaving is a kind of pilgrimage and a kind of exile. Every ocean of thought is fed by the river of dreams.
So, forgive me if I wonder how Dillard’s well could have been filled by any streams other than the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio.
Dillard first taught a stone to talk while “driving along one of Pittsburgh’s clogged narrow highways” gazing out a rain-streaked car window to see “banks of sandstone and shale in streaks; gritty rain stream[ing] down their cut faces and dissolve[ing] the black soot and coal dust and car exhaust.” At first looking upon the city’s industrial gloom with a hatred born of boredom, she later “bade myself look directly at some streaky rock cut and said to myself, thundered to myself, ‘Think!’”
Is it too bold of me to imagine that she could only be the pilgrim at Tinker Creek because she knew the pilgrimage route to the Homewood Library — part of Andrew Carnegie’s still-magnificent gift of the Carnegie Library system — and there found, read and re-read “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams” by Ann Haven Morgan and wondered about all the other library patrons who had checked out and read this book: “Who were these people? Had they, in Pittsburgh’s Homewood section, found ponds? Had they found streams?”
Dillard’s now-famous stint at Hollins College was much less the result of her choice and more because her headmistress at the Ellis School for Girls “sent all her problems there, to her alma mater.”
I believe Dillard knew that every leaving is a kind of pilgrimage and a kind of exile. Every ocean of thought is fed by the river of dreams.
Would she have been granted the vision of angels moving in a clockwise direction had she not seen “every morning [Catholic schoolchildren filing] into the subterranean maw of St. Bede’s … I gathered St. Bede’s was a cave where Catholic children had to go to fill their brown-and-tan workbooks in the dark, possibly kneeling. … Every afternoon, authorities ‘let out’ the surviving children to return to their lightless steep houses, where they knelt before writhing crucifixes, bandied racial epithets about, and ate stewed fish.”
Maybe I am taking it too far, making a case Dillard never cared to consider. I learned this from her, though, the leap from the real landscape into its imagined effects. By now, we all know that the cat with bloody footprints is actually someone else’s story.
And in telling you about Annie Dillard’s childhood in Pittsburgh, I’m telling you my story.
It’s about her and the effect is me.
I was a Catholic school child, standing in the parking lot playground of St. Sebastian’s school during recess, looking to the hills around me, imagining the density of forest as sheltering, their distance as mystery. I grew up in the Monongahela Valley and spent my childhood in towns depleted and forgotten, once hubs of zinc works and steel mills, now of silent main streets. When we drove into Pittsburgh for baseball games, for theater and for museums, we drove along the Monongahela River, and as I stared at our big waters, our rivers, I told myself, “Think!”
When I moved into the city proper for college, I lived in an apartment one block from Kinsman Road. I walked to St. Bede’s for 8 a.m. Mass on Sundays, and I can report that it does have a stone maw, though now the interior has been redesigned as a light-filled sanctuary.
I could go on listing for you all the places that Dillard and I share, but what would be the point? Dillard didn’t show me any place in Pittsburgh I didn’t already know. She added the layer of her voice to the striated rocks and told me that there was a way to show others that this place is a dreaming memory.
Pittsburgh can make a person feel so hemmed in, so provincial, so dialect-bound, so God-damned and then — just as suddenly, like light refracting on the water’s surface — so God-blessed, so broad and so deep, so epic in your particulars as to make you think, surely, this is God’s own garden planted east of Eden. We just changed the names of the rivers.
In other words, Pittsburgh is a tough place to be.
Like Dillard, I wanted to leave, and I did. For 10 years, I played the exile in the Midwest, crafting the story that I had been banished far from hills, valleys, steep-sided houses, Catholic churches on every corner and wending rivers and into a flat land, a water-hungry land, a place of a happier Protestantism and far fewer stone maws.
Unlike Dillard, I returned to Pittsburgh. I told friends and family that I wanted to go home, that I wanted to be in a place I knew and in a place that knew me. When I returned to Pittsburgh, the 10 years I’d been away seemed to collapse into one dense experience. Every tree-lined street, every acrid-smelling concrete block, every river flood, every flower in my parents’ garden, every classroom at my alma mater where I now teach showed me a ghost of myself.
Dillard didn’t show me any place in Pittsburgh I didn’t already know. She added the layer of her voice to the striated rocks and told me that there was a way to show others that this place is a dreaming memory.
Returning to Pittsburgh, I became a dense layering of ghosts.
But I grew up along the Monongahela River bend, among the hills, and my grandfathers were steel workers. We were not dancing fools. We didn’t look to the skies for answers but dug deeper into the earth for the fire below.
So I know what happens with time and enormous pressure:
Soon, I’ll be burning hot fuel.
Soon, I’ll be shining.
In the meantime, I teach a course called Secret Pittsburgh to undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh. Every week, we travel to a different site in the city and learn its stories. We’ve been on a riverboat and floated down the Monongahela. We’ve climbed the stairways from the flats on Carson Street to the Passionist Monastery at the top of the hill. We’ve roamed the Hill District and seen the remains of jazz clubs and August Wilson’s childhood home. We’ve visited the Roberto Clemente Museum and walked through the historic Homewood Cemetery.
And I always begin the course by asking students to close their eyes, imagine the deepest place within themselves, and then read to them the opening of Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood.”
What do I do while the students imagine? I let my mind flow in different directions. I let it move this way and that.
I enter a memory of a dream I had in which I run down stairs without end:
This must be the cold stairwell of the world, industrial and dark. Pursued, I clip the stairs’ edges, hurtling to the bottom that I somehow reach and push hard against a steel door. It opens,
and I know this place. I’m in tall grass, ragweed, along the Monongahela River where it bends from Monessen into Donora, where my grandparents live. My uncle is nearby, and he’s brought the dogs: Keynes (after John Maynard) and Copper. We throw dummies and let the dogs run along riverbank foot paths while we (and now my brother is here) pick the last of the wild black raspberries growing in thorned tangles. It is late July, birthday weather, the sun blatant, and the only smell is water, water green, water deep, water dark, water slow, water carrying mud, water carrying coal barges, water caught in our lungs between two states — a vapor and a liquid — a humidity high.
Suddenly, I am home. We give the small berry harvest to my mother who pulls from the kitchen cupboard small dishes too tiny for any reasonable use, created only for our joy. She places a few berries in each cup, covers them with milk, and sprinkles sugar over it all.
I sit on the porch with my family, but I can only see my brother. He and I grab the berries from the cups with our fingers, breaking their humped honeycomb flesh, staining the milk lavender, our fingertips purple. We lap the sugar-milk like kittens.
And we listen to the thunder bounce from hill to hill,
down into the valley we call home,
to all the land this way
and that,
and we are in every place the thunder dances.
We share the secret between us. We know
that darkness in the distance
is no great chasm.
It is only the river.