An American Childhood. Annie Dillard
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from the Masabi ore range near Lake Superior. Ships had been carrying iron ore bound for Pittsburgh across Lake Erie since the time of Carnegie and Frick. Sometimes a dusting of ore washed up or blew up on the sand beach. It lay in scalloped windrows, as did the powdery purple garnet grains after storms.
Canada, we knew, lay across the Lake. Many times I planned to run away to Canada; I would lie on the canvas raft and paddle with my hands. Instead I took up bicycle exploring. I rode a bicycle all morning for months, for years. I saw apple orchards, nurseries, and cornfields.
The land I toured mornings on a bike was flat and fertile. The Ohio settlers had a crazy way of clearing this land of forest. Father told me about it one night after dinner (our parents visited the Lake every summer). The pioneers, he said—the Scotch-Irish, German, and English pioneers—came in and sawed halfway through the trunk of every tree they wanted to fell, every tree in—was I to believe this?—several acres. Then when a wind came up they felled some big trees at the forest’s upwind edge, and those trees took the whole forest down, just knocked those half-cut trees before them like dominoes. I laughed—what a good idea. Father laughed. When you saw through a tree trunk, he said, the first half is a lot easier than the second half. They never had to saw through the second halves.
I rode past cantaloupe stands and truck farms planted in tomatoes. I rode past sandy woods and frame houses with green shutters and screened porches full of kids. I played baseball with some of the kids. I got a book on birds, took up bird-watching, and saw a Baltimore oriole in an apple orchard. I straddled my bike in amazement, bare feet on the cool morning road, and watched the brilliant thing bounce singing from treetop to treetop in the sun.
I learned to whistle; I whistled “The Wayward Wind.” I sang “The Wayward Wind,” too, at the top of my lungs for an hour one evening, bored on the porch, hurling myself from chair to chair singing, and wondering when these indulgent grandparents would stop me. At length my grandfather looked up from his paper and said, “That’s a sad song you’re singing. Do you know that?” And I was amazed he knew that. Did he yearn to wander, my banker grandfather, like the man in “The Wayward Wind”?
Afternoons we swam at our own beach. When Grandfather joined us I stared at the skin on his legs. It consisted of many scaly layers of fragile translucency, which together appeared bluish. On it, white starbursts appeared at random, and red streaks were visible somewhere inside. The stars and stripes forever. The skin on Oma’s legs was similarly translucent; the freckles seemed to float flat just below the first few layers.
I found a beachful of neighborhood kids to swim with; I came home only to eat. Evenings Amy and I played cards with Oma and Mary on the porch, or, when we were younger, we colored in coloring books with Oma. Oma was a tidy hand with a crayon. She fought with us over the crayons as an equal. The big woodland silk moths banged at the glass walls beside our bare shoulders under the lamp.
We left the Lake by rising at three, eating the last of the sweet cantaloupe by lamplight, and driving through horse-and-buggy Mennonite country back to Pittsburgh. We retraced one of the routes the old Indian traders had used in the 1750s, back from the Lake Erie country to the Forks of the Ohio, where they could load up on trinkets and, pretty soon, buy a drink. In Pittsburgh, Oma would go back to work. Although she claimed never to have worked, in fact she and a partner directed the Presbyterian Hospital gift shop as volunteers full time for twenty years. And in Pittsburgh this year, Amy and I would start new schools.
Now in the embarrassing Cadillac we pulled up in front of our house. From the capacious row of jump seats Amy and I were delivered—suntanned, cheerful, covered with poison ivy, and in possession of suitcases full of new green and purple dresses—to our mother.
The rivalry between our mother and Oma was intense; it was a long, civilized antagonism. Our mother had won the moral battle—we children were shamed, for instance, by Oma’s bursts of bigotry—but Mother fought on for autonomy, seeking to prevent our being annexed to Oma’s big tribe of Louisville Germans. When I was a baby, Oma had several times hauled me downriver to Louisville for Christmas as a prize; Mother put a stop to it.
If Oma had a great deal of shockingly loose money, we had, we fancied, good taste. Oma had a green-and-blue blown-glass sculpture of two intertwined swans, full of bubbles; we had a black iron Calder-style mobile. Oma had a servant and a companion. We had help. Our “help” shared our drinking glasses. At our parents’ parties, friends ate lasagna and danced; at our grandparents’ parties, guests ate sauerbraten and went to the theater.
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