At one point, while thinking through the order of her chapters, she jotted down in her notes, “Remember HDT’s alternation of chapters with solitude + society, light and dark, indoors and outdoors, etc. In many ways, Pilgrim reads like an updated version of Walden, and that’s exactly the kind of book Dillard was trying to write. The book raises questions about the horrors and beauties of nature, and the power of the present moment in a world that’s constantly being created. She comes across as audacious, inquisitive, and hilarious, chasing wood ducks and sleeping alone without a tent under a moonless sky. In its chapters, she spends a lot of time sitting on a sycamore log over the creek, watching a praying mantis lay eggs or seeing a giant water bug sucking up a frog’s body (leaving behind its crumpled skin).
She won the 1975 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book describing her explorations in the Virginia valley where she lived. One of the first women to defy this stereotype and write her way into the male-dominated canon was Annie Dillard. “Here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.” “The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender,” notes environmental history professor William Cronon in a 1995 New York Times Magazine article. She’s one of relatively few female writers in an American tradition that dates back to Henry David Thoreau. In her memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed describes what it was like to be a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, where a fellow traveler dubbed her “the only girl in the woods.” Strayed wasn’t just a rarity on the rugged PCT.
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