El Fleming, Tinker Creek

After reading the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I related to an analytically similar but educationally differing way of looking at the environment. Dillard approaches her environment with the same biological curiosity that I find so deeply rooted in myself, however, with only a sporting interest and a higher capacity to feel the horrors of what happens in nature. I too, feel that many natural things are sad despite their being natural. Natural is not always good. Something dying of old age has never bothered me, be it plant animal or human, but murder in any sense is disturbing. When we were children my cousin DJ requested I collect my favorite spiders. I happily agreed having a creepy love for arachnids. He put each one in a jar. When I had collected ten or so he gathered them up and poured them all into a single aquarium, closed the lid and held me back. I screamed and sobbed while the spiders killed each other. I loved DJ no less, he was just a sporting relative, twelve years later he overdosed on Oxycotton. I did not scream or sob. I loved him, more than a spider I had barely met, but he was not wronged by anyone but himself. Naturally spiders will kill each other, but only because it is necessary, not because it is right. Her book talks a lot about pilgrimages and her wilderness interactions during them.