An excerpt from An American Childhood

by Annie Dillard

  I walked.  My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number.  I walked and memorized the neighborhood.  I made a mental map and located myself upon it.  At night in bed I rehearsed the small world’s scheme and set challenges:  Find the store using backyards only.  I imagine a route from the school to my friend’s house.  I mastered chunks of town in one direction only; I ignored the other direction, toward the Catholic church.

On a bicycle I traveled over the known world’s edge and the ground held.  I was seven.  I had fallen in love with a red-haired fourth-grade boy named Walter Milligan.  He was rough, Catholic, from an iffy neighborhood. Two blocks beyond our school was a field—Miss Frick’s field, behind Henry Clay Frick’s mansion—where boys played football.  I parked my bike on the sidelines and watched Walter Milligan play.  As he ran up and down the length of the field, following the football, I ran up and down the sidelines, following him.  After the game I rode my bike home, delirious.  It was the closet we had been and the farthest I had traveled from home.

Across the street from Walter Milligan’s football field was Frick Park.  Frick Park was 380 acres of woods in residential Pittsburgh.  Only one trail crossed it; the gravelly walk gave way to dirt and led down a forested ravine to a damp streambed.  If you followed the streambed all day you would find yourself in a distant part of town reached ordinarily by a long streetcar ride.  Near Frick Park’s restful entrance, old men and women from other neighborhoods were lawn bowling on the bowling green.  The rest of the park was wild woods.

  My father forbade me to go to Frick Park.  He said bums lived there under bridges; they had been hanging around unnoticed since the Depression.  My father was away all day; my mother said I could go to Frick Park if I never mentioned it.

  I roamed Frick Park for many years.  Our family moved from house to house, but we never moved so far I couldn’t walk to Frick Park.  I watched the men and women lawn bowling—so careful the players, so dull the game.  After I got a bird book I found in the deep woods, a downy woodpecker working a tree trunk; the woodpecker looked like a jackhammer man banging Edgerton Avenue to bits.  I saw sparrows, robins, cardinals, juncos, chipmunks, squirrels, and—always disappointingly, emerging from their magnificent ruckus in the leaves—pedigreed dachshunds, which a woman across the street bred.

I never met anyone in the woods except the woman who walked her shiny dachshunds there, but I was cautious, and hoped I was braving danger.  If a bum came after me I would disarm him with courtesy (“Good afternoon”).  I would sneak him good food from home; we would bake potatoes together under his bridge; he would introduce me to his fellow bums; we would feed the squirrels.

The deepest ravine, over which loomed the Forbes Avenue bridge, was called Fern Hollow.  There in winter I searched for panther tracks in snow.  In summer and fall I imagined the woods extending infinitely.  I was the first human being to see these shadowed trees, this land; I would make my pioneer clearing here, near the water.  Mine would be one of those famously steep farms:  “How’d you get so beat up?”  “Fell out of my cornfield.”  In spring I pried flat rocks from the damp streambed and captured red and black salamanders.  I brought the salamanders home in a bag once and terrified my mother with them by mistake, when she was one the phone.

  In the fall I walked to collect buckeyes from lawns.  Buckeyes were wealth.  A ripe buckeye husk splits.  It reveals the shinning brown sphere inside only partially, as an eyelid only partially discloses an eye’s sphere.  The nut so revealed looks like the clam brown eye of a buck, apparently.  It was odd to imagine the settlers who named it having seen more male deer’s eyes in the forest than nuts on a lawn.

  Walking was my project before reading.  The text I read was the town; the book I made up was a map.  First I had walked  across one of our side yards to the blackened alley with its buried dime.  Now I walk to piano lessons, four long blocks north of school and three zigzag blocks into an Irish neighborhood near Thomas Boulevard.

  I pushed at my map’s edges.  Alone at night I added newly memorized streets and blocks to old streets and blocks, and imagined connecting them on foot.  From my parents’ earliest injunctions I felt my life depended on keeping it all straight—remembering where on earth I lived, that is, in relation to where I had walked.  It was dead reckoning.  On darkening evenings I came home exultant, secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind.

What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door!—joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again.

  An infant watches her hands and feels them move.  Gradually she fixes her own boundaries at the complex incurved trim of her skin.  Later she touches one palm to another and tries for a game to distinguish each hand’s sensation of feeling and being felt.  What is a house but a bigger skin and a neighborhood map but the world’s skin ever expanding?  

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