How It All Goes Down
Annie wakes up one winter morning and tells us a story about her cat, who used to come in through the window at night and claw her face. (Somehow, she didn't mind.) She goes out for a walk and describes Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Tinker Creek is located. She's always looking for new things, because she's keeping, as Thoreau called it, "a meteorological journal of the mind." Basically, she's going to tell us about everything she sees for a year.
In a meditation on seeing, she explains that specialists in any given field (by which we mean a field of study, not an actual field, like the one she happens to be in) are able to see more than non-specialists, simply because they know what they're looking for. Still, she's committed to being there to see whatever nature wants to show her, which she feels is the least she can do.
She talks about starlings, pesky birds that tend to overrun the place. Virginia officials have tried a lot of ways to exterminate them, but they keep coming back, and when they all take to the sky at once, she finds them beautiful. This insistence on coming back to the place where people are trying to kill you is a form of fixedness, which means doing the same thing over and over, even when it's harmful.
In early March, she goes on a road trip and contemplates isolation. She's chosen to isolate herself from humanity in order to get closer to God. She's chosen two different methods for seeing the divine: the via positiva, which asserts that God is omniscient and good, and the via negativa, which asserts that God is unknowable, but we can get a glimpse through looking at his creations.
The via positiva section ends with the chapter "Intricacy," in which she closes by talking about the necessity of evolution, both physical and mental. A chapter about a flood (entitled, appropriately, "Flood") describes the washing out of Tinker Creek a couple of years earlier.
The via negativa begins with the chapter "Fecundity," in which Annie is horrified by the rampant reproduction of insects. It is pretty gross. She thinks about the cruelty of mortality, and wonders why God would create so many creatures only to let most of them die.
She tells us about her adventures stalking muskrats, who are skittish and elusive. You can never tell what a muskrat is going to do, although you can guess what muskrats as a species are going to do. It's kind of like quantum physics, where you can predict the behavior of electrons as a whole, but not of a specific electron. The important thing is to wait out your muskrat and be thankful for whatever it is you see—which is sometimes not a muskrat at all.
She thinks some more about mortality, and how even the creatures who survive bear traces of their brushes with death—insects are missing legs; animals have scars. She concludes that wholeness isn't the rule, but the exception, and says that her time at Tinker Creek has pared her down to something resembling an offering to God.
At the end of the book, it's winter again, and Annie has completed her year at the creek. She's seen a lot of horrifying things in nature, but she's also learned to see beauty in the smallest things; a maple key twirling in the sky looks like a UFO. Her prayers, she says, have become "thank you" rather than "please," which is really quite a perspective shift when you think about it.