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Passage I From the nearest library I learned every sort of surprising thing-some of it,
though not much of it, from the books themselves.
The Homewood Library had graven across its enormous stone facade: FREE
TO THE PEOPLE. In the evenings, neighborhood people-the men and
(5)women of Homewood-browsed in the library and brought their children. By
day, the two vaulted rooms, the adults’ and children’s sections, were almost
empty, The kind Homewood librarians, after a trial period, had given me a card
to the adult section. This was an enormous silent room with marble floors.
Nonfiction was on the left.
(10)Beside the farthest wall, and under leaded windows set ten feet from the
floor, so that no human being could ever see anything from them-next to the
wall, and at the farthest remove from the idle librarians at their curved wooden
counter, and from the oak bench where my mother waited in her camel’s-hair
coat chatting with the librarians or reading-stood the last and darkest and most
(15)obscure of the tall nonfiction stacks: NATURAL HISTORY. It was here, in the
cool darkness of a bottom shelf, that I found The Field Book of Ponds and
Streams.
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams was a small, blue-bound book printed
in fine type on thin paper. Its third chapter explained how to make sweep nets,
(20)plankton nets, glass-bottomed buckets, and killing jars. It specified how to mount
slides, how to label insects on their pins, and how to set up a freshwater
aquarium.
One was to go into “the field” wearing hip boots and perhaps a head net for
mosquitoes. One carried in a “ruck-sack” half a dozen corked test tubes, a smattering
(25)of screwtop baby-food jars, a white enamel tray, assorted pipettes and eyedroppers,
an artillery of cheesecloth nets, a notebook, a hand lens, perhaps a map,
and The Field Book of Ponds and Streams. This field-unlike the fields I had
seen, such as the field where Walter Milligan played football-was evidently very
well watered, for there one could find, and distinguish among, daphniae, planaria,
(30)water pennies, stonefly larvae, dragonfly nymphs, salamander larvae, tadpoles,
snakes, and turtles, all of which one could carry home.That anyone had lived the fine
life described in Chapter 3 astonished me. Although the title page indicated quite plainly that one Ann Haven Morgan had
written The Field Book of Ponds and Streams, I nevertheless imagined, perhaps
(35)from the authority and freedom of it, that its author was a man. It would be good
to write him and assure him that someone had found his book, in the dark near
the marble floor at the Homewood Library. I would, in the same letter or in a
subsequent one, ask him a question outside the scope of his book, which was
where I personally might find a pond, or a stream. But I did not know how to
(40)address such a letter, of course, or how to learn if he was still alive. I was afraid, too, that my letter would disappoint him by betraying my ignorance,
which was just beginning to attract my own notice. What, for example, was
this substance called cheesecloth, and what do scientists do with it? What, when
you really got down to it, was enamel? If candy could, notoriously, “eat through
(45)enamel,” why would anyone make trays out of it? Where-short of robbing a
museum-might a fifth-grade student at the Ellis School on Fifth Avenue obtain
such a legendary item as a wooden bucket? The Field Book of Ponds and Streams was
a shocker from beginning to end. The greatest shock came at the end.
(50)When you checked out a book from the Homewood Library, the librarian
wrote your number on the books card and stamped the due date on the sheet
glued to the books last page. When I checked out The Field Book of Ponds and
Streams for the second time, I noticed the books card. It was almost full. There
were numbers on both sides. My hearty author and I were not alone in the world,
(55)after all. With us, and sharing our enthusiasm for dragonfly larvae and singlecelled
plants, were, apparently, many adults.
Who were these people? Had they, in Pittsburgh’s Homewood section, found
ponds? Had they found streams?
Every year, I read again The Field Book of Ponds and Stream. Often, when I
(60)was in the library, I simply visited it. I sat on the marble floor and studied the
book’s card. There we all were. There was my number. There was the number of
someone else who had checked it out more than once. Might I contact this person
and cheer him up?
For I assumed that, like me, he had found pickings pretty slim in Pittsburgh.
(65)The people of Homewood, some of whom lived in visible poverty, on crowded
streets among burned-out houses-they dreamed of ponds and streams. They
were saving to buy microscopes. In their bedrooms they fashioned plankton nets.
But their hopes were even more vain than mine, for I was a child, and anything
might happen; they were adults, living in Homewood. There was neither pond
(70)nor stream on the streetcar routes. The Homewood residents whom I knew had
little money and little free time. The marble floor was beginning to chill me. It
was not fair.
-Annie Dillard
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