Ok, so I read this book, but where is Tinker Creek?
I looked it up.
Turns out, it is just outside of Roanoke, Virginia.
The creek looks like it starts north of Roanoke (
and ends where it feeds into the Roanoke River (at: 37.266414, -79.904515).
If you stuck to the nearby roads, it looks like you could walk end-to-end of Tinker Creek in about 5 hours.
I sort of like the idea that a river or creek is “fresh every hour.”
The philosophical implications of this are haunting though.
For where does all that change leave us in our short little lives?
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me
steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
