Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Dillard contemplates a weekend trip to a cottage in the Appalachians but hesitates because she knows it will be too difficult to live up to what she wants it to be. She worries that she will fall into the trap of remembering it wrong, memorializing it “as focal points for some absurd, manufactured nostalgia” (161). Accompanying Dillard on the trip will be an unnamed nine-year-old girl and a dog. Dillard remembers going to the cabin as a girl, when a neighbor, Noah Very, took her and her cousins on a tour of a cave in a mountain nicknamed Carson’s Castle. Legend has it that Carson was chased by Indians to a ledge on the mountainside and shoved each of the Indians one by one over the edge.

In the cabin, Dillard marvels over the child and how much she has grown. Dillard has not been back to the cabin for many years. When she first arrives, Dillard finds a note telling her which berries and plants to avoid, though she will not be “samp[ling] bits of the landscape” since she brought groceries (166). Dillard describes the beauty of the woods surrounding the cottage. The child claims she remembers what it’s like being born, and Dillard is amused at her precociousness, though she wonders, “Should I stop hugging her so much?” (167).