"No figure in American nature writing is more openly and desperately concerned to compose and settle herself and her immediate surroundings; none more concerned to relate her compositions of self and place to the overarching, sanctioning and justifying, terms of traditional Western thought, both classic and contemporary, both scientific and religious. And yet no figure in American nature writing is more openly (if not obsessively) engaged in resisting such sanctioned forms of settlement, none more given (or driven) to unsettling things and to keeping them unsettled. None, not even Thoreau, is more given to the 'extravagant gesture,' to radical conceits and overt paradoxes' ''only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself' (p. 199). None is more resistant to the processes and methods of conventional explanation, or more disposed to the wild and extreme, to the manifestly unexplainable, and even on occasion to the irresponsible--to finely crafted, spontaneous shouts of joy--to blatant exclamations of surprise and wonder--'YIKE'- and especially, perhaps to the indisputable predatory and blooded, the bitten and bloated, the flighty, the frenzied, and even on occasion the feral.

In conventional terms, no figure in American nature writing is more patently off her rocker--nor, in deeply traditional ways, more often on it. None, not even Thoreau, comes closer to conventional madness, to crossing and confusing the customary categories and discriminations of traditional Western thought. And yet none is more devoted to (or more self-consciously dependent upon) those same discriminations and categories, not to say the images, stories, and sciences that have developed upon them....no book of recent vintage comes closer than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to capturing (and hence, clarifying) the underlying heritage of American nature writing--that none comes closer to the often divisive and occasionally enlivening experience of trying to land oneself in America--that none is more openly devoted to the drama of impersonal science, spiritual autobiography, epistemology, and metaphysics--or more committed to the competing allegiances of self, other, and language. Certainly no work commonly aligned with nature writing does more to prove that the attempt to settle oneself in America--the effort to compose oneself and to fix the terms of ones environment, in this country so especially dedicated to human individuality and nonhuman other--is finally an epistemological and metaphysical struggle, an ongoing psychobiotic and philosophic scramble in which virtually every moment of innerving belief and hope is met with a coordinate moment of unnerving doubt, each instance of stability facticity (each passage of solid reportage) followed by a meditation on the fragility and indeterminacy of fact, each image of energizing beauty or harmony accompanied by reminders of wasteful and wasting profligacy."

The idea and ideal--"the almost debilitating effort and the utter need"--of American nature writing are "to determine in some intricate detail 'where it is that we have been so startlingly set down'--to bring the details of our surroundings (and, coordinately, ourselves) into history, as it were--to locate ourselves and settle the terms of our environs--even as we continue to seek an original or aboriginal, 'prelinguistic' and protohistoric, relationship to an everchanging, inconstant 'nature,' a cosmos and a wilderness forever opposed to our settling down or in.

To discover or establish terra firma--a sense of place--in a perpetual terra incognito--an unknown and finally unknowable territory--is, of course, an impossible and dividing task--prospectively redemptive, perhaps, but also destructive, alternately exalting and engulfing. And the pain of it, as well as the exhilaration--for both narrator and reader--is that neither of its antipodal concentrations, neither of its rather extreme states of mind and language, can be sustained for very long at all when they are entertained as wittingly as they are here.

In this conspicuously American 'pilgrimage,' the unassuming tales and sights of a 'rather tamed valley' lead all but organically to 'unmapped dim reaches' and 'unholy fastnesses' of the mind--'fastnesses' which are nothing if not mapped places, strongholds, however remote or secret--unholy, perhaps, but necessary, especially to the process of discovering where we are. To find out where we are, in fact, seems to require becoming at least mental and psychic squatters--self-conscious explorers, certainly, if not even scientists of a kind....

...the seemingly perennial endeavor is to attempt to immerse oneself in one's surroundings, to engage one's biotic neighborhood genuinely and fully--but not at the cost of consciousness or self-knowledge--to participate, but to participate knowingly, without sacrificing one's 'freedom,' while preserving one's independence, and above all, perhaps, the inimitable novelty of one's experience (or at least the illusion of same)...

`Someone might say--indeed, she herself might--that she is less the scientist, autobiographer, historian, or reporter than the descriptive and expository self of Walden--more the poet, metaphysician, and theologue--but the difference is finally less a matter of degree than it is of duration. Seldom does she allow herself (or her reader) more than half a paragraph to recover from a bout with uncertainty. Seldom is she able to sustain frank and forthright reportage for more than a sentence or two without interrupting herself or suggesting a mildly disturbing connection between some seeming matter of customary fact and some earlier upsetting experience--some epistemological dilemma, some fright, or some shadow of ecstasy."

[the chapter goes on to examine her book in detail in terms of these ideas about how she confronts the many paradoxes inherent in the relationship between humans, language, and nature at Pilgrim Creek.)