Feature essay || "A Feral Year: The Novel Beyond the End of Communication"

Published April 19, 2022, Majuscule iss. 8

I. Vanishing Point

“I have always kept ducks,” says a character in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, “even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answers to the questions that are on my mind.”

In a novel of acrobatic diction and almost no dialogue, this sentence is a brief, fathomless one; a kind of Sebaldian haiku. Maybe that is why it chimes in my mind’s ear as I get out of the car in the early morning twilight and hang my camera over my shoulder. It’s early winter, 2020, and I shove a mask in my pocket.

At the trailhead, I put on a light jacket and knit cap even though the temperature has fallen into what my wife calls puffy-coat weather. This particular walk is a few days short of the solstice, but the whole year feels like one long night. A few weeks ago I came home after dark, chilled to the marrow, having found a great horned owl in an oak tree, which, once found, required my crouching on the hillside for an hour to marvel at the tapering of its feathers from horn to head, so much like a cat’s ears, until I could no longer see. And it’s lately this way, my pausing over something instead of getting on with it; always cold; sometimes tripping into near-fatal errors. Yet all these situations are of separate orders, never to breed sensible resolutions like wearing a warmer coat or avoiding a bush that growls, or not reading the comments.

The air is not much colder than during my earlier visits to the Marin Headlands, but overnight, the humidity tumbled in from the Pacific and glassed the green metal gates in frost. I’ve been setting out for these nature walks an hour before dawn, going farther and farther for solitude. Ask and I’ll say it’s for the pictures—this morning, hope of seeing the coyotes that left a scrabble of prints on the beach some weeks ago. But the camera at my hip is really just part of the question, with its faint magnetic pull to the matted scrim of grass along the maintenance road. It propels me away from certain unresolvable feelings: despair, for instance, and rage, and still others that don’t have names. And I do ask myself why I keep coming back and what I’m looking for, but like two facing mirrors, the questions reflect to infinity with no answer but the temporary relief of meeting eyes with another creature through glass.

Why do people seem so rotten? What, really, is happening? How does it end?

I point the lens down the trail, turn up the ISO to compensate for the low light, and find a shutter speed just a hair faster than ruinous. With a shiver I start out for Tennessee Cove. Although the mask is still in my pocket, the drumming of everything else on my mind begins to dull under the crunch of my boot soles on gravel. Like the plumage of Sebald’s mallards, answers beckon from beyond language, beyond even the frame of human reference.

Art by Jordan Buschur