THE MOURNER'S BESTIARY

A memoir of illness, the author’s and the planet’s.

Caffall suffers from a congenital disorder, polycystic kidney disease, that, she writes, “killed most of my family before they reached fifty.” With that likelihood of a death sentence upon her, a single mother with a difficult mother of her own, she turns to the ocean and its “threatened sea creatures,” gathering from her studies “a bestiary…a list of fish that will teach me how to live.” Without self-importance or sentimentality, she likens each aspect of her illness, physical and psychological, to the decline of the world’s health. “Our global marine ecosystem works not dissimilarly from the circulatory system in the human body,” she writes, and in that regard that ecosystem is in imminent danger of shutting down: The Gulf of Maine, her central point of reference, is warming rapidly enough that the waters are being invaded by creatures from tropical waters, while the Arctic Ocean is becoming a mere extension of the Atlantic, no longer capped in ice. Caffall writes with the observant care of a natural historian in the vein of a latter-day Rachel Carson: She notes here that acid rain is linked to the rise in red tides, which jeopardize the food chain all the way up to seals and whales, and that the poisons brought into the oceans from industrial farms and metropolitan sewage rob the waters of oxygen and suffocate creatures such as the lobster—a process marked, she writes, by “the same things that overwhelm a body when kidneys no longer filter blood properly.” Whirlpools, bioluminescence, the Gulf Stream, barnacles, and sharks—all figure in Caffall’s graceful and understandably elegiac pages and her closing benediction: that in the mystery and miracle of life “lies all that can save you and the world entire.”

A future classic of nature writing—if, that is, there is a future.