THE HOPES OF SNAKES

Nature writer and first-book author Couturier makes Megalopolis her wild place, observing the natural world and delineating its effects upon her personality.

“For someone like me who has desired little except a closeness to animals, and who craved this so strongly that without them I often felt fractured and lost,” Couturier writes, “the creatures of New York City, once discovered, became healers in a way.” They restored her equilibrium, shaky in so man-made an environment, and brought back to her a measure of sacredness. The writer does not exclusively inhabit the realm of the mystical and sacred, but she understands the powerful impact of associations with animals that transcend a look: blood rushes through her body, her senses are heightened, she’s grateful for the close communion. In one piece, she wonders about the return after a year’s absence of a vulture, the bird of death, on Easter, day of the Resurrection. Not every urban creature garners her appreciation. Cockroaches may be enduring, but they are also repulsive when their mass goes critical. Yet pigeons catch her fancy, as do the city folk who feed them, and she manages to overcome her fear of the aggressive black racer snake enough to allow “the flaring forth of its tongue,” the creature’s way of getting to know her. The author marvels at a peregrine falcon nesting on a skyscraper and at a family of foxes that have been allowed to police an urban golf course, ridding it of rats and Canadian geese. Of these she writes with a serene pleasure, as if witness to a blessing. She also conveys, with a gentleness unusual to journalism, her affection for the damaged East River: “I love it for the same reason I love the Arthur Kill: for its magic. In all their woundedness, these resilient waterways are managing to give life.”

Couturier lyrically renders that life in each finely tuned essay.