Of course the Germans have a word for the anxiety migratory animals experience at the beginning of the migration period: zugunruhe.
On the face of it, The Snow Geese is a story about a man following flocks of lesser snow geese as they make their spring flight from their wintering grounds in Texas to their breeding grounds far north in the Arctic circle.
But this is a book less about birds and more about zugunruhe – a restlessness ingrained in us as much as the eponymous birds.
I was given this book by a friend for my thirtieth birthday. Buying a book for someone else is a perilous venture. Books are deeply personal things, and I don’t know about you, but, as irrational as it is, I find I immediately take against one that has been recommended to me. This one was different. It is a book that leaves you wanting your own adventure and with a new appreciation of home.
Fiennes follows in the footsteps of other such quests, like that of Canadian ornithologist Joseph Dewey Soper who, in 1929, went in search of the breeding grounds of the snow goose. Soper established a camp above Bowman Bay in the Canadian Arctic, and during the first half of June watched waves of geese pass overhead, obeying their ‘furious northern urge.’
It is this furious urge that most occupies Fiennes. As Fiennes chases and waits on the geese, he details his conflicting desire to move on and longing to return home. Like the migratory swifts and swallows, we are a species characterised by both the urge to range and the gut-tug of home. And the further we venture out – an eye now to Mars, and beyond – the tighter the cord pulls.
Nostalgia or homesickness, Fiennes recounts, was widely believed in the early eighteenth century to be unique to the Swiss. In German, the condition was known as Schweizerkrankheit – the Swiss disease. And it was thought to be caused by the increased air pressure experienced by these mountain-dwellers whenever they descended to the lowlands. The only cure for them was to return home immediately.
But it’s universal, and old as us – the trope of everything from the Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings. And like Odysseus’s return to his beloved Ithaca, the end to Fiennes journey is just as bloody.
Yet for all the restlessness that wracks Fiennes and the geese he follows, what stands out is his way of seeing the world. He observes with a tenderness everything from the ‘thrum and riffle’ of wingbeats to the conscientious industry of a couple of young waitresses in a roadside diner. His is an observation rooted in place, finding the inner life in the atmosphere and denizens of night buses, motel rooms, and grain elevators.
It encourages you to see the everyday with a new eye, to render it both more familiar and rich and strange. Look at the world in ever more detail and it becomes fractal, infinite, as measuring a coastline in ever more detail makes it infinitely long.
While geese are the book’s subject, Fiennes’ eye is more often trained on the people he meets along the way. People who are driven by the same migratory restlessness as him and his geese. People like Marshall, who regales Fiennes with a lifetime spent hopping freight trains with friends like Nightmare Alice and Sticks Wilson; and Sam, building himself a gyrocopter in his garage to fly ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just around.’
The geese, meanwhile, are always kept at binoculars’ length. A distance only physically closed late in the book when Fiennes joins two Inuit hunters on a trip to the tundra of Foxe Land – the geese’s breeding ground. The trip leaves him shaking and the geese sheering off from their V- and W-shaped skeins as the shot finds them, each one dropping ‘like a cloth bag filled with coins’.
It is a distance reflected in language, too, the geese flying overhead in their limited, broken alphabet, and we struggling with our clumsy phonetic renderings of birdsong. But one that may be bridged.
In the 1960s, ornithologist Stephen Emlen studied the migratory instincts of indigo buntings, confining them in special funnel-shaped cages lined with blotting paper. At the bottom of each cage, an ink pad stamped the buntings’ feet, while the blotting paper logged their attempts to break free. Stirred by zugunruhe, the birds hopped in the direction the season dictated, over and over, little black footprints accumulating in the north or south of the cage. ‘The buntings,’ as Fiennes puts it, ‘kept diaries: footprints lettered their seasonal restlessness.’
The Snow Geese is Fiennes’ zugunruhe ink blot. But unlike the buntings, Fiennes finds his way home, his lyrical, restless quest done.
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