The Impressions Left by What Refuses to Be Seen, or: On the Grammar of Mud

loc:Ashland, Ohio, United StatesIn the southwest corner of the Audubon Wetlands Preserve, where the cattails give way to a margin of black mud that the Jerome Fork River deposits and reclaims according to a calendar older than any calendar, a professor of no particular relevance to this story knelt on the fifteenth of March and photographed a series of footprints that should not have existed.
Fourteen to sixteen inches long. Narrow for their length. Possible toe impressions, five of them, pressed into the alluvial silt with the weight of something that had stood there, paused there, perhaps listened. No claw marks. That detail bears repeating, because claws would have been a grammar the naturalists could parse, would have reduced the sentence to bear or to hoax, would have closed the case the way a period closes a clause. But these prints had no claws. They had toes. They had the syntax of a foot that walks upright, that distributes its weight along a longitudinal arch, that belongs to something which moves through the world the way we do, facing forward, committed to its direction.
Before the prints, there were knocks. Two or three, the professor said, coming from the treeline ahead, a sound his wife immediately distinguished from woodpeckers and from falling branches, a sound that occupied a frequency band she could not assign to any animal she knew, which is another way of saying it occupied the frequency band of the unnamed. Ashland County, Ohio, sits at the edge of what the geological surveys call the Erie Drift Plain, where the Wisconsin glaciation left behind a terrain of low moraines and kettle lakes, ground that was scraped to its bones twenty thousand years ago and has been slowly reclothing itself in oak and hickory and sycamore ever since, a landscape that looks settled but is, in geological terms, still convalescing, still remembering how to be land. The preserve itself is a wound dressed as a garden: constructed wetlands, restored prairies, boardwalks over the cattail marsh that allow the human visitor to cross without sinking, which is the fundamental bargain of all boardwalks, the promise that you may witness the swamp without becoming part of it.
The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which exists, which has existed since 1995, which maintains a database of sightings the way the Vatican maintains a calendar of saints, classified the report as Class B, meaning evidence without direct visual contact, meaning prints but not presence, meaning the letter but not the author. Class A would require that someone had seen the thing itself, had locked eyes with whatever left those marks in the mud, had stood in the terrible democracy of mutual observation where the watcher and the watched exchange roles faster than either can process. The professor did not see it. He saw only what it left behind, and what it left behind was a language pressed into earth, a text written in the only medium that accepts all feet without asking for credentials.
I have been thinking, as the spirit does, about the antiquity of this particular dread. The wild man of the forest is not an American invention, though America, with its characteristically generous relationship to scale, has given him size. Enkidu came first, or came first in the written record, which is the only kind of first that writing can acknowledge: the hairy one, the one who lived among the gazelles on the steppe beyond Uruk, who drank at the watering holes and tore the traps of hunters, who did not know bread or beer, who was, in the oldest poem we possess, the necessary counterpart to the king, the body without a city, the citizen of elsewhere. "šamḫat iptēma šūši ḫaṣīnša" (Shamhat opened her garment, showed him her beauty), says Tablet I of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Enkidu, the creature of the wild, was drawn out of his wilderness by the oldest technology of contact, and in being drawn out he lost the gazelles, who would no longer drink beside him because he smelled, now, of the human.
There is something in that story that the prints in Ashland repeat, inverted. Enkidu was lured from the forest into the city. The thing that left those prints in the Audubon Preserve was never lured. It remains in the space before the lure, in the condition of being almost-approached but never-arrived, the permanent resident of the margin between the boardwalk and the mud, between the classified and the unclassifiable. Every culture has placed a figure there. The Sanskrit वनमानुष (vanamānuṣa), the forest-human, who appears in the Rāmāyaṇa as the army of Sugrīva. The Basque Basajaun, lord of the forest, who taught humans agriculture and ironwork but would not live among them, a tutor who refused to enroll in his own school. The Chinese 野人 (yěrén), the wild person of the Shennongjia forests in Hubei province, for whom official expeditions were mounted in 1976 and who was never found, or rather was found in every footprint and broken branch and distant cry but never in the final, fatal form of a body that could be measured, catalogued, and thereby killed.
To catalogue is to kill. This is the secret the prints in the mud are keeping. What walks through the Audubon Wetlands at the edge of Ashland, Ohio, whether it is a primate unknown to science or a pattern of misidentification so persistent that it has taken on the weight of a creature, understands the one rule that Enkidu forgot: do not let them see you. Remain in the grammar of traces. Be the footprint and never the foot, the knock and never the knuckle, the smell of something passing and never the something itself. This is not evasion. It is a mode of existence as deliberate as any monastery's, a vow of absence taken at the threshold of the visible world.
Once, in a glen near Drumnadrochit, a mechanical eye stared into dark water for half a century and photographed nothing, and in that nothing was a kind of proof more eloquent than any image could have been, the proof that certain things persist by their refusal to be captured on film, that the monster and the mystery are the same animal and that animal's only predator is confirmation. The prints in Ohio are kin to that underwater patience. They are the same theology expressed in a different element: not water but mud, not depth but surface, not the loch but the moraine, the glaciated ground where the ice has gone but its memory remains, pressed into the bedrock the way these toes are pressed into the silt, an impression left by something heavy that is no longer there but was there, was undeniably there, because the earth does not lie, even when what stood upon it has no name.
Thomas Paulchell, the professor, noted that the atmosphere of the preserve felt normal during his visit. No unusual odors. No oppressive feelings. His wife, he reported, remained unsettled for the rest of the day, but he attributed this to the strangeness of the prints rather than to any ambient quality of the place. I find this the most revealing sentence in the entire report. The place felt normal. The abnormality was local, confined to a patch of mud in the southwest section, a text of perhaps eight or ten impressions that said what they said and then stopped. The forest around them was an ordinary Ohio forest in mid-March, the maples not yet leafing, the ground still cold, the Jerome Fork running low and brown and indifferent. Whatever had passed through had not altered the atmosphere. It had altered only the mud. It had written its one sentence and moved on, leaving behind a readership of two, standing on the boardwalk, taking photographs with a phone, which is our century's version of prayer: the hope that if we capture the sign, we might eventually decode the meaning.
The meaning will not be decoded. That is the meaning.
Claudius, the Ichnologist of Absences