Diary of a Young Naturalist, published last June, was written when Dara MacAnulty was 16 years old. At 18, he is a prominent youth activist on behalf of the natural world. Diary chronicles the turning of a year in Northern Ireland. McAnulty evokes his beloved landscape in youthfully energetic prose, but what is exceptional about the book is the way it conveys his inner landscape as well—and especially the profound and critical relation between the two. Many of us experience the natural world intimately, but for McAnulty, who is not neurotypical, this connection is the fulcrum of his being. He lives at a fever pitch of sensation.
Having introduced his siblings and parents, he notes that “we are all autistic, all except Dad – he’s the odd one out.” The family is passionate about nature and full of adventure, and provide one another with the support needed to navigate their intense worlds of feeling. “Together, we make for an eccentric and chaotic bunch. We’re pretty formidable, apparently. We’re as close as otters, and huddled together, we make our way in the world.”
While his family is his sanctuary, the natural world is his consolation. “A solitary gannet scythes the sky and its cantering cries synchronize with my heartbeat – Orcadians … call them Solan Goose, or Sun Goose, and as the rain falls I feel the warmth of its lamenting calls.”
It is the human world that is often a source of pain. “Dandelions remind me of the way I close myself off from so much of the world, either because it’s too painful to see or feel, or because when I am open to people the ridicule comes … insults directed at the intense joy I feel.” Running the gauntlet of an ordinary day at school, he is grateful for the refuge of the school’s ‘safe space’: “a room reserved for kids on the spectrum, or others with needs for a quiet space.”
Acute anguish at the destruction of the natural world is what drives him to act, to speak, despite the emotional cost of doing so. He offers an account of driving around with his family listening for the corncrakes endangered by intensive agricultural practices. “When dusk comes it is a bruised blackberry sky. The air is cool and fragrant with hay.” The rest smile to finally hear one, but he steals from the car and weeps as he listens to it call for a mate that will never come: “It keeps crexing, and it will keep crexing until the season is over. … A surge moves through me. I have to do something. I have to speak out. Rise up.”
The natural world that he cares for so deeply saves him, again and again. In a week when “the anxiety army [is] marching” and his defenses have failed, his family is out hiking when he sees the ugly scar left on the landscape by heavy machinery and his distress is exacerbated. “I run from the bottom to the top of the Gortmaconnell summit and feel the wind breaking apart the turmoil. It surges out into the landscape and I lie flat and look at the clouds. I close my eyes, put a hand on my chest and feel a steadier beat. I sleep for a while; everyone leaves me alone.” Elsewhere there is a description of a howling snowstorm and its calming effect on his mind: “I can listen, I can hear, I can think and speak and feel and move all at once.” An ordinary day among people renders him acutely distressed, but the arrayed forces of nature give him back to himself.
The book also offers moments of tenderness, as when Blathnaid, his younger sister, loses a feather and begins to melt down. He scoops her onto his back: “The light bleeds from the sky as I sing her songs of nonsense. I feel her head on my shoulder, body relaxing.”
Diary of a Young Naturalist has the beautifully observed natural history of four seasons, but even more the story of a young man learning to manage his inner storms, and driven by his love of the world around him to find his voice and take action–“Can I breathe and live and also fight?”--whatever the cost. “I … want to go out into the world and weave my way, however overwhelming and painful it might be. … My heart is opening. I’m ready.” It is evocative, moving, and inspiring in equal measure..
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.