From The Baffler, no. 18

Feral Houses

JAMES GRIFFIOEN

I live in the city of Detroit among tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned homes. These houses—most of them burned and collapsing—are a constant reminder that this city, where two million people once lived, is now home to much less than one million. Some estimate that there are as many as seventy thousand vacant houses in Detroit, along with twenty-five thousand acres of prairie where homes and entire neighborhoods once stood.

As the city disappears, nature flourishes. I take my bird dog pheasant “hunting” on the empty street grid of an old Slovakian neighborhood. I’ve seen a pair of red foxes trot into our abandoned Beaux-Arts train station. I had a face-to-face encounter with a wild badger in the city’s abandoned zoo, which is also home to a pack of feral dogs that once attacked my family at a nearby playground.

“Feral” means reversion to a wild state, as from domestication. It comes from the Latin root fera, for wild beast, but it also has a connection to another Latin word, feralis, literally, belonging to the dead. Though it is usually used to describe animals, “feral” could also be used to describe some of the abandoned homes in Detroit. For a few months every summer, some of them disappear behind ivy or untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago. They may belong only to the dead, and yet every year they teem with a new kind of life. <