Salamanders Migrating
It’s been at least a week since my backyard saw a blizzard, though snowbanks are only now beginning to soften. The largest is a four-foot monument that’s transforming into meltwater. It has carved a small channel in my unpaved driveway. The steady stream is flowing past an old apple tree, toward the New River at the bottom of my yard, with currents that will carry it through mountains toward the ocean. It’s delightful to watch those hard-packed snowflakes find release. But for me, the space between winter and spring still feels a little like purgatory.
I have a vague notion that this is when the underworld of soil begins to stir with spotted salamanders. They have, like me, been waiting for warmer seasons. These creatures spend their entire lives underground, outside of a few nights each spring when, across North America, they emerge in search of ephemeral, or vernal, pools, which are fed by snowmelt and rain. These pools disappear and reappear annually, giving them a place to breed away from hungry fish. Salamanders are animals who depend on impermanence.
To my human senses, the promises of spring are mostly abstractions. Seasonal action is happening in dark places I cannot access. But finding ephemeral pools might be a way to catch a glimpse of the spring-forward motion I’m craving.
I am ready to welcome longer hours of daylight, but I’ve been considering the way salamanders will mark the coming season without directly feeling sun on their skin. They live in darkness and travel to those seasonal pools only thanks to nocturnal slipstreams.
The mountains have already begun to nudge animals out of their burrows, soil freezing and contracting in push patterns. I know that some of my neighbors go out each spring to see salamanders migrating toward ephemeral breeding pools, and I start to wonder how I might join them. I begin to muse about how better understanding the way salamanders relate to night might help me more nimbly understand my own relationship to it—as well as the enduring human impulse to banish darkness before it can take root.
To suggest that someone is “living under a rock” or that they’re “in the dark” means that they aren’t aware of what’s going on around them. Yet most of us have little knowledge of what lives in the dark, under actual rocks—maybe because sayings like this indicate that they aren’t worth much. But turn over a stone in any Appalachian woodland and you’ll find all sorts of writhing life-forms.
Salamanders are spotted and striped, so lovely that it isn’t uncommon for people to refer to them as jewels. Of 550 known species in the world, 77 can be found in Appalachia, and much of North America is rich with them. These creatures might spend most of their lives under rocks, but they are acutely aware of things we generally ignore, and their bodies bear wisdom that science is only beginning to investigate.
Finding a salamander in a creek indicates that the water is clean, because salamanders, which sometimes breathe through their skin, are highly sensitive to pollutants. They’re well-known in scientific circles for their ability to regrow tissue, organs, and limbs. James Monaghan, of Northeastern University, has been studying salamanders’ regenerative abilities, which employ mechanisms that humans amazingly have in early developmental stages, though not in mature tissue. He suggests that human regeneration—guided by salamander clues—will realistically occur within the next decade.
Salamanders are masters of shape-shifting, but in the modern world, species that have survived 200 million years and three mass extinctions face a myriad of threats—among them, car tires. In 2015, Virginia’s Center for Urban Habitats found that road-crossing salamander casualties can reach 50 percent. This has led to the formation of large-scale human “salamander brigades” in Iowa, New York, New Hampshire, and a multitude of other states, where people ferry animals to safety.
I don’t know how to locate an ephemeral pool, but I soon hear from a biologist in the know that local salamander enthusiasts are already watching temperatures and gauging the rain that motivates salamanders to move. “We just have to be on call this time of year,” she tells me, sounding every bit like a midwife waiting to hear from a woman going into labor.
Weeks into my attempts to figure out how I might witness this fleeting migration, a friend of a friend, Mike Gangloff, a biology professor at nearby Appalachian State University, reports that spotted salamanders have started to stir at a populous site. He’s planning to take some of his students out, so he asks if I’d like to join them. It’s just a casual patrol, meant to help salamanders cross from overwintering woodlands to their ancestral breeding pools. The site, as it turns out, is only a few miles from my house.
Mike’s nocturnal-wildlife-seeking adventures have taken him to some unexpected places—including the ditches behind a familiar fast-food restaurant, where he says salamanders are shockingly prevalent. But none of them seem more peculiar than our community’s gun range, where he has, in the past, surveyed salamanders under a cacophony of gunfire. Tonight, the place is thankfully quiet.
As soon as he pulls up to meet me and the group of biology students who’ve convened, Mike jumps out of his truck to survey the roadbed, scanning at close range. “Wouldn’t want to hit an animal!” he says.
Here, tires are weapons and guns have become unintentional tools of conservation. The daily booms of the firing range have deterred vacation-home owners and most locals from building houses and installing septic systems in the area. Because of this, there is little artificial light and an intact forest full of salamander burrows.
Mike leads us through a wetland that looks like a miniature diorama of the Appalachian chain, bumps and valleys gathering rain. Salamanders appear as ribbons of black weaving through sedge grass—and these are just the early party guests. “It’s better the later it gets,” Mike says. “It’s like going to a bar. You want to be there late, when it starts rocking!”
The ground itself is communicating. Every time I lift my shoe it feels like I’m being released from a suction cup. Thwap goes my left foot as the boggy ground tries to hold it. Thwap goes my right.
One of the college kids is wearing open-toed shoes. He exhales sharply with each infusion of water into his sandal. Still, he doesn’t complain. Thwap. “That,” he says, “is a wonderful sound.”
The location we’re headed to, Mike explains, hosts a whole ephemeral pool complex. He suspects parts of it were built by beavers. “I’ve seen people sink right into the ground out here,” he warns. “One minute they’re there and the next minute they’re not.” It isn’t quicksand, but it would be easy to lose a rain boot.
There are several shallow ponds and a deeper one, where I can see stray spotted salamanders floating, their dark bodies speckled with yellow-star dots. On the pond’s silty bottom, there’s a string of what look to be freshwater pearls. Mike points them out as spermatophores, packets of reproductive material that the males have left out for females to collect.
The females, who typically leave their mountain burrows a bit later than males, will ultimately take them into their bodies via a vent. Within weeks, these animals will be back underground, going about their business. “We don’t know much about what salamanders do for the rest of the year,” Mike says.
“They’re just so chill,” a student says when a male salamander comes into view, steadily marching toward the ephemeral pools. “Watch that little guy walk!”
The salamander does seem chill. His feet, which look like small purple hands, touch the earth two by two. Left, right, left. Left, right, left, every press and pull of his feet turning life’s wheel.
Mike spots action below the surface of an ephemeral pool. “The females are starting to show up,” he says. “It rained hard today. That’s always a good sign of movement.” Now that we have the lay of the land, we make our way from a grassy area to blacktop. Mike’s colleagues have previously surveyed 400 spotted salamanders in a single night. But tonight the flow of salamanders is more of a trickle. Even so, it takes less than a minute for a student to notice an animal on asphalt.
If there were more salamanders to be handled, the student would likely be wearing gloves to prevent her from exposing the animals to human skin. But this is a low-key walk in the scheme of salamander crossings. Still, when touching a salamander, even to save it from other dangers, it’s best to have wet hands.
The student, who has forgotten to bring a water bottle, presses her palm against the rain-soaked ground, absorbing what she can from the path. She inspects the glaze. Satisfied, she proceeds carefully. “The road is not for you, little one,” she says, as she carries the animal to safety.
I keep pace with a teenager who is wearing pajama pants, as though he was unexpectedly beamed straight here from his couch. As it turns out, he isn’t even in Mike’s class. He was sitting around watching movies when he spontaneously decided to join his friends at the last minute. “They knew I’d be into this. My room’s full of animals—lizards and plants, lots of them. People have started calling it ‘the Sanctuary.’”
In our college town full of cinder-block dorms and windowless apartments, his description sounds like an oasis for nature-deprived humans. It takes me a minute to realize that he’s referring to his room as an animal sanctuary. “Salamanders are awesome,” he tells me.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that woodland salamanders play a significant role in sequestering carbon. They are, according to biologists who work with them, unsung heroes in mitigating global warming. Their lifestyles lead to more carbon being stored in soil, with a significantly protective effect. In a rainy season, 170 pounds of carbon can be sequestered by salamanders in a single acre.
As a group, salamanders make up more living weight than any other creature in these woodlands. More than deer. More than Appalachia’s famed black bears. “I think there are salamanders all around us right now,” Mike says, studying a ditch. “We just don’t see them, because they’re masters of camouflage.”
When one of the more squeamish students sees a salamander, she puts her cell phone on the road like a directional guardrail so she won’t have to touch the animal. Her finger accidentally brushes the screen, and it lights up. Immediately, the salamander freezes.
From the salamander’s perspective, this must be akin to being in Times Square with a larger-than-life electronic billboard. This creature has likely never been exposed to sunlight, much less artificial light at close range. The phone-holding student is still nervous to touch the animal, so I reach out to move the salamander away from the roadbed, but not before the group turns into paparazzi, their cell phones popping and flashing.
When my fingers close around the salamander’s body, it almost feels like the animal can sense my unease in being a voyeur of the highest degree. But when her inky eyes meet mine, I cannot help but feel like she is smiling. I know it’s just her resting amphibian face, but I can’t get over the curve of her mouth, a grin that seems to permeate her entire body. Ultimately, I lay her in a ditch, away from car tires and selfie-seekers.
More salamanders are crossing the road in slow motion. Left, right, left. Half a dozen students watch for oncoming cars. But there isn’t much traffic on this backroad. I start to wonder if our work is even helping. Then a car passes. In its wake, we find the pale outline of frog who didn’t make it. “There’s nothing to do for him,” Mike says. Still, the students stand around the frog’s body until one of them whispers, “This is sort of traumatic.”
The mood shifts when we encounter another salamander just a few feet away. The student who had previously used her phone as a guardrail has, in the wake of our frog discovery, lost her inhibition. The stakes are now tangibly high. She reaches out to move the animal as the student in pajama pants coos, “These guys are too cute to be out here walking around on the ground!”
To chase salamanders is to endlessly contemplate the ground itself. The language of land—like the language of darkness—makes us strive for places aloft and alight, disparaging those down and dark. But the truth is, the darker soil appears, the more nutrients it generally holds, the more life it can support. Still, we are conditioned—almost all of us who have come of age going to zoos and aquariums—to think of the ground as somehow gross. We tend to value light over dark, high above low, the heavens as greater than the ground, perceived as entry to an underworld that many of my fundamentalist neighbors associate with hell.
A car approaches from a main road, and a passenger wearing a headlamp jumps out to check the terrain before rolling forward. Our shift is over. This marks a transfer of the guard.
The animal lover in pajama pants pipes up to thank Mike for letting him tag along. This student arrived at the gun range seeking something beyond academic credit, something he still isn’t sure how to articulate. Here, his only task was to hold the human world temporarily at bay so that salamanders could find their own way in a world that, unlike with his aquariums, he didn’t have to create.
“I can’t believe I never knew this was going on,” he says, placing a hand over his heart in gratitude. “Walking around out here in the dark with salamanders, it’s an experience I think I’ve been waiting for all my life, and—until now—I didn’t really understand that it was possible.”
Given salamander-chasing’s rigorous schedule, Mike and his wife, Lynn Siefferman, who is also a biology professor, trade off fieldwork nights. When she calls the next day to invite me to join a group of community members she’s leading to a different pool, I can’t imagine that she’s going to direct me to a site more unexpected than the local gun range. But then she asks, “Do you know the place where the sidewalk ends?”
With no additional clues, I know exactly where we’re headed. She isn’t referencing Shel Silverstein’s famous children’s book; she’s talking about a locale in a local park that has, for years, served as a turnaround point for walkers and bikers and skateboarding kids. It is an abrupt ending that makes people pirouette just before the sidewalk turns to grass.
I have always pondered why it ends there more than I’ve contemplated what, exactly, lies beyond it. And what’s beyond it, Lynn tells me, is a particularly active ephemeral pool. She refers to it as Barbwire Pond, due to the twisted metal pieces of agricultural fencing that divide the public park from private pasture.
The place where the sidewalk ends might hold an ephemeral pool, but the place where it begins is flanked by soccer fields. When I arrive, hours after sunset, it’s ablaze with stadium lights, though only a few people are kicking balls around. It looks like the site of a spaceship landing.
Under the glare, I see Connie and Doug Hall, educators locally known as the Frogologists. They’re famous for lugging amphibians around to schools so that students can commune with them. “When I was into bird-watching, I used to always be looking up,” Connie says. “Now that I’m interested in salamanders, I’m always looking down.”
She waves her hand across her face like a windshield wiper, as if she might swipe the stadium light gone. “Out where we live, there are nights when you can still put your hand in front of your face and not see it. That’s my preference. Sometimes, I’m so bothered by lights like these, I wish that I could just shoot them out,” she says. Given my time at the gun club, this has real-world resonance. In contrast to that somewhat nail-biting setting, tonight, I’m at what most people would consider a family-friendly place. But the lights here, to some biologists, read like an acute threat.
We’re soon joined by a group of diverse citizen scientists. Together, we trace a sidewalk along the New River—and then we step onto grass. Darkness thickens. We hear Barbwire Pond before we see it, with a frog chorus so loud that, at close range, my ears start burning. Along the pond’s bank, tiny spring peeper frogs shriek. And in back, wood frogs go quack, ca-quack.
With the help of headlamps, we can see across the pond to the base of a mountain. This land is protected by local government, which has installed hiking trails on it. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard wood frogs before this week,” I tell a retired biology professor, Wayne Van Devender, who’s standing nearby. He’s dubious. Maybe, he suggests, I just didn’t know what I was hearing.
“It’s like I used to tell my students: You really can’t see anything until you know what you’re looking at,” he says. “Same thing for listening. The more you learn, the more you can see and hear. One thing’s for sure—it’s a good day to be a wood frog. Just look at all of them!”
But I can’t see a single member of the quacking chorus. When I tell Wayne as much, he instructs me to put my diffuse flashlight beam—which has proven to not be very good at probing dark waters—directly next to my eyes. I stop shooting from the hip, as directed.
Wayne suggests using a fallen branch as a landmark. “Follow it along that bank to the edge of the water. You’ll see wood frog eyes staring back at you.” My flashlight catches on a string of silver beads, barely surfacing. Frog eyes, finally.
These creatures will only cluck for a few weeks, though peepers will sing longer. I thought I was unfamiliar with the song of wood frogs. But once I’ve met them, I start recognizing their voices everywhere. Wayne’s right—I’ve just previously dismissed their distinctive voices as background noise.
I step over barbwire fencing to join a guy in his twenties who is crouching low to the ground, directly addressing an animal. I lean in to see that he’s talking to a peeper frog, barely larger than a dime. “Could you be any cooler, bruh?” He turns his attention to me. “Just look at this little homie!”
On cue, the frog puffs to the size of a quarter. When he lets loose, the student puts his hands over his ears and shouts to be heard over the close-range belting: “It’s louder than a Def Leppard concert out here, and I forgot my earplugs!”
“You know,” Connie says, “in winter, wood frogs freeze solid.”
“Like cryogenics?” I ask, channeling every sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen.
Connie nods. “They’re fragile when they’re like that,” she says.
I’m reeling from the cryogenics revelation when one of the graduate students who’s joined the group, Chloe Dorin, strolls over. Chatting with the Frogologists, she brings up the fact that spotted salamanders—animals who spend their entire adult lives in darkness—are the only known vertebrates on Earth who can photosynthesize, because they have algae living inside of their cells.
It sounds unbelievable. It sounds like science. Truth is stranger than fiction, almost always.
Naturalists discovered the relationship between spotted salamander eggs and algae in the 1900s. The globs of salamander eggs in this ephemeral pool will, in time, turn green. Because when a salamander embryo develops a nervous system, emerald-colored algae blooms inside of each egg, giving the salamanders a boost of oxygen, which the algae produce through photosynthesis.
It wasn’t until the 2010s that researchers realized the algae seen inside of salamander eggs is also found in the cells of salamanders themselves, in an especially intimate interspecies alliance. It has since raised questions about similar relationships that remain undiscovered, given that this oddity was found in such a common salamander species.
Chloe says, “The more I learn about the salamanders’ relationship to algae, the more questions I have. It’s a one-of-a-kind relationship—a vertebrate animal that basically has plants living inside of it. That’s some science fiction sort of stuff! Why does that occur? What are the ultimate effects? We’ve learned a lot, but there’s a lot we don’t know.”
Salamanders’ reduced capacity to self-identify bodily cells is thought to be related to their ability to grow new limbs and organs as adults. It’s akin to the porousness that allows them to breathe through their skin, which makes them susceptible to taking in pollutants. Their physiological boundaries are unusually fluid, their sense of self larger than what we, as humans, might be able to comprehend. Salamanders, on a cellular level, seem to recognize themselves as part of a larger, living world—for better or worse, leading to sickness and to health—with vulnerabilities that often double as strengths.
It’s not entirely understood how salamanders navigate to the same pool year after year as they do. It’s thought that there’s a strong magnetic-orientation element, some use of celestial navigation, and maybe even an olfactory aspect since salamanders can recognize the smell of home. Unfortunately, initial studies have shown that some of their navigational senses are disrupted by artificial light at night. Apparently, it’s not only the light that confuses them; it’s the resulting dark-light contrasts. Because artificial light leads to artificially dark shadows cast, and the interplay creates a perceptual fencing on the ground that stands to hold them back.
There has been a dearth of research on how artificial light might hinder their regenerative abilities, in addition to their navigational skills, but initial research out of Utica University indicates that spotted salamanders’ ability to regrow limbs might be disrupted by it. Under artificial light, it is as if a salamander’s regenerative ability becomes self-consciousness—frozen, on a cellular level.
The rest of the group has left, but Chloe and I linger. I turn my headlamp from white light to red. She makes her flashlight go completely dark. Up ahead, the stadium lights have been turned off, but security beams in empty parking lots are still forming pools of light on the ground below. Chloe tells me that the migration might progress throughout the week as rain continues.
“For me, there’s a deep feeling of awe in the migration,” she says. “It is so comforting, how elements in the natural world confer to make this happen. The spotted salamanders we just saw have been in those ponds before. They’re coming home. Some might have hatched there thirty years prior to come back year after year. Their ancestors have been here for hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years. I feel less alone seeing them. They make me feel like I don’t have to fight all the time. The battles aren’t all lost. This is still happening.”
There doesn’t seem to be another human outdoors for as far as we can see, which is, by the beams of security lights, nearly a mile. After spending hours in the relaxing darkness of Barbwire Pond, the lights strike me as particularly out of place.
In the 1990s, Russian scientists launched a fake moon into space to increase human productivity in what was then known as the Soviet Union. The experiment planned to capture runaway sunlight to reflect it back onto Earth to disrupt the natural cycles of night. It worked. Briefly, the luminosity of roughly five moons illuminated landscapes in Europe before moving onto Russian soil. The experiment led to plans for whole fleets of reflectors that might allow the banishment of night at human will. Ultimately, the project was abandoned when some of the fake moons caught fire.
Though the idea sounds outlandish, one of the main arguments supporting fake-moon creation was cost savings. Proponents have suggested that, if sunlight is never allowed to fully take leave from Earth’s surface, we will no longer have to pay for streetlights. Those fake moons were promoted not as a new world order but as a way of replacing the outdoor lamps we’re already using. Futurist predictions of endless days are observable right now, in this parking lot, in my small Appalachian town, via a scene that’s being replicated in parking lots across the country at this late hour.
A week ago, I would have driven by this artificially lit environ without giving it—or the ground under my car tires—a second thought. The parking lot is so bright that Chloe is forced to shield her eyes from the light that’s pouring from above, though it’s nearing midnight. “Why are these lights even here?” she says. “It’s so weird, the way we live.”
Hoping to commune with fairy shrimp—tiny freshwater crustaceans—on my next ephemeral excursion, I reconnect with my old friend Wendy, trekking again from overlit parking lots to Barbwire Pond. Wendy, who lives a few miles away from Barbwire Pond—in the center of downtown Boone—is one of the most enthusiastic and nature-knowledgeable people I know, and she always seems to be prepared. On the banks of Barbwire Pond, she pulls a recycled food container from her pocket and scoops water. Then she takes the concentrated light of a scuba diving flashlight and places it underneath so that the fairy shrimp she’s caught are backlit.
I’ve loved fairy shrimp since the late 1980s—only back then, I didn’t know it. They’re related to the hybrid brine shrimp marketed as Sea-Monkeys in the back of comic books. Hungry for wonder, when I saw those advertisements as a child, I always wished I could buy some, though I never sent in a check or money order. Now I know that throughout the years I spent pining, I was likely surrounded by Sea-Monkey relatives without realizing it.
These fairy shrimp, barely larger than fireflies, are pale pink, with touches of citrus orange and purple trimming their translucent bodies. Threadlike appendages twinkle like fingers tickling a piano. “They look like little aliens,” Wendy says.
She pours the fairy shrimp back into the pool as we’re joined by her friend Leila and Leila’s preteen daughter, Lou. “Have you heard of axolotls?” Lou asks, referring to the pink-skinned salamander species that’s arguably the most famous in the world. I tell her that I have and that, just recently, I saw a kid wearing a T-shirt that said: Axolotl Questions! Lou giggles.
Axolotls sport feathery external gills that look like Las Vegas headdresses. Their likeness has been immortalized in video games and various toys. I have only just learned that juvenile spotted salamanders have gills very similar in shape to the ones that have helped make the axolotl famous. Yet for many kids at the elementary school located a mile from this place, their best hope of seeing spotted salamanders is via the Frogologists’ mobile aquariums.
“Axolotls are huge!” Lou says. “They live in these lakes in Mexico.” Their presence in popular culture does make them seem gigantic, but they’re around the same size as spotted salamanders, roughly 10 inches long. And they do live in Mexico’s lakes—but not many of them. Axolotls are thought to be the most populous salamander in the world. There might be as many as one million axolotls living in aquariums globally, but in Mexican lakes and canals, there are almost none left, due to environmental degradation.
Almost all pink axolotls in captivity are thought to be descended from a specific leucistic-mutated male that was shipped to Paris in 1863. Since that time, people the world over have bred axolotls for bubblegum-colored skin. But, in the wild, axolotls are almost always brown, animate extensions of their home soil. Pink axolotls are, by contrast, superstars of the human-built world.
In Mexico, the axolotl is famously associated with Xolotl, god of fire, who shape-shifted into a salamander to escape being sacrificed by humans. In regenerative medicine research, there’s no species more famous. Researchers are looking to salamanders to solve all kinds of medical mysteries. The animals have already helped them understand spina bifida, and salamanders’ resistance to cancer—which can be up to a thousand times more effective than that of mammals—makes researchers hopeful their bodily knowledge might someday transfer.
Leila leans into Barbwire Pond to take an underwater-camera photo of a spotted salamander, not-so-distant relative of the axolotl. “This almost feels like scuba diving. It’s a whole different world in there!” she says. Only it isn’t a different world—it’s the one we’ve always belonged to, a living mystery.
Wendy points out a group of dragonfly larvae. Mature dragonflies might not look like dragons, but their larvae do, complete with armor. The silt-colored creatures move like hovercraft, propelling themselves through the pond by ejecting water from their rectal chambers with a pressure equivalent to that of a sports car. This was one of the first insects to evolve on Earth, 300 million years ago. And tonight, there’s one swimming in Wendy’s hand. “I call these butt breathers,” she says as the larva shoots from her thumb to her pointer. At this, Lou snort-laughs.
All the times I’ve seen a dragonfly flit on blue-sky days, I’ve been witnessing ripples of dark places like this. I have, for all my life, been watching the marvels of darkness without recognizing night as the source of their beauty. I’ve been unaware of how a pilgrimage to a place like this might, after a hard, cold season, help soften my fragile spirit—though I now understand that it’s exactly what I’ve been craving.
This ephemeral pool is like some sort of elixir that’s potent enough to change my view of a place I thought I already knew. It is a concoction of hidden biodiversity that will ultimately populate the world around us—flashing through skies in the form of dragonflies, filling entire mountains with salamanders. Even when the water of this ephemeral pool evaporates, this spot will be covered in dehydrated fairy shrimp awaiting next spring’s deluge so that they might reanimate in ephemeral pools the way those Sea-Monkeys were advertised as being revived by kitchen spigots. In a hushed voice, Leila says, “It feels like we’re in on a secret, doesn’t it?”
Before I started spending time with salamanders, I’d never considered that it might be easier to slide across rain-glazed ground. I hadn’t thought about how moisture turns hard-edged leaves into tissue paper. I’d never looked up at bright clouds on a warm spring day and wished they would swell into dark forms. But that’s what happens the following day. Every hour of sunshine makes me think to myself: I wish it would just rain already!
When I tell Wendy that I’m headed out again that night even though clouds have failed to gather and temperatures seem below ideal, she offers to accompany me. Neither of us consider ourselves big news-watchers, but recent events have been acutely concerning. The specifics of doom are ever-changing. What remains the same is how scrolling newsfeeds makes me feel like my soul is shriveling.
My headlamp has, night after night, proven too diffuse for probing water. It is more of a bludgeoning device than a scalpel, so Wendy has brought her husband’s scuba light for me to borrow. I’m happy to have a better tool, but I’m having trouble figuring it out. The flashlight doesn’t have a switch; instead, its casing requires a twist. And I’ve twisted it too far, all the way to a distress setting that looks like the reflections of a disco ball. As the light thump-thumps against my calf, Wendy laughs. “How are you even doing that?” she asks.
The nightclub-style strobes inspire me to tell her that one of the reasons I’ve been excited to witness the migration is because I’ve heard that spotted salamanders perform artful courtship rituals. They nudge each other and move in circles. The activity is so rare that some field biologists who’ve gone out for years have missed witnessing it. Still, I’m here because, against all odds, I want to watch a salamander dance.
Wendy gets it. After a hard winter, she has specific natural-world yearnings of her own. “This time of year, I just want to get my hands dirty,” she says. “It’s the best way I know to combat the winter blues.”
It’s well documented that bacterium in soil can boost moods, maybe as effectively as antidepressant drugs. While light therapy plays a role in increasing serotonin and has long been used to combat seasonal affective disorder with morning exposure, researchers have started sounding warnings that being exposed to artificial light at night warrants more attention for its contribution to rising rates of mood disorders.
It’s been linked to pro-depressive behaviors, and it activates the part of the brain associated with disappointment and dissatisfaction. Brains that process artificial light at night are known to have lower dopamine production the following morning. But, given our cultural associations, it’s difficult to align with the concept of light as a force with the power to make us sad. We almost always use darkness to symbolize depression and light to indicate happiness.
Parents—including me, mother of a twelve-year-old—are increasingly concerned about how often their children are exposed to screens, but a large-scale study put out by the National Institutes of Health in 2020 shows that other forms of artificial light stand to cause harm. Adolescents who live in neighborhoods with high levels of outdoor artificial light at night are more likely to suffer from mood and anxiety disorders than those who live in areas that still have access to natural night. Rates of bipolar disorders and phobias in particular have been found to rise with lighting levels.
The human relationship to artificial light is relatively new, but our relationship to natural darkness is ancient. This seems obvious, but it’s hard to absorb that, unlike society’s most prevalent light-dark metaphors, light is not always a positive force and darkness is not always a negative one.
It’s Friday, but there are no stadium lights tonight. The soccer fields are quiet. It hasn’t rained, and there’s nary a worm on the sidewalk. “I don’t think we’re going to see anything,” Wendy says, directing our attention across the New River, where security lights reveal the contour of a distant riverbank.
Instinctively, we turn to identifying the lights as if they are stars forming constellations. There’s a car dealership. A produce-distribution center. A new indoor gym that Wendy sighs at on sight. “That’s right on the river, one of the prettiest places in the world, and they didn’t put a single window on the backside of that building,” she says. Even in full daylight, people on treadmills cannot see the river running alongside them.
We recognize another cluster of lights as a gas station. We’re temporarily stumped by a parking lot that appears to be the brightest spot in the lineup. It’s directly across from the ephemeral pool. Ultimately, Wendy identifies the lot as being attached to the administrative offices of a local electric company. She shrugs. “I guess they were like, ‘Well, we’ve got the energy, might as well use it!’”
Outdoor lighting at night often gives people a sense of security, but there is not clear scientific evidence that it increases safety. In fact, some studies have found that streetlights do not lessen accidents or crime. Certain forms of security lighting have even been found to decrease safety since they make potential victims and property that might be stolen or vandalized easier for perpetrators to visually target. It’s a fraught topic with no easy answers, but the fact remains: It’s not uncommon for outdoor lights to be installed haphazardly, favoring as much illumination as possible with little thought as to how darkness might situationally be of aid.
Temperatures keep dropping. Our breath appears as chalky puffs against a blackboard. We walk back toward the ephemeral pool, drawn by the promise of life. At the place where the sidewalk ends, we crouch in foliage that shields us from the lights across the river. In my scuba beam, I can see fallen twigs with salamander egg clutches attached to them. And there, in the middle of the pond, embracing one of those clutches, is a female spotted salamander. The egg mass she’s clinging to resembles NASA images of a star expanding. And right now, she’s adding to it.
“She’s laying eggs! Right now!” Wendy says. She grabs my arm in an I-can’t-believe-this move, and we jostle up and down like we’ve just won the lottery.
Next to the egg-laying salamander, the pale flash of a second salamander’s belly appears. Then it disappears. This isn’t the courtship ritual I’ve read about, in which males attempt to woo females by nuzzling their heads, but it’s clearly some type of dance. “Did you see that?” I ask Wendy. But she is still hyper-focused on the egg laying.
“I can’t believe this is happening! We need to be careful that we don’t disturb her,” Wendy says, turning her scuba light from its high to low setting.
Meanwhile, two frogs locked in an embrace pop to the surface of Barbwire Pond. They’re surrounded by a halo of fairy shrimp who are fanning their pink-feather legs, flashing tropical colors in dark waters. Through the cloud of translucent fairies, the frogs swerve into a gelatinous mass of already-laid frog eggs, shining purple. Their movement is making everything quiver.
That’s when I see the dancing salamander again. From the darkest part of this pool, in the darkest part of this beloved park, the salamander’s star-dotted body shoots again to the surface of water. This time, Wendy sees him, too. “Oh, my!” she exclaims.
The animal is flipping. He’s somersaulting. His feet-hands are fervently waving back and forth, churning with such joy that we start laughing along with the wood frogs as, all around us, the peeper frogs howl. Every species in this ephemeral pool seems to have come alive at the same time. The water is writhing with life. It twists and turns, colors of a kaleidoscope, until I’ve lost my bearings.
When the frogs kick off into deeper water, it feels as though they’ve conjured a celestial wind, knocking us out of the hypnotic state we’ve been caught in. Wendy and I both take a step back at the same time and gasp in unison. It’s that tangible, the feeling that we’ve just surfaced from swimming in a pool of life everlasting.
What we’re feeling is awe, which the Journal of Positive Psychology defines as “a self-expansive emotion, where the boundaries of a separate self are transcended to process a larger, complex reality.” Neuroscientists have found that, when humans experience awe, it potentially reduces the brain’s capacity to read bodily boundaries.
In awe, the egocentric sections of the human brain appear, on scans, to go dark as the organ moves to process “you and me” into “we.” In this way, awe isn’t just an emotion; it’s a physiological experience that temporarily lessens our neurological firing. Awe is, in this sense, a resting state.
“Wow,” Wendy says. “I feel so full.”
I, too, feel satiated. Like my soul has been rehydrated.
We came to Barbwire Pond reeling. We are still wrestling with the reality that justice doesn’t always prevail. We are reckoning with the fact that, even in the modern world, safety is often an illusion. But life on Earth is tenacious. And we are part of it, indivisibly.
The term “mucked up” is used to indicate that something is wrong. But muck is life-giving and life-sustaining. I have the urge to tell everyone I know about this place, like an ephemeral pool evangelist. But trampling human feet would imperil the very ecology that deserves attention. Still, traffic to this singular pool of wonder need not be dangerously concentrated.
There are, around the world, tens of thousands of ephemeral pools. Maybe millions. The reality is: Nobody knows. Ephemeral pools have been found all over this planet. They form a string of earthen bowls from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. There are some citizens taking inventory of pools in states like Vermont. But they mostly exist without humans noticing.
They’re notoriously hard to find because, much of the year, they aren’t there. Yet creatures like fairy shrimp remain in their absence, waiting to be reborn with rain. A single ephemeral pool, like this one, can hold more biodiversity than its fifty surrounding acres. On this imperiled planet, magic still exists, often in the places we least expect it.
This ephemeral pool is, like almost every ephemeral pool, threatened. A municipal complex, with another parking lot full of artificial lights, might soon be built across the river. This sidewalk ends abruptly because someone has plans to extend it. But Barbwire Pond is right here, right now. There are thousands of people who walk this path in daylight, turning around where the sidewalk ends. They don’t know this exists. And it’s hard to protect that which you haven’t really seen or heard or been given the opportunity to consider as important.
I’ve been examining the surface of Earth at close range. And all the while, I’ve been balancing on the balls of my feet, straining to hold my body aloft, somehow separate. I’ve been holding myself at bay while searching for animals on the ground, because—as ridiculous as it sounds to admit now—I didn’t want to get my pants dirty. But the exhaustion of late nights has accumulated. The position I’ve been holding is not one I can sustain for much longer.
When Wendy walks off, I lower myself to the ground, rolling from my feet to kneel on soil that’s still saturated from earlier storms. The ground is soft. It is forgiving. The relief of resting against it is somehow surprising. This is the respite I have been denying myself by not getting fully down and dirty, night after night. Because, despite how intently I’ve been focusing on it, the ground has felt somehow beneath me.
Until now, I have not really been aware of this underlying perception. I thought the pajama-wearing student’s reaction to a salamander stooping so low as to walk around on the ground was sort of funny. But it’s a deep-seated notion that I myself have been carrying subconsciously.
Before I started paying attention to salamanders, I never realized that there’s peace to be made with darkness below as well as above. But now here I am, on my knees, ready to accept encompassing darkness—here, on the surface of Earth—as its own sort of savior. This might, to some, sound like blasphemy. To me, it feels not unlike an old-time Appalachian baptismal ceremony.
Even though it’s now common for baptisms to take place in fiberglass pools and galvanized cattle troughs full of chlorinated water, it isn’t unheard-of to come across more traditional ceremonies at municipal parks like this one in summer. I have, with my own eyes, seen people go down to the river to pray in that old way. I have watched entire Baptist congregations gather along riverbanks in white clothes to be dunked in the flow of water that has not been sanitized—that is to say, water that’s still full of life-forms, including some of the largest salamanders on this planet: hellbenders.
Those giant Appalachian salamanders, which live in the river just beyond Barbwire Pond, can grow to be nearly three feet long and were named such because the European settlers who saw them thought that they looked like they came from hell and that when they twisted themselves under river stone, back to hell they went. But in that river, where parishioners are dunked to symbolically shed sin in baptism, their white clothing sometimes gets soiled, taking on the color of silt, the color of salamander skin, the color of local riverbeds.
Here, at the place where the sidewalk ends, I have found a shared sanctuary. And in it, I have gotten thoroughly cold and wet and dirty. Clearly, this wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of fun. I’m not sure it’s even mine. But in the muck—with salamanders, fairies, and dragons—I am coming to understand, in a visceral way, that being grounded is not a punishment; it is a privilege. The dark recesses of this planet are not hell; they are home.
Tonight, the houses on the ridgeline above the park look like aquariums that have been filled with light. But down here in the valley, I feel as though I’ve been poured from my own container back into the whole. Down here, fairies are tickling my fingers with their dancing feet, reminding me to pay attention.
Darkness, like a mountain-surfing salamander, migrates toward us every day, sliding across the burning face of this world. But welcoming it would be countercultural. Artificial light is a consumer good, bought and sold, while natural darkness offers itself freely. It is a renewable, life-giving-and-sustaining respite that we, as humans, are increasingly depriving ourselves of because we have been told, so many times, in so many ways, to fight the dying of light. But at Barbwire Pond, it’s clear that surrendering to natural night would be a communal victory.
The same darkness that presses against celestial bodies will brush against our faces, cool as a mother’s hand against a fevered cheek, as soon as we let it. As soon as we, like brigades of crossing guards, hold space for it. I’m only visiting this spot temporarily, like most of the migratory creatures in this bubbling pool. I’m surrounded by lives beginning and continuing, cycles new and ancient. This is but a way station in a never-ending migration. But right now, there’s a salamander dancing in the darkness that remains. And to bear witness, I only need to be still. I only need to be.
I give the end of my scuba light a gentle twist, skipping the disco setting for a slow fade. As light slips away, my contracted pupils begin to widen to absorb as much of this place as I can. Leaves, branches, whole trees are swept up in the incoming tide of darkness. Gone are the threads of silver barbwire, the delineation between the place where the sidewalk ends and the one where life begins. It is difficult to even see the outline of my own hands. My arms, my legs, all my body parts dissolve as the inky borders of the ephemeral pool expand to include me.