Glowworms Squirming
I’ve got maggots on my mind. This might not sound pleasant. In fact, it might evoke a reaction along the lines of: Ewww! But, if you’ve never met any fungus gnat larvae, that might just be bug bias talking.
Orfelia fultoni, more charismatically known as glowworms, are associated with damp, dismal places, because they require darkness to shine—which they do, a deep, brilliant blue. On cool spring evenings, these maggots make earthen embankments gleam as though they’re encrusted with sapphires. I’ve seen them once—and once wasn’t enough.
It was in Tennessee that I first encountered the species. I was walking a path along Norton Creek in search of blue ghost fireflies when I saw light glimmering on a raw road embankment. In awe, I told Will Kuhn, the biologist who identified them for me, that I’d always wanted to visit the famed glowworm caves of New Zealand.
Because of this, it was particularly shocking when Will told me that Southern Appalachia is one of the only other places on Earth where blue glowworms are known to exist—and that the Orfelia fultoni I’d found on my firefly quest were cousins to the famed glowworms that live in New Zealand and, to a lesser degree, Australia.
Will admitted that he, like me, was guilty of not always recognizing the wealth of life around him. Being cognizant of this, as the head of Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s biodiversity inventory, is his actual day job, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that he’d started recording species in his backyard after his farther-afield projects shut down. “It’s just a regular-size yard,” he told me. But already he’s identified hundreds of species that he hadn’t noticed before.
If I was surprised when Will told me that there are populations of glowworms across Appalachia, I was flabbergasted to later discover that, in the mountains of Alabama, some reside in wondrous sandstone slot canyons. Alabama’s Dismals Canyon holds one of the largest known populations of Orfelia fultoni in the world, with glowworms present in spring and summer. The species is so closely associated with the area, people occasionally refer to the glowworms as “dismalities,” though the attraction is not well-known outside of the Southeast. Still, Orfelia fultoni spin webs on slot-canyon walls, without fanfare, embraced by darkness. And I aimed to find them there.
Only, when I started travel planning, I learned that the season had been cut short by a heat wave. Where once there would have been thousands of glowworms, there were only a few still shining. Locals feared that, in a matter of days, numbers would dip below a dozen. This made searching for glowworms feel like wonder-chasing during an apocalypse. The indication of climate change was harrowing. The personal missed opportunity, beyond disappointing.
Then, almost exactly a year from when I gained my first glimpse of Orfelia fultoni, Grandfather Mountain, the local-to-me place where synchronous fireflies were discovered in 2019, announced that they were hosting an inaugural event called Grandfather Glows to celebrate bioluminescent creatures. In advertisements, glowworms were noted, in fine print, as a sideshow.
Event organizers knew people would be interested in attending. But on the day that registration opened, so many people logged in from around the world that it crashed Grandfather Mountain’s website. When it was relaunched, tickets sold out in 60 seconds. Despite the odds, with only a few hundred allocated spots, I secured one.
More than a few people I mentioned this to were envious, and one woman I know was downright upset, because she had tried and failed to get a ticket. She was mad that the mountain was charging money for nature communing, which she argued should be freely accessible to everyone. She told me the whole thing reeked of privilege. Then she revealed that, though she couldn’t figure out how to find local maggots, she had previously visited the glowworm caves of New Zealand.
Despite her around-the-world encounter with their cousins, she hadn’t even heard of Orfelia fultoni prior to Grandfather Glow’s advertising. I told her that I’ve come to understand that diverse fireflies are present in pockets all over the region, suggesting that she might also have Orfelia fultoni along her rural road’s embankment. It’s a possibility I have been wondering about myself. Because night is unmapped territory. And, no matter where we live, no matter how otherwise outdoorsy and capable we might be, many of us are unsure of how to navigate even the land we know best when it turns into a nightscape.
I’ve been visiting Grandfather Mountain since I was a child. Always, I have related to the human-face profile of the mountain like the features of a beloved elder. After driving through Boone, I find peaks cresting clouds, making Grandfather look like a green-bearded man in a milk bath. I can see his nose, forehead, and green chin—each of them sky islands likely inhabited by saw-whet owls.
I turn onto a gravel road to enter the first-ever Grandfather Glows event. Almost immediately, I bump into John Caveny, Director of Education and Natural Resources for the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation. I’ve been acquainted with John for a few years. He’s almost always sporting facial hair and a baseball cap, periodically claiming that he doesn’t know a lot, but that he’s good at finding people who do. Every time he says it, in a self-effacing way, I think about how this sounds, to me, like a leadership trait.
On a hillside where we can see visitors milling around educational booths, John tells me that during a recent staff pre-showing, it was a little windy for fireflies, but the glowworms were out in full force. “When everybody saw the glowworms, they couldn’t stop asking questions. I think they had some idea of what fireflies might be like, but those glowworms were like nothing they’d seen before. Everyone kept asking me about larvae. When do you get an opportunity to talk about larvae? It was awesome! People are coming for the fireflies tonight,” John says, “but I suspect they’ll leave talking about the glowworms.”
The species of glowworms found on Grandfather Mountain have two lanterns, and they are the brightest known blue-light-emitting life-form on Earth. John’s seen them on riverbanks and roadsides, both locales bare of foliage. “We don’t really know much about glowworms. Are they there because those are the places they prefer, or can you just not see them other places because plants are covering them?” he muses. “Have we just not found them in other places because there’s no one looking? Nobody knows!” There are indications that the glowworms’ bioluminescence is to attract prey, which then gets snared in the gossamer webs they spin. John isn’t totally convinced that the light doesn’t have other functions, but these glowworms are nearly unstudied in the context of their native habitat.
Fog begins to wrap around us like the graying innards of an antique quilt. If it rains too hard, fireflies might decide not to fly, but the glowworms will be delighted. John turns his face upward until he’s a human-scale replica of Grandfather’s profile. “It’s a new moon tonight, pretty dark out,” he says, “and these clouds should help us see some things.” Glowworms, like salamanders, inspire appreciation for rain.
The thick mists of Grandfather might be a boon for glowworms, but they make it hard to see Harvey Lemelin, one of John’s expert contacts, until he’s pretty much standing next to us, raincoat hood cinched around his face. He’s traveled from Canada to attend the evening’s event, but he’s more concerned about the visitors who vied for tickets. “I hope this rain lets up, for their sake,” he says.
Harvey, a professor at Lakehead University, is here as an ecotourism consultant. He was particularly happy when John reached out to him about an evening event because he’s observed a desperate need for after-hours engagement among students. Harvey used to talk to his classes about catching fireflies to evoke wonder, but every year, he finds fewer of his students have those memories to draw from. So he’s had to replace bioluminescent encounters with examples of human-made light. “They’ve been to rave parties. So now, in class, I tell them to imagine glow sticks in the hands of people who are dancing. It’s an image they’re more familiar with,” he says. “When we disconnect from nature, we disconnect from night. And remember, these are students who’ve chosen to take outdoor recreation classes. If they’ve lost that connection, it doesn’t bode well for everybody else.”
Even more concerning is that he’s watched students, year after year, become increasingly filled with dread when he keeps them outside on evening field trips. “No one experiences massive darkness anymore. No one uses their own senses,” he says. “That’s where events like this come in. They give people an opportunity to reflect.”
Harvey got his start researching polar bear tourism with a friend of his who was a biologist. “My friend was studying what the bears were doing,” he says. “And I was studying what the humans were doing.” He is the reason that polar bear tour vehicles have two guard grids in the open vent holes that allow tourists to view bears. When he saw operators’ single-screen configuration, he suggested fortification. Otherwise, he warned, people’s fingers would go all the way through, reaching bear jaws.
When he shared this double-grid suggestion, an operator asked if he thought tourists were idiots. “I told him, ‘No, it’s not about being idiots. It’s about instinct,’” Harvey recalls. “‘We’re tactile. We instinctively want to reach out and touch things. That doesn’t make us idiots; that makes us human.’”
These days, he specializes in entomotourism, a subset of wildlife tourism focused on insects. Harvey has written whole articles about dragonfly tourism, in which people specifically seek out the dragonfly larvae I found in ephemeral pools by happenstance. Those tourists are sometimes called dragon chasers, which gives the practice mystical flair. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that he coauthored one of the firefly articles that inspired me to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park to see synchronous fireflies in the first place. Entomotourism is a small field, and in it, Harvey’s kind of a big deal.
With shrinking large-animal populations, entomotourism has turned to charismatic microfauna to foster more-than-human understanding. At its best, the practice moves people from bug disgust to tolerance to full-on insect respect. And, in the case of lightning bugs and glowworms, hopefully a new appreciation for natural darkness as undervalued habitat.
When Harvey was called in to consult on the planning for this event, he helped the mountain come up with strategies to mitigate the damage visitors might cause. “We could have put hundreds of additional people out here every night,” John says. “But we’re trying to figure out how to introduce this to as many people as possible without having them destroy what they’ve come to learn about.”
Harvey gives a nod. “When all goes well with an event like this, we witness a transformation in people,” he says. “They start to wonder: How can I make my own part of the world better? How can I bring this home?”
Beyond where we’re standing, a trail has been sectioned off with rope. It’s lit with red lanterns, making the scene feel like a film premiere. With darkness setting in, we follow visitors up the demarcated grassy path to a hardtop road, where some people have set up encampments, finding various ways to pass the time before sunset. There’s a woman reading in a mini–living room she’s built with a tarp. There’s a couple walking, arm in arm, barefoot, down the blacktop road, splashing as they go. Harvey raises his eyebrows at the shoeless humans. “I’ll have to make note of all this,” he says.
We’re not talking loudly, but the farther we walk, the quieter visitors get. Soon, we’re shushed by a group of people who are already staring into the forest, looking for firefly lanterns, despite how much daylight is left. Harvey takes it as a sign that Grandfather’s visitor guidelines are working. If the synchronous event at Great Smoky Mountains National Park was like waiting for a parade, the general mode of pilgrims here is more that of parishioners waiting for a sermon to begin.
Given the fact that I’ve been biding time with people in official gear, when I briefly separate from the Grandfather crew, a man approaches me, clearly thinking I’m part of the naturalist staff. He’s a transplant from somewhere abroad where bioluminescent beetles are uncommon, and he’s nervous. “Do the fireflies bite?” he asks.
At first, I think I’ve misheard him, but he repeats himself, arms crossed, finger to his temple as if, no matter what I say, he’s determined to remember. “No, these fireflies don’t bite,” I assure him. “They just blink. They’re not going to hurt you.”
Relieved, the man leaves to share this information with a huddle of elderly women who are accompanying him. They chatter in whispers, some of them turning to smile at me in relief. I try to imagine how it might be to see fireflies without a childhood of spending time with them. There are surely things in this world that I unnecessarily fear, things that these visitors, familiar with other parts of this planet, know to be safe without hesitation. Out of context, it isn’t all that difficult to imagine fireflies as little heat-seeking missiles ready to burn skin.
People often talk about fear of the dark as tracing back to ancestors, how threats of large animals at night probably made our species jumpy. But it seems far more likely that our way-back predecessors did not fear darkness as we do, because for them it was a place to which humans belonged. Our ancestors, all of them, knew the night as it existed directly around them, just as they knew how to identify the creatures and nuanced sounds that it held. How strange it is, from that perspective, to think that anyone would view darkness as something pulse-quickening in and of itself. Fireflies do not bite—but, then again, neither does night.
When I circle back to members of the roving event staff, I share the man’s unexpected question. John doesn’t seem surprised. In fact, the idea that a visitor has asked about a firefly’s ferocity delights him. “That’s exactly the sort of person we want to get out here,” he says. “Someone who is afraid of fireflies is someone we want to be able to reach.”
Harvey has fielded too many questions from undergraduates to be fazed by any inquiry. But, so closely juxtaposed to stories about his time with polar bears, I cannot help but think about how Grandfather is one of the only places I’ve personally seen a black bear free-roaming. Yet about those giant nocturnal creatures I have not heard a single person express anxiety. It’s not that I’m particularly concerned about bears tonight—especially given the bustle of three hundred people, quiet though they might be—it’s just strange to think that we’ve been so greatly distanced from darkness that we often do not have the knowledge we need to sort night terrors, much less wonders, by reasonable degrees.
After my neighborhood bobcat encounter, I did a little sleuthing about darkness and light as they relate to predatory behavior. In a study on bobcats, nights of low moonlight yielded less productive hunting than nights of high illumination. In the wild, increased light often helps large predators on the prowl, whereas darkness offers avenues of escape for prey. How strange that we tend to think the opposite.
Given that bears were not included in the promotional materials, I start wondering if visitors have even registered that bears live here. I’m inspired to ask Harvey, polar-bear consultant, dark-recreation educator: “Have you found that people are generally more afraid of bears or the dark?”
“Darkness,” Harvey says, without pause. “We’ve almost completely forgotten how to relate to it, and we’re alienated from pretty much all the animals that depend on it.”
Harvey, unlike his young students, has caught plenty of fireflies in his day. But when it comes to connecting with night, it’s always nice to find new, positive associations. He, as much as anyone, knows how fortunate we are to have found our way here. Harvey estimates that Appalachia’s glowworm cousins account for one million annual tourists to Australia and New Zealand, where conservation concerns have led to limited viewing. It’s one of the reasons John felt it was important to bring Harvey on board. Regionally, firefly tourism has already presented challenges, particularly south of here, in DuPont Forest, where public fervor to see blue ghosts led to forest-floor trampling—a sad reminder that a loss of habitat leads to a loss of magic.
Once a natural wonder is discovered, those who care for it often find themselves in a race to protect it in double-edged situations. Ecotourism can create acute dangers, but it stands to help lessen larger systemic dangers like light pollution. Studies clearly show that people are more likely to take pro-environmental action if they’ve had tangible encounters that make them care about a particular place, species, or issue. Even so, the balance of harm and reward is one that seemingly no one has tuned to perfection. But plenty of people are trying—and, on Grandfather Mountain, the level of care is heartening.
In addition to Alabama, Appalachian glowworms are known to live in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. But Grandfather Mountain is, as far as anyone knows, the only place in North America where it’s possible to see synchronous fireflies, glowworms, and blue ghosts simultaneously. Harvey will, in official reports, refer to this evening as one of the first case studies of firefly-glowworm entomotourism in its “embryonic phase.” I have not yet seen an iota of glow on Grandfather Mountain. But I am already witness to the birth of an international tourist attraction.
As a travel-loving human, I have done a thousand amazing things in a thousand different places around the world. I have, for much of my life, overshot in my quest for awe, overlooking the very land that gave me a love of place from the start: the mountains I explored as a child, not as sweeping vistas, but, rather, through the soft undersides of rhododendron leaves, the smooth-on-skin pebbles of creek beds. Now, people from all over the globe are overshooting their home habitats to discover the nocturnal marvels of my homeland alongside me.
Grandfather Mountain’s synchronous fireflies have been whoosh-blinking for some time before it’s dark enough for me to see neon blue on a road embankment. Glowworms come into focus slowly until, finally, the roadside is a luminescent ribbon. A few stray blue ghosts are hovering above the stationary glowworms, creating some confusion. Are these two species somehow connected? Each time I’ve seen glowworms, they’ve been accompanied by these ghosts. It isn’t clear if this is a coincidence or if there’s some other relationship at play.
Some areas have more glowworms than others. I walk the road until I locate the largest group. Around each pinpoint of blue light, there are webs spun across soil. It makes the glowworms look like they are floating in cotton candy clouds. I get as close as I can to the road’s white line to study them, navigating a gauntlet of chairs abandoned by other visitors.
The brightest area is partially blocked off by a family of four—mother, father, two teens. They were here before sunset, so I’m curious to know if they knew something I did not when choosing a location. I decline their offer to move chairs aside, but it emboldens me to ask: “Did you know that you were going to have the best seat for glowworms?”
“It was raining pretty hard when we came out,” the dad tells me. “So we put our chairs here for shelter.” I can, even at night, sense shade here, where tree overstory reaches all the way across the road, branches intertwined like hand-holding fingers.
These parents have flown in from the West Coast because, as Tennessee natives, they have been missing the fireflies of their youth. “Grandfather Mountain was the place of so many childhood memories,” the woman says, “when we saw this event, we decided to try to get tickets.” But even though they’ve come for the synchronous show, they’re sticking closely to the glowworms.
I tell them that, though I’m a huge fan of fireflies, I’ve mostly come for the glowworms. As we chat about bioluminescence, I mention that I’ve heard their home state has notable bioluminescent waters—full of organisms that light up when disturbed. “We’ll have to look into that,” the woman says, suddenly distracted by the arrival of a blue ghost. “As a child, I always wanted to know more about fireflies, so I’d trap them and put them in Mason jars to make lanterns,” she says. “Back then, I didn’t know their adult phase only lasted a matter of days. Days! I did things that meant they spent their entire lives imprisoned!” What was for her a blip in time was for that firefly a lifetime in captivity. “I think I even smashed some of them. It’s horrifying when I think back to it,” she says.
Currently, every firefly flash feels like something fragile and precious. So, too, does the dark cathedral of trees that’s protecting us from the lights of housing developments beyond the gates of Grandfather Mountain. The woman says of her sons, who are hovering nearby, “When we got here, they were like: ‘Are we really going to sit here for hours in the dark staring at bugs?’ Now they don’t seem ready to go. It’s amazing.” Their sustained interest is, to her, nearly as fascinating as the glow-world we’re immersed in.
Since we’re in such a populous glowworm spot, other visitors are drawn to it. “I knew about the fireflies, but these glowworms might be my favorite part!” a passerby says.
“They look like a night sky,” another observes.
“I think it’s more like being in an airplane, looking down at a city,” their friend retorts.
Most visitors move on after quick encounters. But others linger. One woman, after crouching at close range, says, “Wait, are they moving?”
Her companion confirms: “I saw some shifting around. I thought something was wrong with my eyes at first!”
It is disorienting to have your gaze fixed on constellations or city lights only to have them shift. The worms, barely larger than the half-moon of my thumbnail, are writhing just enough to remind us that they are living light.
To me, they look like an almost exact match of Pleiades, a brilliant star cluster that shines 444 light-years away from Earth. These blue worms, nestled in their webs, and depictions of those blue stars, nestled in nebulae, are a perfect match in overlay. The resemblance is so uncanny that, forevermore, when I see space photos of Pleiades, I will instinctively think, at first glance, that I’m being presented with a photo of Appalachia’s gorgeous, glowing maggots—stars that squirm on the surface of our home planet.
The Orfelia fultoni species was first recorded by science in the 1940s by B. B. Fulton, a naturalist who noticed blue light in his western North Carolina backyard and groped around in the dirt, investigating. He was the first person to document that the larvae conceal themselves in dark crevices during the day, inching out to lounge on gossamer webs at night.
Fulton attempted breeding experiments, but he quickly found that, when exposed to heat, the creatures died. Around the world, glowworms that shine by night and require dark forests are, despite the pressures of climate change, still being discovered. It wasn’t until 2020, a year after the discovery of synchronous fireflies on Grandfather, that glowworms were confirmed to also live here. They were initially noticed by my buddy John himself, which is a detail that he doesn’t confess until several hours after dark.
He’s taken a break from his rounds to join me under my tree shelter. I tell him that I’ve been thinking about how trees that offer shade by day also offer protection against light pollution at night. “I’ve never really thought about shade at night,” he says. But, now that I’ve mentioned it, John recalls that he was in the layered shade of rhododendron, crawling around on the ground, when he found his first glowworm on Grandfather Mountain.
“At first,” he says, “I thought I saw a female blue ghost waiting around.” To be sure of what he’d found, he enlisted the help of Clyde Sorenson, the entomologist who had reported the mountain’s synchronous fireflies. “It was pretty amazing when he confirmed that I’d found a glowworm, given there are so few places they’re known,” John says.
Globally, maggots seem to be having a moment. In 2019, the same year that I first saw Orfelia fultoni, a new glowworm species was described in Brazil. Neoceroplatus betaryensis is a confirmed cousin to both Appalachian and New Zealand glowworms, another fungus gnat species, considered to be the first blue-light-emitting insect known in South America.
Orfelia fultoni’s South American cousins’ bioluminescent functions are thought to be identical. Brazilian researchers think the worms have potential uses in biotechnology, marking cells or genes, and in the creation of pollution biosensors. But, in a way, all glowworms are biosensors, since if you notice them, you know that you’re in an area where light pollution has, at least in part, been held at bay.
Still, glowworms are such a fringe species that there still aren’t many people paying attention to them. Even here on Grandfather Mountain, where things are being carefully considered, it isn’t clear how many are in residence. “How many glowworms do you think there are here?” I ask.
“On this whole road? Thousands and thousands,” John says. “We haven’t done any surveys on glowworms yet, because we’ve been so focused on fireflies in preparation for this event.” He makes a casual grid-frame with his hands and says, “We can safely say there are hundreds of glowworms here, just right in front of where we’re standing.” He drops into a squat. “But, Leigh Ann, check this out. Down here, things get complicated.”
Standing, it’s only possible to see one angle. But, if you’re willing to shift perspective, there’s more light to be found. I take a lower vantage point and gain access to glowworms that, from above, are shrouded by soil. I see new lights—more glowworms. Some are dwelling at the rims of the earthen holes they inhabit; others are more deeply embedded in their worm-size caves. Every time we move, more light comes into view. It isn’t possible to see all the glowworms at the same time.
We zoom in and out. We go high, we go low. With worms, we wiggle. Soon, a couple of visitors approach, oblivious to our awkward posturing. As they study the glowworms, one of them says, “Hey, look, some of them are in little groups. They’re like, ‘Hey, we need friends too.’”
“Yeah, but then there are some out there on their own, like they’re spreading.”
John’s filing away what he hears as things that might be worth looking into later. When the visitors ultimately move on, he says, “Just in this area, what I thought was fifty glowworms at first is more like a population of a hundred and seventy-five,” he says. “I just counted. And that’s in an area that’s barely twenty-five feet wide. This quickly goes from hundreds to thousands when you take in the whole of this road.” Upland, the road curves. We could not see the end of it from here even if we tried.
There could be, as indicated by a quick layperson’s count, as many—maybe even more—glowworms here as there are in peak seasons at Alabama’s Dismals Canyon, where, depending on weather conditions, populations range from 1,000 to 20,000. And this is the first night that the public has ever encountered them on Grandfather Mountain. Being here feels like participating in history.
Beyond the glowworm-encrusted embankment, synchronous fireflies are still making small whooshes of light. There are even a few blue ghosts drunkenly weaving in between the lanterns of other species. But John is, like me, wholly focused on the maggots that have turned this roadside into an effervescent river of light.
By day, this roadside is passed by hundreds of thousands of visitors a year en route to better-known attractions. After hours, it’s frequented only by security officers tasked with protecting the mountain from off-hours trespassers. All night, the guards cruise around in patrol vehicles, headlights on high, blind to the life around them. At least, that’s what they used to do.
When John first started doing firefly surveys to get a baseline population count under Harvey’s guidance, he didn’t have enough late-night helpers, so he enlisted members of the security team. “They were out here all night anyway, so I asked them to go to certain spots, get out of their cars, turn their headlights off, and report what they found.” And what they found was diverse bioluminescence, all over the mountain.
Now the night watchmen of Grandfather Mountain have seasonal duties that go beyond paying attention to threats; it is part of their job to find and guard glowing lives. In sensitive areas, they are careful with where they even point flashlight beams. Because glowworms have helped them understand that, in preserving life, security lights are not always as important as the security of natural night.
Since entomologist Clyde Sorenson first reported synchronous fireflies on Grandfather Mountain, he has found yet another undescribed species—in his own lowland backyard. After a neighbor reported some strange glows, he decided to stake out the woodlands behind his house, where he’s resided for more than 25 years. It was a site where he had, already, recorded at least 11 known-to-science firefly species. Yet when he looked again, he found fireflies resembling blue ghosts flying 200 yards from his own back door.
Are they blue ghosts outside of their mountainous range? Are they a different species? Are they new to science? He’s started a citizen-science project to figure it out, admitting that the close-to-home discovery has been both delightful and embarrassing. He’s a professional entomologist, after all, a renowned firefly enthusiast. If it could happen to him, it seems like it could happen to anyone.
I’m thinking about this one afternoon, not long after the Grandfather Glows event, as I walk the rhododendron-rich quarter mile it takes to get to my mailbox. The round trip to a main road takes some time, seemingly uphill both ways. Halfway through my walk, a neighbor slows his truck to ask if I need a ride. I decline, but I tell him about Grandfather Glows, and I explain that I’ve been scouting tree shade and trickling water and bare patches of dirt surrounded by hardwood leaf litter. After I detail my quest for glowworms, I ask, in all seriousness, “Do you think I should send out a neighborhood email saying something like: ‘Hey, I’m going to be walking around after dark, please don’t shoot me’?”
I’m on friendly terms with my full-time human neighbors, though our worldviews sometimes diverge. We alert each other to the timing of ephemeral wildflower blooms and host neighborhood parties with old-time bands. We often join each other on summer kayak trips, and in fall, we gather fruit from scattered apple trees to utilize the antique cider press that’s stored in a barn every other day of the year.
We’re not all that far from town, but far enough to know that depending on each other is sometimes the only way we can make it. We collectively endure blizzards and floods. But in darkness, out here, every animal is a shadow. No human is, from a distance, recognizable.
We must rely on local knowledge to navigate this terrain. There are no Google Maps to help, no filters that can reveal hidden arsenals. I know which of my neighbors are stockpiling guns—and there are many of them. I know who locks them up when they’re not in use, who uses a silencer when target shooting, who drinks at night and occasionally shoots at the sky for fun. I know who fled here from a city after being threatened with a machine gun. I know who has lived here all their life and recently taught their eight-year-old how to shoot deer, right off their porch, to fill their meat freezer for winter.
I don’t have a count, but I suspect there are, in my neighborhood, more guns than people—all on a patch of land where houses and livestock and wildlife rub surprisingly close to each other. These factors comprise my reality. This likely sounds terrifying to people from off the mountain—and it is, admittedly, sometimes scary to me—but guns are part of an equation that I have, for all my life, been required to calculate when outdoor exploring.
During salamander season, I was nervous about visiting the gun club after hours, but in all actuality, in terms of raining bullets, I might have been safer there than in my own neighborhood. It is a place many people wouldn’t want to tread after dark—especially if they didn’t know it personally. This is, of course, another reason that Grandfather Glows is so sought after. Even when I visit the parks and trails that are considered public domain, I often notice closes-at-dusk signs. If night is disappearing due to artificial light, landscapes where it’s permissible to tread after dark are also increasingly closed off by private property signs, security cameras, and, in many parts of the United States, gun-toting humans.
It might seem shocking, but—despite all the gun owners around me—I still fear more deeply the harm of absentee real estate investors. There are some who buy property and develop it minimally, but many destroy flora and fauna and put fences up where—within my lifetime—locals were free to roam in an unspoken culture of communion. For generations, walking unposted forestland was a generally accepted practice in this area, so long as no one was harvesting things like ginseng or venison without permission.
My neighbor, who apparently does not overlay a mental map of gun ownership when taking mailbox walks, shrugs off my firearms concern. But when I tell him about my bobcat encounter, he gets nervous. “A bobcat, huh,” he says. “Now, that’s something you should worry about.” In the back of my mind, I always carry a wise quote from my friend Mike: The things we fear most aren’t usually the things that wind up hurting us. After all, we’re generally afraid of the dark, but it’s artificial light that might ultimately play a larger role in harming us all.
When my neighbor moves on, I go back to looking for places where tree canopies meet over the road. I scout ditches and drainage areas, slopes that have been left alone because contractors deemed them too steep to build on. This is a neighborhood dominated by gravel, paths that move underfoot to announce a traveler’s presence.
In an area of relative shade, I notice some holes in bare ground. I see silken webs that lack the intricate patterns of spider work. I start attempting to conjure, in my layperson imagination, the cast of tiny creatures that might have crafted such a setting. Just when I decide this might be worth checking out at night, my dog, Wilder, an 80-pound goofball, bounds up a hill where hardwood leaf-litter meets road embankment.
I call him back with an urgency that he finds confusing, since—unlike the heart of my neighbor’s vegetable garden—I’ve never emphasized this spot as worth safeguarding, but I don’t want him to carelessly paw-churn the understory. In the wake of Grandfather Glows, this land—where spring water gathers in pools lined with mica dust—seems particularly precious.
I am the kind of person who jumps at her own shadow. I know this for sure because, when I head out at dusk—accompanied by my reluctant twelve-year-old son, Archer—I leap at the sight of my profile, silhouetted by a neighbor’s security light. Archer tells me that he didn’t know jump scares existed outside of horror movies. His smirk makes me think that my antics have, if nothing else, made our search more entertaining for him. “What did you think that even was?” he asks.
“I thought I saw an animal,” I say. “I mean, I know I’m an animal, but I didn’t recognize myself for a minute. I guess I mistook my shadow for a bobcat coming after me.”
He laughs, but I can feel him tense at the mention. This is a gravel patch where he himself has seen a fox trotting recently, and there’s no telling who’s around this evening. Researchers at UCLA surveyed 62 species across six continents and found that mammals around the world are fleeing daylight to become more nocturnal as they attempt to get away from human disturbance. It isn’t clear if artificial light is creating the spatial-temporal changes or if the animals are simply desperate for some alone time with the human world closing in. In a rural community of increasing development, I can relate. Once, I met a new neighbor who recognized me from images he’d already captured on his wildlife camera.
I’m not sure if there’s another mammal within earshot on the road, but Archer and I chat at normal volume. If there are bobcats or bears here, our voices, announcing human presence, will likely be enough to ward them off. And if any of our neighbors are out, they stand to recognize the sound of our voices as part of this landscape’s familiar song.
We have already walked deeper into darkness without a light than I’ve ever traveled by myself, though we still haven’t gone very far. I have rambled the globe solo, but I apparently need a preteen companion to feel emboldened enough to explore the far reaches of my own neighborhood after dark. My son is barely on the cusp of puberty, but he is already taller than me. And he is growing, growing. But no matter how much he grows—or how much I end up shrinking in old age—together we will always be bigger than we are alone.
There is a pole-mounted light below the cliff-side road we’re walking. Due to our elevation, I’m standing directly next to the bulb. It belongs to vacation-home owners from off the mountain who visit, maybe, twice a year. I haven’t met them. Neither have my other neighbors. But we know well the light they leave on when they’re away.
Some spots on this mountainside are shaded by trees, while others are being hit by artificial light. I can tell that, precisely where the artificial light shines through, unshaded ferns have yellowed, likely doubly exposed to light during the day. These plants are never able to fully escape blue light. The vacation-home owners rarely use this place as a getaway. But even in their absence, there’s no way for these mountains to take a break from their ecological impact.
I have started seeing new lights across the river, revealing houses I otherwise would not have known were there, because they’re hidden by trees. It is as though people think of the lights themselves as protective. But where those dwellings are located, there’s no one to witness what’s happening. As it is, those security lights only stand to draw attention to what doesn’t fit. If anything, they signal to locals that a house is standing empty.
I think of Harvey’s beloved polar bear populations, dwindling. I think of the glowworms of Dismals Canyon, sizzled out of season. When we leave lights unchecked, we torture ourselves and everything around us, strangely unable to acknowledge connections between the burning of the world and our burning of midnight oil. Whole ecosystems are disintegrating in our backyards while we’re worrying about the melting of far-off glaciers. It’s harrowing. Still, Archer and I are out here looking for signs of hope. We’re here to figure out what stands to be lost.
We slow our pace once we’ve passed the worst of the vacation cabin’s security beams. At first, I think the sensation of cooler air is psychological, but I soon realize that we’ve entered a microclimate by simply walking a few feet. It’s a quirk of mountainous terrain. This is an area of night shade.
Even in urban areas, neighborhoods with substantial tree cover can be cooler than others by upward of 20 degrees, though in some cities, sparse trees can no longer keep up with the need for shade, so activists have had to turn their efforts toward installing overhangs and umbrellas to create pockets of daytime darkness. But the effect isn’t the same, because the cooling power of trees isn’t just about blocking light; it’s about how trees share their stores of moisture. Shade trees don’t just offer a dry coolness; they create mist in a process called transpiration. The collective moisture and emitted isoprene that hover over Appalachian forests give these mountains their long-range haze. It’s how the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains got their names.
“What’s that?” Archer asks about a stand of flowers. Dark foliage has melted into night, leaving only white-dot petals.
“Elderberry,” I say after a few minutes of study. Here we’re both children, relearning. Some lovely things that blended in daylight now stand out, reflecting available light.
When we reach a crossroads, Archer thinks he sees a shooting star. I think it might have been a high-flying firefly. Ultimately, we decide that, for our purposes, the specifics don’t matter. By either name, it was light in motion. Energy, animated.
I suggest that he should make a star-wish. It’s a beautiful tradition, this act of sharing dreams with the sky. It’s a practice that introduces us to the notion that we might talk to the cosmos directly, calling on powers that can move tides and seasons in hopes that they might intervene in our small human happenings.
In the woods, something tumbles. Branches crack. Leaves are hit. There’s a squeak. Then, a squawk. “What was that?” Archer asks.
“It sounded like a nest of flying squirrels falling from a tree, or baby birds, maybe?”
“I think we should go,” Archer says. But it is not yet dark enough to see bioluminescence.
Then a whinny from the same direction as the squeaks. “Did you hear that?” Archer asks, shocked by the amount of action in darkness.
This sound, I can identify for certain. This, I can teach.
“It’s a screech owl. Listen,” I say. And he does, rapt for longer than I expect.
Archer is hurrying out of childhood, and he’s been cold-dropped into middle school after a confusing pandemic period. Some people might have fared well with emergency homeschool and virtual learning. We—neither of whom are gifted at creating the hard lines of structure, both preferring organic shapes and fuzzy edges—did not. He is a wide-open human in a world that doesn’t often have time to remind him to breathe. And, frankly, he gets that from me.
I have the sudden urge to grab his hand, now larger than mine, as if he was still a young child and we were preparing to cross a street. But we are not crossing, we’re purposefully standing in the middle of a road in the middle of the night, so I lay a hand on his shoulder instead. He does not turn away. If anything, he leans into it. A week ago, it would have seemed odd to imagine that we’d be outside, staring into darkness. Now, it seems weird that we haven’t done it before.
Beyond us, the screech owl keeps singing to let family members know that they’re surrounded. I give Archer’s shoulder a squeeze. We’re seldom given formal introductions to darkness as a locale, a place of nonthreatening presence rather than a store of fear or symbol of life’s absence. From an early age, we are almost always taught to cower from it. But not tonight. Not here. I think, though I do not say: This is darkness, part of your home, part of you. Do not be afraid.
Darkness deepens. Archer reciprocates my gesture with his free arm around my shoulders. It’s a show of preteen affection, and I cannot help but think the privacy of night has freed him to make it. We’re clustered together, tightly as glowworms. My mothering heart feels, for a minute, brighter. But parenting is often about pivoting at short notice.
Soon, Archer is hungry. He’s complaining about being tired. He is the sort of kid who dreams of moving to a city as soon as possible, and he has already put in a good deal of time inspecting dirt with me. But I ask if he can hold out for a few more minutes. Soon after, two blue ghosts appear on the hillside above us, bobbing and weaving. I cannot believe it.
He seems impressed with the ghosts’ steady light, which is evocative of neon signs. “How rare are these?” he asks. “What would happen if I caught one?”
It is, after his years of summer nights spent catching and releasing common fireflies, hard to resist the impulse to reach out to capture these blue ghosts. It’s hard to go against instinct.
I tell him about how synchronous fireflies were once thought to live only in pinpoint-specific places, but that understanding of their population range is growing. How, with blue ghosts, the same is happening. “I’m not sure if they’re regionally rare, but they seem rare here. I mean, I’m only seeing two or three. It probably wouldn’t hurt if you were careful. But let’s just leave these.”
Archer accepts my directive. But he is still hungry. He is still tired. Despite this, he takes a second to examine the road embankment more closely. My instincts have, in terms of living blue light, proven to be surprisingly on target. But, despite our concentrated attention, nothing. “Let’s go to bed,” he says. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
We turn in the direction of our house. And it is in that field-of-view shift that I see them—tiny lights, nearly full-shrouded by foliage. I emit a high-pitched squeal. The blue ghosts have been a nice surprise, but I cannot believe that there have been glowworms shining among us, wholly unnoticed. I point them out to Archer. “You sounded like a teakettle when you saw those,” he says.
There are no painted road lines to rein us in, only the threat of poison ivy. I turn on a red-tone headlamp to peer into the worm-size caves of my neighborhood, their tiny openings knit over with webbing. These neighborhood maggots aren’t embedded in dirt. They’re nestled in moss beds. “What do they look like up close?” Archer asks. I don’t know how to respond. I don’t have a good read on them, even though, by now, I’ve seen thousands from a distance as stars that elude close examination. In the macro photos I’ve seen, glowworms have translucent bodies with brilliant blue light emitting from both their heads and tails. Their glow cannot be properly photographed, in the way that sunset photos always make the phenomenon seem small, every two-dimensional attempt sad in comparison.
I want to pick this glowworm up. I want to examine it, show it to my awaiting son. I am drawn to claw at its cool illumination with the heat of my curiosity, but I keep my hands to myself. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt it if I pick it up,” I say.
“Then don’t,” he says. “I can see it from here.”
Wishing I had more to offer, I say, “In the close-up pictures I’ve seen, they look like glow sticks.”
I’d pitied Harvey’s students who had never seen fireflies. Now here we are, realizing that we have only just been introduced to the glowworms that glow sticks resemble. In glowsticks—omnipresent at birthday parties and music festivals—my son and I have been accepting stand-ins for real things without knowing what we’ve been missing.
As we turn to finally walk home, we realize that we could not reliably find our way back to this exact location. Archer fumbles to find large pieces of gravel, which he stacks into a miniature cairn. “This will help us tomorrow,” he says. “How long have you been trying to find glowworms, anyway?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about them for a while.” He doesn’t comment, but I notice that he’s walking with a little swagger. He was, after all, the first to spot the blue ghosts earlier.
When we reach the front door of our house, he releases a sigh that’s reminiscent of my teakettle squeal. “Ahh,” he says. “It’s good to be home.” It feels like we’ve just returned from a transcontinental voyage, though, in measurable distance, we’ve hardly traveled at all.
When we locate the cairn the next day, in sunlight, we find that the place that we attempted to mark no longer exists. Archer’s stone-stack, which appeared as an ethereal altar in the dark, now looks like a pile of dirty rocks. The palette of soil previously holding neon blue signs of life seems a dismal wasteland. And yet. As long as this area remains undisturbed, as long as trees are left intact and my absentee neighbor’s security light does not burn surrounding foliage to death—we wouldn’t be required to take a single step if we wanted to return to that wonderland. It is, already, spinning its way back to us.
I hover over a rock face that’s emanating the stored cool of night. It feels like peppermint against my skin. I keep my hands to myself, but my gaze moves from dot to dot, connecting dewdrops caught in glowworm webs. I study the markings of a still-standing dead tree, likely home to a screech owl family. Without context and an earnest plea for taking care, it seems imprudent to leave a directional marker here. Stone by stone, as we dismantle the cairn, I suggest that Archer should join me in taking note of the fern species, the dripping of springwater. These are not clues that I’ve seen in any book; they’re just my own time-and-again observations.
Grandfather Mountain’s glowworms have been known for a while, but the ones in my neighborhood were, I’m confident in saying, first spotted in living memory yesterday. Because of this, it seems wrong not to share this place with the woman I know who was upset about not securing Grandfather Glows tickets. The place we’ve marked is a spot I know she has driven past a hundred times herself. And it looks very much like her mountainside driveway in a neighboring county.
Destiny might be written in the stars, but it’s translated by geography. And it will be a special thrill to share with my frustrated acquaintance that what she sought an admission ticket for is a wondrous world in which she is already living. Because she, like me, is privileged to live in a landscape full of shady, mucked-up places. It is harder to find wonder close to home than it is in far-flung places; where everything is new, nothing can be taken for granted. But when exploring darkness, it’s easier to be awed, wherever we stand. Because night is a foreign country, and I, for one, am seeking dual citizenship.
It has been well documented that we suffer, in all kinds of ways, when we’re separated from the natural world at large. But the losses of night are, in the human story, ones we’ve only just begun to tally. We attempt to measure them in light exposure rather than darkness deficit, maybe because we think of darkness as an absence, nothing to lose. But darkness is, arguably, the genesis of life itself.
I’m starting to suspect that the anger my ticketless acquaintance felt toward Grandfather Glows—an emotion shared by many who did not secure entry—might have been less about that singular event than about the broadscale frustration of living in a culture bent on alienating us from the land we live on and that, on some subconscious level, we’re all feeling the loss of darkness itself as a commons. There was a time, not so long ago, when humans could touch darkness without even trying. As recently as when I, myself, was a child, night was an altogether different place than it is for Archer.
None of us alone can reclaim natural night. But maybe reclamation begins by attempting to honor the lives of the tiny, sometimes shining creatures who depend on night deepening not just above us but also around us. For healthy ecosystems, darkness is required. Even in the land of the midnight sun, the opposite phenomenon of polar night arrives for balance—though those extended periods of darkness are lesser talked about. In my neck of the woods, glowworms stand to help us recalibrate how we think about dismal darkness, because it is the only place where their brightness shines. Maybe we can revitalize massive darkness by fostering the conditions required to locate our own homeland’s minuscule wonders, wherever they might reside.
Leaving no trace of our amazing find, we head home. The land that holds our neighborhood glowworms is in a legal right-of-way, but the property does not belong to us on paper. Its deed is held by people who do not live within a hundred miles of this land, absentee investors who could likely not dream that they control the fate of glowing creatures that tens of thousands of people annually vie for tickets to witness, living marvels coveted by researchers as far away as South America.
Right now, day blind, even Archer and I no longer know exactly where the glowworms reside, but we don’t mind. We no longer need a cairn or a hard-to-get ticket, because learning to read habitat has given us invisible-ink maps to entire kingdoms. We’re only beginners, but we understand that routes drawn by shade and stone and water and moss can, in darkness, lead to treasures hidden.