Foxfire Glowing
Tal Galton has been walking backward for a quarter mile. Over broken stone. Over fallen leaves. I am among a handful of people following him, none of us bringing up his peculiar choice to not look where he’s going. Walking backward is counterintuitive. But so is walking in the dark. Yet here we are, traveling toward dusk, because we are on a quest to glimpse foxfire—glowing fungi known to turn forest floors into scenes from a fever dream.
We all just met as strangers, with barely enough daylight for us to make out faces. It seems like Tal might be walking backward to use every ounce of sunlight left to study our identifying features. His stance also has the effect of assuring us all, in a language without words: If I can walk this trail backward, you’re going to be able to walk it in darkness.
Tal takes a step back. We take a step forward. Anything seems possible. We’re already part of a carnival parade.
Gravel turns to stone, polished from years of human travel. “The path we’ll be walking in full dark is similar to this,” Tal says, helping us chart a way forward. “It’ll still be an hour before it starts to get completely dark. By then, you’ll hopefully have a sense of the surfaces we’re dealing with. Tonight, we need complete darkness. We can’t use any flashlights. The foxfire we’re looking for is quite dim.”
I first heard the term “foxfire” as a child, when my mother shared her copies of the Foxfire book series, which was founded in the 1960s as part of an ongoing oral history project that is still being updated today. The books have, for generations, recounted the stories, cultural practices, and land-based traditions of Southern Appalachia with large audiences. With nine million copies in print, its publisher calls the series “an American institution.” But from my perspective, the books simply covered my family’s everyday practices—things that, as a child in the faster-flashier 1980s, I mostly took for granted.
Even though I grew up with the Foxfire series—among grandparents who embodied the self-sufficient folklife in its pages—it was only recently that I learned foxfire is not a particular species, as I’ve long thought; it’s a blanket term for bioluminescent fungi. Only 80 of the roughly 100,000 species in the fungi kingdom are known to glow, not only in Appalachia but across the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Despite this global presence, foxfire remains one of the most readily identifiable symbols of Appalachia, thanks to the book series. For me, finding glowing fungi has become a priority.
The purpose of fungi’s bioluminescent function remains unclear, but some species use it to attract insects that might help spread its spores. Prior to electricity, people harvested foxfire to read by its light at night. Early submarines mounted it behind glass. Its chemical compounds are used to track things in the human body like infections and cancer cells. Historically, logs alight with foxfire were arranged on the ground to outline nocturnal paths. In 2015, a team at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry found a way to isolate a fungal protein to create luminescent plants that they suggested might one day serve as energy-efficient streetlamps, though green light emitted from all directions would present a light pollution issue. It all sounds terribly newfangled. But in some ways, it’s the kind of creative, living alternative to artificial light that my Granny and Papaw might have appreciated.
“You never know what you’re going to find on any given night out here,” Tal says. We might find mycelium and bitter-oyster mushrooms. There could even be a jack-o’-lantern somewhere in the vicinity, with fruiting bodies that can grow as large and orange as their namesakes and are often mistaken for chanterelles, a foraging delicacy. “Eating jack-o’-lanterns won’t kill you, but it might make you wish you were dead,” he says.
One of the wonders he seems most excited to show us is a species he knows where to find: a minuscule mushroom that, as far as he can tell, is currently undescribed by science. “A lot of people who know a lot more than me have told me that they’ve never seen anything like it in this region,” he says. He’s currently working with mycologists to investigate. But, regardless of its scientific status, we’re assured that we’ll be seeing something that relatively few humans have ever beheld.
“Every so often you’ll hear about a new population of something discovered on Grandfather Mountain or in a national park. But diverse fireflies, or lightning bugs, are everywhere around here,” Tal says. “It’s the same with a lot of foxfire species. To find them, all you need to do is go into the woods and really start looking.” Only, to do this, some people—including me—need lessons in how to navigate the world nocturnally. Tal is one of the few naturalists I know who specializes in the practice.
The road we’re traveling shifts from stone to dirt. There’s plenty to see, and some of it is probably glowing, but the lingering light of day prevents foxfire—which glows constantly—from being spotted. So we walk as we wait, surrounded by what we’re seeking, unable to see it. But Tal assures us that our bodies are already working to assist in our quest. “Your eyes,” he says, “have already started to adjust for night vision.”
The mention of night vision seems to create a subconscious panic. Group members start looking around, attempting to record everything possible before daylight leaves completely. But, despite this impulse, we’re not here to escape darkness. We’ve traveled to Tal’s home turf in Celo, an intentional community that has preserved its forests, because we want to find it here, along with foxfire.
I’ve visited Celo throughout my adult life, thanks to a college friend whose aunt and uncle studied at Penland, a nearby world-class craft education center, as glassblowers. Like many artists, they decided to stay after their workshops were over. In a clearing not far from here, I once attended a party where someone had a two-story-tall puppet, built just for fun. I’ve eaten pizza from an earthen oven crafted from the ground it stood on. Everywhere, there are gardens. Everywhere, there are carless trails between houses. It is, in my experience, a community that has done exceedingly well with the utopian concept.
Celo was founded in the 1930s and is run as a land trust governed by residents. The original community constitution states that the collective’s purpose is “to provide an opportunity for its members to enjoy a life that includes personal expression, neighborly friendship and cooperation, and appreciative care of the natural environment.”
Here, electric light isn’t taken for granted. Like everything else that’s incorporated into life at Celo, every addition and subtraction is carefully considered. The artists and farmers who caretake Celo’s 1,100-acre property recognize the land as having its own needs and autonomy. Residents own their houses, but the land itself is never sold; it is assigned for lifetimes. Like Tal walking backward, Celo fosters a culture that doesn’t do things just because they’re mainstream or expected. They do things by consensus, always with respect for other living beings.
The houses tucked away in these woodlands are a mix of new and old. Not many of them have the log-cabin vibe people associate with Southern Appalachia—a region that is a diverse and ever-changing mix of rural and urban, new and old. Celo is a place of living history, a wink to Appalachia’s artisan leanings. It was founded as part of the back-to-the-land movement that followed the Great Depression and mimicked some of the traditions familiar to my maternal grandparents. They were born and raised in families who’d never left the land for cities in the first place, surviving as subsistence farmers on what they could raise from the ground and salvage from industrial leavings.
Making my way through Celo to meet Tal earlier, I saw a group of children frolicking in a field with a milk calf. Here, roads have names like “Clay,” inspired by potters who turn earth into dinnerware. A meal on these grounds is more likely to include lightly sautéed asparagus than my grandparents’ vinegar-soaked beans. But if you took my family’s old-time folk art and farming traditions full circle, you’d meet Celo’s rootsy avant-garde traditions. I think this is why, to me, Celo has always felt like a version of home.
Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crows, heralding dusk rather than dawn. Tal leads us across a small hand-hewn bridge to the side of a road. This allows us to bypass the creek that cars must quickly drive through if they want to travel beyond. This is a road that’s been built on the waterway’s terms rather than in accordance with human desire. The footbridge is covered in mesh intended to give our feet traction. We walk across boards that have been nailed in crooked, creek water flossing between them.
When Tal started giving tours, years ago, inspired by blue ghost populations that appear at this spot in spring, he had a vague understanding that his eyes dilated to let in varying degrees of light depending on his environment, like a mechanical camera. But as he’s spent more time outside, he’s become more interested in the complexity of what’s happening in his body.
People generally tend to think that their eyes have acclimated to the dark after a few minutes. But while it’s true that the fastest gains of night adaptation are made within the first 30 minutes of light reduction, studies at the University of Illinois reveal that it can take several hours without flashlights or phone screens for eyes to reach full sensitivity, which, at its peak, grants humans night vision that can be one million times more powerful than what we utilize in daylight.
Tal adjusts his white baseball cap, chosen for low-light visibility. “Have you ever heard of rhodopsin?” he asks. “It helps us see in dark.” Silence. Crickets. As it turns out, we’ve come hoping to see external, nocturnal wonders only to realize that, in some fundamental ways, we don’t know how our own night vision works.
According to Tal, rhodopsin is a purple-pink-tinted protein that my body has been generating since light began fading this evening. It was first observed in the 1800s and named for the Greek roots of “rose” and “sight.” At night, humans have access to rose-colored lenses through which to view the world, though we don’t often realize it. Rhodopsin facilitates a biochemical reaction that allows humans to see in low light by helping to convert photons—that is, the energy coming at us—into electrical signals. And it’s a process that takes time.
Years ago, before the development of navigational technology, airline pilots used to wear red glasses for hours before flying at night to take full advantage of their night-vision abilities, because red light does not deplete rhodopsin as much as other wavelengths, though all artificial light instigates at least a slow siphoning. Even though humans cannot see as well as some animals built for nocturnal living, many of us have more night vision than we realize.
Healthy eyes have, front and center, cone cells that assist us with making out color and detail. Our rod cells, located to the sides, are better at operating in dim light, and rhodopsin is a rod assistant. This is why, at night, we often catch things out of the corners of our eyes. “If rhodopsin is exposed to light, it gets bleached out and your body has to start making it again,” Tal says.
I think of the pain of light hitting my eyes in the dark as the sting of bleach, an actual erasure that forces my body to start a physical process all over again. I think of all the times this has happened: the burn of a flashlight, the flick of a switch leading to pain, the way exposure to artificial light after spending time without it delivers the sensation of a lush velvet darkness suddenly stained.
Across a summer-buzzing meadow, we can make out the profile of a small house. “That’s the last cottage we’re going to see,” Tal says. Before we enter full evening shade, which will speed the arrival of darkness, Tal pauses and pulls a roll of glow-in-the-dark stickers from his backpack. He hands them out and asks us to put them on to help the people behind us maintain their bearings. “These are not bright enough to alter your night vision,” he says. “They’ll just allow us to keep track of each other.”
We press the stickers against shirts and backpacks as Tal delivers one last plea: “I need you to really absorb the fact that there can be no photos tonight. The light of cell phones is enough to undo everything.” By that, he doesn’t mean we’ll harm the glowing mushrooms we’re here to see; he’s concerned that we’ll damage our own night vision.
Tal is prone to include quotes in his emails and tour notes. “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” his online bio reads. When I first saw the quote, pasted into our early correspondence, I’d thought it was a lovely bit of poetry. Now I recognize it as potential epigraph for a night-vision manual. Because sharpening senses isn’t a matter of mental will; it’s about giving them the space they need to develop on their own. In the modern world, this is harder than it seems. And difficulty continues to increase.
“Even smartwatches stand to be an issue out here,” Tal says. This is the first season he’s found their tiny screens to be a problem. Every new form of technology presents a threat that isn’t always recognized in time to be thwarted. On night walks, smartwatches are not just founts of flowing information; they’re tiny bottles spilling rhodopsin-altering bleach. I’m not wearing one, but several people in the group unbuckle the devices strapped to their wrists and slide them into their pockets. It’s hard to process the reality of these everyday devices as capable of altering our body chemistry, directly and immediately.
Tal has the svelte frame of a trail runner. He knows this land well. But artificial light is something that cannot be outrun, and if a single indiscretion is made, it has the potential to take everyone down, sight singed. “I need you to be really careful with your night vision this evening,” Tal says. “Protect it. Consider it a precious resource, because that’s exactly what it is.”
On the forest-lined trail ahead, I can make out the shape of a mushroom. “Is that glowing?” someone asks, shocked that we’ve already had success. But it isn’t bioluminescence; it’s just a pale mushroom that’s reflecting what’s left of daylight. The confusion signals to Tal, who’s still walking backward, that it’s time to turn, forward facing, to greet the night. Mid-pivot, he plucks the mushroom like a flower. “You can say ‘fung-ee’ or ‘fun-guy,’ either works,” he says.
“This is the fruiting body of a bolete. These are fun ones.” Boletes are unique in that most mushrooms have gills on the undersides of their caps, but these have spongy surfaces with pore openings that disperse spores. “Every mushroom is pretty much a spore-dispersal mechanism,” he says. “The rest of the organism lives underground.”
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelia, rootlike fungi under Earth’s surface. There are forms of mycelia that never fruit, but a mushroom is always the visible manifestation of larger organisms at work. “You can think of the fruiting body of mycelium like an apple,” he says, as if the larger, underground structure is a buried tree. Only from branches, we get the crisp tart of Granny Smiths. And from branching mycelia, we get the oft-edible fruiting bodies of fungi.
A 2023 study found that at least 59 percent of the planet’s species depend on soil as habitat, and it’s thought that almost every plant on Earth has a relationship with some form of mycorrhizal network. These networks connect individual organisms, transferring water, nitrogen, carbon, and minerals among them. Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist, has called the fungal networks a “global blind spot in conservation and climate agendas” in explaining why mapping these networks is of growing interest.
Generally, a single handful of soil can hold veinlike mycelia that would stretch for 60 miles. Studies have confirmed that trees, connected via fungal networks, work more like functional communities than competitors. Mycelia attached to tree roots can transfer nutrients, channeling resources from tall trees in sunlight to smaller trees that live in shady areas. Saplings that receive energy from those underground networks are more resilient to the stresses of climate change. And recent studies have shown that mycelia use electric signaling to communicate, with messages that move back and forth in conversation.
Foxfire’s living light can come from mycelia, fruiting bodies, or both. There are even some species with bioluminescent spores, which send out reproductive materials in glittering clouds. New fungal species and behaviors are discovered all the time, all over the world. It’s estimated that 98 percent of fungi on Earth remain undescribed. “It’s still mostly a mystery how it’s all connected and what everything is doing,” Tal says.
He holds out the bolete’s floppy cap. I press my fingers against its pores, pancake spongy, as he explains that fungi—bioluminescent or not—are heterotrophs that cannot produce their own food. Saprophytic fungi are responsible for breaking down organic material—plants, animals, and leaf litter—acting as a forest-wide digestive system that processes nutrients from dead organisms in ways that make them accessible to the living. “Even live trees have some dead wood in them,” Tal says. “When you see mushrooms growing out of wood, they’re often saprophytic.”
He is standing next to a straight hardwood trunk. “Lots of animals, including humans, are more genetically related to mushrooms than to this tree,” he says. “It’s all relative. Or rather, we’re all relatives.” Humans have been found to share roughly 50 percent of their DNA with fungi species.
As we move on, Tal reels off lists of things people often mistake for foxfire in full light, including green fungi, which gives rotting wood the appearance of turquoise. The mention makes me realize that, just days ago, I came across green fungi and wondered if it might shine. But bioluminescent species don’t usually provide hints to their unique attributes in sunlight.
Some people in the group have come to walk with Tal because they live in cities where both darkness and forests have become hard-to-find resources. But other regional residents like me have come out to follow him through darkness not because Celo has species that our communities do not but because Celo—oasis of land-based culture, as well as mature forests—practices engaging with these mountains in ways that we have, in the span of just a few generations, mostly forgotten.
At this point in history, a full third of human beings on this planet can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live. It is not a stretch to say that, at current pace, there will come a time when humanity will not be able to see stars at all. And though foxfire fungi might not be as sensitive to light pollution as fireflies, our bodies cannot perceive foxfire’s light without darkness.
Already, in urban areas, there are children for whom stars are only phenomena mentioned in fairy tales. For them, it takes faith to believe that those celestial objects are real, visible elsewhere. Difficult as it might be to accept, and despite the fact we rarely talk about it, there is a good chance that we are among the last generations that will be able to see the night sky. Even less considered is the fact that this means we might be among the last to live in a world where natural darkness is deep enough to reveal the presence of foxfire and glowworms and fireflies. If light pollution does not abate, lots of species that already seem too magical to be real will, along with starshine, fall into legend.
“How’s everybody feeling about walking in the dark? Are you getting the hang of it?” Tal asks. He’s answered by a chorus of murmurs. We’re making it, but we’re not exactly sure of ourselves. The sky still has a sheen, but we can no longer see where we’re putting our feet.
“Stay steady and keep moving,” he says. “Move heel to toe.”
Solid ground is no longer something I can take for granted. I’m paying attention to which part of my foot is touching earth first. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. The technique is preventing me from tripping over all sorts of things.
I’m in a heel-toe rhythm when I see a hint of light alongside the trail, inspiring an abrupt stop. It’s the unmistakable outline of a fallen branch. Tal navigates a stand of trees to retrieve it. We trace his approach via the glowing green wand that’s floating toward us. We’ve found our first foxfire species, bitter oyster.
“Bitter oyster is hard to see from a distance, but it can get pretty bright up close,” he says. “These are fresh.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“They’re soft and slightly sticky. You can touch them if you want,” he says.
The wand floats toward me. I extend my hand to touch its end. The foxfire is rubbery, soft enough to yield. It leaves my skin coated like pine sap, though the residue filling the grooves of my fingerprints isn’t as thick. “You can break off a bit if you want,” he says. But I already have, accidentally. The bitter oyster is so sticky that pieces of its fruiting body have attached to my skin. My hand is encrusted with tiny jewels alight.
I touch the wand’s glow, again and again. Each time, a tangy scent is emitted. I could place this bitter oyster on my tongue. It’s not known to be poisonous. But I don’t have to consume this to belong to it.
“It won’t be long before these bitter oysters begin to age,” Tal says. “They harden, they dry. They only glow at certain stages.”
Once you’ve discovered a magic wand in a dark forest, it feels wrong to discard it. But Tal promises this is only a hint of foxfire’s abundance. So we leave the branch on the ground where we found it.
It’s wondrous to know that the innards of the wand-stick are full of light threads, unseen. My mind moves out, like branching mycelium, thinking about how every fruiting body is just an outer manifestation of inner-spreading beauty, something greater than itself. .
In Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, there is a honey mushroom known as the Humongous Fungus. It is arguably the largest living organism on Earth. It spreads primarily underground, with mass not visible from Earth’s surface. It has been alive for more than 8,500 years, growing under the forest floor. Almost every article I’ve ever read about it has omitted what seems, to me, its most fantastical aspect: The Humongous Fungus glows, producing subterranean light for miles.
Every year around this time, it produces fruiting bodies that indicate its otherwise-shrouded presence, as does another fairly humongous fungus in Michigan. That one has been alive almost 3,000 years, though it wasn’t known to science until the 1990s. These giant fungal networks are vastly older and larger than the trees they connect.
Bioluminescent mycelia—and, really, mycelial networks in general—only reveal themselves in bits; to underground grandeur, fruiting bodies are only hints. Right now, we’re walking past dead tree stumps potentially full of living light. And there’s no question that there are fruiting bodies all around us, on the verge of emerging as clues to worlds we’ve only just started to consider.
I ask Tal if he thinks there are giant bioluminescent mycelial networks in our home region. “It seems reasonable to think that we have whole acres around here that are glowing underground,” Tal says.
For all the elementary school science book pictures I’ve seen of Earth’s molten core, I remember no lessons about luminous tattoos just under the planet’s skin. I don’t recall ever being told about the networks of living light that are reaching and yearning and making community to support almost all the verdant plant life that surrounds me.
As we hike on, moving tenuously as tightrope walkers, I’m oddly comforted by the notion that foxfire might be knitting a net of light below me, growing and glowing as it has since a time before human religion, or language, or memory began.
Before long, we’ve reached a crossroads. “You’ve probably gotten used to the road by now,” Tal says, “but the trail we’re going to take from here is narrow. It’s different, more challenging.”
We have no guiding light, only the direction of Tal’s voice. “We’ll need to travel one by one from here,” he says. We line up behind him, single file, our glow-in-the-dark stickers in alignment. Then we disappear into a stand of rhododendron.
The tunnel of rubbery leaves is several degrees darker than the already dark landscape. “I’m going to tell you when there’s a dip in the trail, and we’ve reached the first,” he relays to me, since I’m directly behind him. “This is a big one,” he says. “There are also roots. Let the person behind you know.”
I switch up my heel-toe strategy, shuffling. I slide my way across one tree root, then another, gently lowering myself. I’m glad I chose shoes with flexible soles. It’s a strange sensation, to ascertain the shape of what’s underfoot as important, my feet groping at the ground like a second set of hands.
“Root,” I say to the teenager behind me. “Dip.”
“Root,” she forewarns the next person.
There’s a minuscule dot of light pulsating on the side of the path. “Likely firefly larva,” Tal says. He sees larvae on the forest floor all the time, sometimes even into winter. But there’s no time like the cusp of fall for finding foxfire. “The ‘fox’ in foxfire,” he says, “comes from the French term ‘faux,’ fake.”
Tal slows his pace. “Do you always walk this route without lights, even after your tours are over?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Walking around in the dark is how you find new things.”
When Tal first came to Celo, he was a teacher at the on-site school, a place that doesn’t allow cell phones. It’s a rite of passage for students to walk home in complete darkness. In solidarity, Tal often joined them. It was on one of those walks—traversing the unknown alongside his students—that Tal first saw blue ghosts and realized they were something worth sharing with others. And it was on a walk home after leading one of his blue ghost firefly excursions that he first noticed the species he’s taking us to see, an entire tree alight with mushrooms potentially undescribed to science.
It wasn’t until he took photos and posted them online that he realized he’d found something others didn’t know about. “People started commenting,” he says, “and I realized the species was really unusual.”
“Is it edible?” a guest asks.
“It’s so small, you wouldn’t even know you had it in your mouth,” Tal says. “You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”
A rhododendron branch taps my shoulder to let me know that I’ve strayed from the path. I sense Tal stumbling in front of me. “Dip,” he reports.
“Dip,” I call.
“Dip, dip, dip,” the voices behind me ding, as each person in line warns the person behind them. Without sight, we’re mapping the trail through sound. It’s an exercise in trust, with people whose faces we’ve never fully seen. And it is a lovely, unusual feeling, having human sounds, rather than artificial light, guiding us through nocturnal terrain.
I ask Tal if he’s seen a change in people after these walks, peculiar as they are. “In the literal sense, I don’t really see people at all,” he says with a laugh. This is, to him, one of the most interesting things about night walks. After greeting strangers in low light, he typically never sees them again, though they almost always go on to spend hours walking around together. Still, those unseen have presence. He quickly learns the cadence of their voices, the character-revealing insights they share from the dark, which grants each attendee a shroud of privacy, even when enmeshed in a crowd.
The most memorable transformations he’s observed have taken place among teenagers. “I’ve had kids terrified of the dark, I mean, shaking with fear. And once they see bioluminescence, they become entranced,” he says. “They shed fear; it’s like they altogether forget it’s something they were carrying.”
In front of me, I sense a tumble. “Root!” he shouts.
“Root,” I say, turning my head to amplify the alert.
“Root, root, root,” vocal cords ping.
In Victorian times, people marked trees to guide them home. They dug braille-like pocks on trunks to help them feel their way along. It’s an intimacy of place that Tal seems to have without causing tree damage, so acquainted is he with this landscape. And it is his familiarity that’s allowing us all to travel freely.
I suppose, in daylight, I have familiarity with my specific plot of land, too. Years ago, a friend told me he knew old-timers who could gauge the depth of the New River by where currents hit a certain rock. After nearly two decades of river living, it’s something I can do, too. And there is more than one life event that I mark by the blooming of rhododendron, which drops blossoms in the river around the first of July. Those petals on water are, for me, more effective reminders than notes on a calendar. The intimacy I have been seeking with night is one that I’ve spent a lifetime casually cultivating with these mountains in daylight. What a gift it is to realize that I’m pining for more of what I already have, a deeper connection with the land on which I already stand.
But tonight, the familiar wilds of these mountains have been made, once again, strange. We’re still a good journey away from Tal’s fungal discovery, but we pause when we see a puddle of ethereal light beside the trail. It’s surrounded by flecks of light that speckle the ground like paint splatter. Tal explains that it’s mycelium in the process of consuming fallen leaves. “If I turned a flashlight on,” he says, “this would just look like ordinary leaf litter.”
Tal picks up a handful of light and gives it to me. The leaves are cool and damp, well on their way to decay. “Mycelium is really running right now.” Running, like a stream in motion, like a living river.
I cannot see the teenager behind me, so I hold the glowing pile of mycelium up to announce it as an offering, inhaling wafts of the leaves’ mild, medicinal scent. She is the youngest of the group, and she stayed in her father’s car until the minute we left the parking area earlier, cell phone light pointed directly at her eyes. In the dark, I’ve heard her emit a few grunts indicating that she’d rather be somewhere else. But, in this moment, she comes across as wholly present.
She seems to be carrying a fear of missing out on cell phone time more than she’s exhibiting a fear of the dark, but she sighs when she accepts the mycelium, as though she’s traded something heavy for the puff of light. “How beautiful,” she whispers.
We are, in essence, watching death become life. We are watching darkness being transformed into light. The teenager stares into the handful of alchemy before, finally, passing it on. “Mycelium,” she announces, letting the person behind her know what’s coming, announcing wonder as she had previously passed on warnings.
“Mycelium, mycelium, mycelium.” Each handoff is announced, connecting us to each other. We are no longer faces. We are no longer hands. We are all part of the darkness. Because, in this forest, the glow of this leaf litter is all that visibly exists. It moves through the night, tracing the path of our voices, like a luminescent cloud pushed by invisible winds.
The farther we travel into the woods, the soggier the ground gets. It’s clear from the darkness of the overstory that we’ve entered areas that don’t see much sunlight. One minute, we’re in complete darkness. Then a bioluminescent tree appears. Tal doesn’t need to point it out. His main task was leading us here so that we could discover it ourselves.
This is something beyond handheld marvels; it’s an entire tree trunk covered in a glow that no one knows what to call. The light looks, to me, slightly bluer than the green light of bitter oysters. We cannot see the shape of a single mushroom from here. They’re too small. But we can discern the profile of the tree they’re growing on.
Each mushroom appears as a chink in glowing armor that’s covering an ash tree. This concerned Tal at first, because emerald ash borers—invasive insects native to Asia—have already decimated millions of ash trees in North America. Borers might even have played a role in what we’re seeing, since the dead parts of this tree are what fungi are feasting on.
If the species was dependent on ash trees and they were lost to borers, this foxfire might be gone before the mushrooms creating the dreamscape could be given a name. Fortunately, Tal has found what he believes to be the same mushrooms on another tree species, which means they might not be choosy.
The light of the tree draws us in, and our single-file line turns into a mass of awkwardly bumping elbows as we try to figure out where to stand. My careful navigation of the path is forgotten. I am so focused on the lights that I end up with branches in my face. The tip of a limb slips through my lips, hooking me like a fish. I sputter and wave my hands erratically to escape.
Branches guide me to the ground where, on the tree’s north side, I crawl on hands and knees, until I’m nearly close enough to feel the tree’s moss-bearded face against my cheek. I cannot see individual dots of light until I am less than an inch away. There, I can make out capped mushrooms that shoot out of the tree to rise upward like umbrellas the size of pinheads.
Tal has sent samples of them to a mycologist who is attempting to help him sleuth out where the fungi fit. “Figuring out how to get DNA in a way that might work for identification has been hard,” he says.
Tal’s contact suspects that it’s an undescribed species. But there’s a chance it’s a known species that wasn’t previously known to glow. Or that it is known to glow elsewhere and is a surprise resident of the region. “If it is an undescribed species, who gets to name it?” someone asks.
Tal isn’t sure. A male voice calls out a suggestion: “The Tal Mushroom!”
Immediately, Tal rejects the idea. “It bothers me when I’m learning about something and it’s named after a human being,” he says. “I don’t think species or places should be named after people. All species have their own attributes. I like it when things are named after their characteristics. The blue ghost, for instance. That’s a name that helps you recognize it when you see it.”
“So what are the attributes of this?” I ask.
“It glows; it’s tiny,” he says.
“Maybe something like ‘tiny lantern’?” I say. “As in: ‘Look! Over there! I think that tree is covered in tiny lanterns, first described in the Celo community of western North Carolina!’”
“There you go!” Tal says.
As we walk on in darkness, it seems the conversation has been forgotten. But the forest is so quiet, outside of the scraping of our soles against rocks and roots, that I can make out the sound of Tal whispering to himself in Latin. “Minima laternis, tiny lanterns,” he mumbles.
We step from soft soil onto gravel, where my feet turn broken granite. The overstory opens, and the encompassing darkness we’ve been treading is replaced by cloud-filtered gloom. “Is this light just because we’re not in the shade anymore?” someone asks. Tal confirms and says, “Some of this might be light pollution. And the moon is higher now.”
I have, many times in my life, gone out of my way to watch a sunset, but I’ve never really thought about the timing of moonrises. Before heading to Celo, I glanced at my moon calendar to see what phase it might be in this evening, but I didn’t take its movement into account. But Tal did, and he planned this walk so that we’d emerge from the woods just as the moon was crowning mountains.
“You know,” Tal says, still ruminating over our conversation about tiny lanterns, “I think it’s good to call species ‘undescribed’ rather than ‘undiscovered.’ I’m not the first person to find those, I’m sure. There were people who knew about that species at some point in history,” he says, acknowledging that we’re walking ancestral homelands of the Cherokee. “The thing is, most of us don’t see the world around us, not even in daylight anymore, really. Plant blindness. You’ve heard of it?”
The term was coined in the 1990s as a way of talking about how people—particularly those from traditions that do not incorporate plants into spiritual and cultural practices—have a bias to overlook and underappreciate specific plant species. Studies have found that plant blindness, which is sometimes referred to as plant awareness disparity, alters how greatly people care about conservation efforts, with less knowledge leading to less concern.
Standing in the night shade of Celo’s community forest, it’s hard not to wonder if light pollution is being allowed to increase at exponential rates because, as a whole—particularly in parts of the world where artificial light is most overused—humans are experiencing a similar, relational disconnect with darkness. We depend on natural nights just as we depend on plants. We have become not only species unaware; due to the endless faux days we’ve created, we’ve now reached a point where we hardly notice that night itself has its own characteristics and functions.
Plant awareness disparity isn’t as great in some cultures as it is in the United States’ mainstream. Studies have shown that in India and Sweden and diverse indigenous communities around the world, the spiritual, emotional, and practical relationships people have with plants encourage connection. It might not be a coincidence, then, that I was inspired to seek out the nocturnal wonders of foxfire because Foxfire has, for all my life, been something associated with subcultural Appalachian folkways—including things like planting gardens in accordance to moon cycles—familiar because they’ve been practiced by my ancestors in these mountains for more than seven generations.
Humans have been found to be more adept at identifying animals than plants. Plant awareness disparity is thought to be a chemical and visual bias of the human brain—which, overwhelmed, tends to lump what it cannot easily process—but it’s something that can be overcome with species proximity and cultural conditioning, as evidenced in communities around the globe. Seemingly in their own wisdom, foxfire species have presented themselves not as part of the relentless din of day, but rather as gems laid out against velvet night to be inspected as precious.
Our time with Tal is officially over, but no one walks back to their cars. Instinctively, we form a circle. Here, we have seen forms of light that relatively few humans ever have. Not one of us is ready to leave, not even the teenager, whose cell phone remains tucked away of her own volition.
“Being out here is a privilege,” Tal says, acknowledging the rarity of having unfettered access to a place like this, particularly one that, unlike many public lands in the area, is relatively flat, lowering our chances of walking off a cliff.
Even though we’ve been wowed by fungi, it’s the depth of Celo’s darkness that seems a luxury. It is a reminder that, once upon a time, electricity was only for the rich and urbane. Asheville’s Biltmore Estate, built by the Vanderbilt family, remains one of the largest privately owned houses in the country, and it was the first house in this region to have electricity.
For my own rural farming family, electricity is a recent reality. In the 1940s, when my grandparents were young, only a fourth of North Carolina’s farms were wired. The electricity that runs through my house—outside of what’s generated by an array of solar panels—is still delivered by a regional cooperative. Historically, the only way my home county could tap into the grid was by acting communally, since, for a long time, power companies refused service to rural, mountainous areas. But even the most remote regions on this planet are rapidly changing.
A 2022 study indicates that artificial light, once mostly an urban issue, is now also associated with nonurban populations, because light has started bleeding, often unmitigated. Rural areas that endure other forms of environmental pollution—including the degradation of air and water—are also, increasingly, being bleached by light.
The socioeconomic indicators of darkness even extend to the shelter of midday shade in cities. Inequalities in urban neighborhoods track a lack of trees, which, when isolated in asphalt seas, require human resources and funding to stay healthy. A 2021 study published in Landscape and Urban Planning found that a lack of trees—and thereby, shade—directly correlated with race- and education-based inequalities. Studies about artificial light pollution have similar findings, in reverse, with socioeconomic inequalities correlating with greater light pollution at night. In a warming world, vulnerable communities are being scorched, day and night. Whereas once, artificial light was rare, it’s now natural darkness that has become scarce.
Tal’s sister, a teacher visiting from Boston, says, “I wish my students could go on a walk like this.”
“I wish everyone could go on a walk like this,” I say. The group hums in agreement.
Tonight, as members of the group travel home, we will reestablish our dependence on artificial light as we start our cars. Before this, we might not have considered how headlights stand to negatively alter our vision. We might have erroneously assumed the brighter the lights, the better our sight. Recently, I learned that the pirates that populate childhood storybooks wore patches over their eyes not to hide some sword-fight disfiguration, as I’d long thought, but because they likely wanted to keep one eye attuned to the darkness belowdecks even at midday. They, like Tal, knew that fully developed night vision was something worth safeguarding.
The LED headlights that have gained favor in recent years can be up to three times as potent as traditional halogen headlights. In the United Kingdom, a recent survey revealed that two-thirds of drivers say they are regularly dazed by modern headlights, with 67 percent saying it takes up to five seconds for them to regain functional sight.
The United Nations has founded a World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, but the United States has been relatively slow to embrace adaptive lighting. In 2012, the American Medical Association adopted a statement calling light at night a health hazard, citing concern about “disability glare,” a reduction in visibility caused by headlights. Excessive light was deemed a road safety risk.
Those of us driving up and down mountains will soon lose much of our hard-earned night vision while chasing LED lights, but Tal won’t. He’ll be walking home through the darkness we’ve just emerged from, accompanied by rivers of light and spangled trees and other magnificent things, discoveries of which we cannot yet dream.
Even though I live in a rural area—in the actual boonies of Boone—my neighborhood no longer knows Celo-level darkness. In recent months, a new storage unit has been erected on my side of town, its lighting scheme overlooked by ordinances. Meanwhile, someone on a hill across the river has installed a new LED porch sconce, which blasts like a maximum-security prison floodlight from their front door.
I bemoaned these changes, but I did not fully realize how greatly they were degrading the world around me until I saw them in contrast to Celo. Still, the patches of mature hardwood forests around me almost certainly hold foxfire. And I’m freshly inspired to scout shadows as caches of wonder.
Soon after Archer hears about my foxfire encounter, he decides to join me for a sunset walk so that our sight might develop as sunlight fades. We sit on crumbling logs, allowing our eyes the space they need to greet darkness.
After a bit of time has passed, Archer starts asking, “Is it dark enough yet?”
“Let’s wait a little longer before we start walking back,” I say. Already we’ve identified red chanterelles, valued as a culinary delight, as well as destroying angels, among the most lethal-if-consumed mushrooms. In these woods, sustenance and poison grow side by side.
An hour passes. Archer grows impatient. It’s dark, but not dark enough to see bioluminescence. This wooded trail is a little farther out than the roadside where we witnessed blue ghosts. He wants to walk back to the house, but he seems reluctant to leave me alone in the forest.
When we start to explore on foot, I suggest that he should move heel to toe. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a faint flash of light. Then, again. But Archer, focused on the path ahead, has missed it.
The rods of human eyes, responsible for a great deal of our night vision, generally only need a few photons—maybe even just a single photon—to be activated. Their location on the outer edges of our retinas strategically helps us catch things coming at us from all angles. It’s something we, as a species, have depended on for nocturnal protection and hunting practices. But in the modern world, these side-eye powers feel strange. Maybe because we’re not used to valuing what’s on the periphery.
It’s probably why I thought I might have been imagining things when I first saw that neighborhood bobcat. It’s probably why I’ve heard so many people question their own senses in darkness: Am I imagining that? We generally know our cones, but we’re less acquainted with our rods.
What I’m seeing out here isn’t fungi. It’s too bright. I suspect it’s firefly larvae. Still, even on hands and knees, I’m having trouble locating the source of light. I try different points of focus, utilizing the corners of my eyes. Still, nothing.
When the forest releases us into a neighbor’s garden, Archer makes a run for home, but I linger. On the side of our gravel drive, again, I think I see something. I lower myself until dandelion leaves seem as unfamiliar and exotic as palm trees.
My fingertips press against stone. Then, something else. A firefly-to-be, larva that looks not unlike a glowing roly-poly. I place the larva in my palm and run home to announce my find. Archer comes when I call. He can see the larva glowing. But, already, he’s lost the high-quality night vision gained on our walk. “Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow,” he says, shrugging.
He is eager to return to the movie he’s already started watching, but I can tell he’s disappointed that he missed out on experiencing this living light at full throttle.
When I notice a stick covered in milky discs on a midday walk, I almost don’t pick it up. But its bumps have the outline of bitter oysters, so I collect it, just in case. I know how to identify bitter oysters in the dark, when they are aglow, but I have no idea what they look like during the day.
I drop the branch off on my porch and forget about it until it’s nearly dusk, when I realize that, if I’m going to be able to confirm that I’ve found bitter oysters, I need to let my eyes adjust. I sit on a porch swing, watching birds weave through distant trees. I could take this branch to a darkened space, but—even if I were to find a windowless room to reveal this branch’s secrets—I cannot intellectually will my sense of sight sharper. I can only give my body the time and space needed to summon my abilities, seek environments that will no longer stunt them.
I open the front door and shout for Archer to come out. When he emerges, he is, again, arriving from a world of blue light. Only this time, he decides he’d like to invest in reclaiming his night vision.
“Give it a minute,” I suggest. What I mean is: Give yourself a minute. Let your vision ripen.
He romps through the yard with our dog, Wilder. After a bit of time has passed, Archer’s night vision is far from full capacity, but he’s gained enough to see. He cups his hands around the branch so that he can have a darker space for viewing. Then, he shouts, “Foxfire! Radioactive green!” Bitter oysters’ glow is dim, but it does look radioactive, no black light needed.
Immediately, Archer suggests that we should take the foxfire to my mother so that she might witness what we’ve found. It’s a way to align the finds of dark terrain with our not-always-surefooted elder’s level of mobility. And, thankfully, this branch is wholly portable. So off we go.
When we arrive at my parents’ house, my mother ushers us into a bedroom. It’s darker than her higher-altitude yard, where the skyglow of Boone is bright and there are no trees to act as shade-shelter. With window blinds pulled tight, we feel our way to each other. She has been in a dim-lit space, so it doesn’t take long for her to catch her first glimpse of foxfire.
“That’s amazing!” she says as Archer waves the branch around as though casting a spell. It is a very real evocation of awe. My mother, normally demure, is so delighted that she bursts into laughter.
She has been in possession of the Foxfire books for almost half a century. But, for all the Foxfire-connected heritage my mother propagates, she has never seen foxfire, the actual fungi, for herself.
When she reaches out to touch the sticky-fresh fungi, crumbs fall on a log-cabin-pattern quilt that my great-grandmother constructed from the discarded clothing of the people she loved, ancestors I never met. “A magical mystical gift!” my mother says of the branch. The foxfire does feel powerful. Even more powerful than it did to me in Celo, given that it is held by my mother.
For her, the Foxfire books were one of the first indications that growing up on a farm—where my grandfather raised poultry, whittled duck decoys, and upholstered furniture with factory scraps—provided a wealth of folk knowledge that was valuable beyond her homestead’s fencing. What those books gave her was a sense that she should better honor traditional knowledge that, out of embarrassment, she might have otherwise let fall away. She’s told me that, before she read those books, she’d always tried to get her peers to see her as modern, contemporary, anything other than a backward hillbilly.
I’ve always known Appalachia as more valuable than the sum of its parts because my grandparents were masters of conjuring its magic. Long before I was introduced to the importance of oak trees as moth habitat, I knew the feel of white-oak splits softened in water—my fingers guided into basket weaves by my grandmother’s hands. Since childhood, matriarchs have been showing me how to use needle and thread, but I’ve never had much talent for Foxfire-style crafts. My sad attempts have, at times, made me feel a little lesser than. I’ve always been more attuned to natural patterns than sewing patterns, and it has taken me a lifetime to understand that this is not a failing.
The biodiversity of the night world my grandmother knew no longer exists in full, but I have been trying to collect bits of the darkness that she wore around her shoulders before it wears too thin for stitching. Because bearing witness to the natural world is a folkway that must also be practiced, lest it disappear completely in an era of pan-flashes and abstraction.
For Archer, the word “foxfire” might not immediately evoke a book series at all. The term will more likely, for him, always be the glowing mushrooms that are floating in this loving womb of a room. The ghostly light we’re fixated on is both life and death, past and present. And the memory of this evening will tie him to these mountains, sure as a quilting stitch—turning darkness into a familiar comfort that he can wrap around his shoulders wherever he’s able to find it.
In time, my mother’s declarative oohs and aahs about the foxfire begin to soften. Archer seems to realize that it would be easy for her to mistake initial novelty as all that exists. But he now understands that time can deepen the value of darkness as an experience. “The longer you stay in the dark, the better you’ll be able to see,” he tells her. Slowly, our nearly forgotten powers rise to meet our newfound patience as—hand to hand, generation to generation—we pass an actual torch of natural heritage.