Preface

Years ago, I heard a story about a boy who was lost, alone, in the woods. When a man from the search-and-rescue team found that child, curled like a baby rabbit among leaf litter, he did not lift him from the forest floor. He did not whisk the boy away to an artificially lit, human-built space. Instead, he lowered himself to the ground beside the boy and asked him to describe what he had heard and seen and felt during the long hours he’d spent in the dark, terrified.

At his rescuer’s prompting, the boy described the sounds of creatures cackling, the feel of tiny feet tickling his skin. In return, the man, to the best of his ability, explained what had been going on around him. That first responder understood that, for the rest of the boy’s life, his memory would wander back to that place. And, if he had been properly introduced to the creatures he’d encountered there in the dark, he would not have to continue living in fear of them.

Unfortunately, most of us are rarely advised to hold space for darkness, and it’s difficult to find guides that might help us better relate to it. Against darkness, the Western world has a deep cultural bias. Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish it as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.

But darkness is an integral and essential part of the human experience, and it’s one that we are collectively losing. Organizations ranging from DarkSky International to the American Medical Association have implored the public to fight light pollution, which has been shown to cause increased rates of diabetes, cancer, and a variety of other ills, as well as degradation to entire ecosystems. Still, light pollution continues to grow.

What might we discover if we pause to consider what darkness offers? What might happen if we, as a species, stopped battling darkness—negatively pummeled in popular culture and even the nuance of language—as something to be conquered and, instead, started working with it, in partnership?

This is the story of how I set out to re-center darkness by spending time with some of the diverse and awe-inspiring life-forms that are nurtured by it. We are surrounded by animals who rise with the moon, gigantic moths and nocturnal blooms that reveal themselves incrementally as light fades. In the past, I might have conceptualized a journey to align with natural darkness as requiring a jaunt to the Canary Islands, the darkest place on Earth. I might have neglected the nocturnal expanse of my Southern Appalachian homeland. But we are increasingly in need of models of how to find wonder on our own patch of planet. In this way, I hope my quest will strike curiosity that can be applied by anyone, to any nocturnal landscape.

Darkness turns familiar landscapes strange, evoking awe by its very nature, in ways that meet people wherever they stand. In Appalachia, as everywhere, night offers a chance to explore a parallel universe that we can readily access, to varying degrees. Nocturnal beauty can be found not only by stargazing into the distant cosmos or diving into the depths of oceans, but by exploring everyday realms of the planet we inhabit.

We, along with everyone we know, have relationships to darkness that influence how we think about it, talk about it, and move through it. But, unlike that child found in the woods, we’re rarely given opportunities to contemplate our experiences. Whether we are swimming in bioluminescent tides off the coast of California or watching iridescent moths hover over a sidewalk in Brooklyn, nearly anywhere on Earth can—at the flip of a switch—become a wilderness of possibility.

As you travel with me through the fern-sprouting valleys and cloud-cresting peaks of Appalachia, encountering creatures both familiar and strange, I hope you will join me in recognizing darkness as a restorative balm for this burning world. And by the time you’ve turned the last page, I hope you won’t feel the impulse to always quicken your step when encountering darkness, imagining perils. Instead, when you come across shadows, I hope you’ll be inspired to sometimes slow your stride, alert to marvels.