a woman says one morning,
paused on the Appalachian Trail
after catching me hunched over,
prostrate in the duff,
worshiping unseen deities
beneath a rotting log. I show her
what I’d found there—
a Weller’s Salamander, four inches
of gristle and copper-gold
that holds its shimmer even
in the shade—and she wants to know
what the big deal is. I should tell her
it evolved in the cool muck
of spruce bogs with mammoths
and musk oxen, that it watched them
die and the planet warm
and moved upwards to rest here, exiled
in ridgetop islands of boreal trees,
one of the last lingering echoes
of that great forest and all the joy
and agony it had seen.
Or that ten-thousand years later
a kid, wandering off
from his high school field trip and drawn
to the muffled darkness of those woods,
found the same animal and disappeared,
that they discovered his body days later
in the back-eddy of a headwater stream,
a bag clutched in his hand holding
the first glimmering specimens
of the amphibian that now bears his name.
But it’s cold and we need to get moving,
so I say maybe we come to the mountains
to find the things we can’t get
elsewhere—a dumb answer, I think,
until she nods and tells me
about her husband, gone
three years now, and how she returns
here, to their favorite place, each season
just to find a little of his light,
how the gold of that place,
even if cast in shadow,
never seems to fade.
Wally Smith is a conservation biologist and poet living in Wise, Virginia. His work has most recently been featured or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Untelling, Split Rock Review, and Appalachian Journal.
