On the Tennessee side, Newfound Gap Road runs through the wet, high forest of a park called the Salamander Capital of the World, home to thirty-one salamander species. On a foggy April night in 1937, a scientist went out on this road and started counting what was crossing it. Boone tells what he found on the pavement, and what may have come out to meet it.
Take a good look at this blacktop. On a certain kind of night, it isn't yours. April twentieth, nineteen thirty-seven. A warm night, and fog down on the mountain. A scientist named Willis King was out on this road, on the Tennessee side, somewhere up in this same band of mountain. And the road was moving. Salamanders. Mountain purple salamanders, at least two hundred of them, crawling across the pavement in the dark. King said he could pick them out a long way off, pale bodies against the black road, but what struck him even more was their eyes, shining back at him. So why would a salamander crawl out onto a highway? Partly for the warmth. A road like this tends to run warmer at night than the ground beside it, and when it's wet it draws the earthworms up onto it, so the salamanders come for supper. Somebody opened up a screech owl killed by a car on this road and found salamander in its belly. Then an opossum, same road, same end, with screech owl in its belly. So a park naturalist worked out a chain. Rain brings up the worms. Worms bring the salamanders. Salamanders bring the owls. Cars kill the owls, and the dead owls bring the opossums. He never claimed it went exactly that way. He called it within the realm of possibility, which is a careful man's way of saying he wouldn't bet against it. Now look what's driving that chain. A set of headlights, same as yours. Every one of those owls and opossums that got found, a car had found first. On any given day, the salamanders of this park outweigh every other animal with a backbone put together, and on a wet night they come creeping out onto the one warm strip of ground in these mountains that's got cars on it. One kind up here lives nowhere else on earth. The red-cheeked salamander, every last one of them, lives inside this park, in the high country. They've got no ears. They hear through their feet, as a shiver in the ground. To them, I'd guess, a car on this road is a kind of thunder. I keep it slow up here on a wet spring night, and I'd tell you the same. Watch the edges of your headlights. The fog will be lying on the road, and somewhere out in it, a few hundred little eyes may be shining back at you, waiting for you to pass.
Photo: Reuven Martin, CC0, via iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons · CC0