Braiding Sweetgrass

the salamanders are moving—and dying—he can’t sleep. He puts
on a raincoat and goes out to carry them across. Aldo Leopold had
it right: naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.
As night deepens, there are no more headlights twisting down the
hollow. By midnight even the slowest salamander can cross in
safety, so we trudge back to the car and head for home, driving at
a snail’s pace until we’re out of the hollow lest our own wheels undo
our work. We’re painfully careful, but I know we are as guilty as
anyone.
Driving home through the fog, we hear more war news on the
radio. Columns of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles are
advancing over the Iraqi countryside, through a sandstorm as
dense as the fog that shrouds us here. I wonder what is crushed
beneath them as they pass. Cold and tired, I crank up the heater
and the car fills with the smell of wet wool. I think back on our
night’s work and the good people we met.
What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of
species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry
salamanders across a road? It’s tempting to call it altruism, but it’s
not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on
the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness
this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with
other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.
It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great
sadness, a “species loneliness”—estrangement from the rest of
Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our
arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a
moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we
began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.
Salamanders are so very much the “other,” cold, slimy creatures