Braiding Sweetgrass

The chapter opens with a brief scene: Robin is doing something by flashlight on a country road one rainy night, and a car approaches. She gets off the road in time to avoid it and thinks that the car might stop to ask if she needs help, but instead it speeds on past. If the person won’t even brake for a fellow human, she thinks, there is no chance that they will interrupt their drive for any other species of traveler this night.

The narrative shifts to a few hours earlier, as Robin prepares some pea soup in the rainy evening. The news on the television shows bombs falling on Baghdad—it’s 2003, and the start of the U.S.-Iraq War. In describing the destruction, a reporter uses the term “collateral damage,” which Robin knows is a euphemism to keep us at a distance from the real human suffering that is taking place.

As bombs fall on Iraq, the rain falls on the forest outside Robin’s house. She imagines the spotted salamanders, who have been hibernating for six months, hearing the rain and waking up from their long sleep. At this, the first warm spring rain, they will rise up from their burrows en masse and make their way to the nearby Labrador Pond, which is their spring breeding ground. The salamanders move very slowly, however, making them easy victims for cars when they must cross a roadway. This is why Robin and her daughters have driven out into the rainy night: to help ferry the salamanders across the road.

Robin walks down the empty road with her flashlight, observing the frogs that quickly hop across to safety, while the salamanders take about two minutes to cross. Soon they start to find salamanders, and Robin and her daughters pick them up one by one and set them on the other side of the road. She observes one female spotted salamander in particular, noting how primitive and alien its shape is, but the salamander doesn’t resist as Robin picks her up and carries her to safety.

Kimmerer describes how the salamanders take circuitous routes in their journey because they cannot climb over obstacles, and she compares their internal guidance system to the “smart bombs” currently homing in on specific targets in Iraq. Unlike those bombs, the salamanders use their sense of smell and a sense of the earth’s magnetic field to guide their way.

The year before, Robin had taken one of her daughters to follow the salamanders on their migration and see where they ended up. They trailed the salamanders to the edge of Labrador Pond, to a small pool by its main shore, where the amphibians unceremoniously leapt straight into the dark, cold water. Looking closer at the pool, Robin saw that the muddy bottom was covered in salamanders, all whirling around each other. Suddenly the water began to churn as a huge group of them began their mating ritual, in which the swarm dances about each other as individual males break away to deposit sperm and females seek it out.

A few days later, the female salamanders lay their eggs—hundreds at a time—linger until they hatch, and then return to the woods. The newborns will live in the pool and metamorphize through several stages until they too are able to live on land, their gills replaced by lungs. They then wander about for four or five years before reaching sexual maturity and returning to the pond. They may repeat the annual migration for as long as 18 years, Kimmerer says—if they can survive crossing the road. Amphibians are already extremely vulnerable, as their sensitive and porous skin has no resistance to toxins in the water.

Kimmerer imagines the drivers speeding past, totally unaware of what’s happening beneath their tires as a “glistening being following magnetic trails toward love is reduced to red pulp on the pavement.” Robin and her daughters work to save as many as they can, but they can only do so much. A truck speeds by and Robin recognizes it as one of her neighbors, whose son is stationed in Iraq. Kimmerer again connects the carnage in that far-off country to the tragedy of the salamanders on the rainy road. Neither the young soldiers nor the salamanders are the real enemy: they are just “collateral damage” to larger forces, like our addiction to the oil that starts wars and then fuels the machinery of war—and also fuels the cars killing salamanders.

Robin and her daughters pause in their work to eat some of the soup that they’ve brought in a thermos. Suddenly they hear voices and see flashlights, and Robin worries that it is some young men who are drinking and looking for trouble. As they draw closer, however, she realizes that these strangers are also looking for salamanders on the road. Robin greets them and offers them some of her soup as they all share a moment of relief and camaraderie in their united purpose.

The newcomers are a group of herpetology students from SUNY, and Robin feels embarrassed about her automatic assumption that they were troublemakers. The class is studying the “effects of roads on amphibians,” and they repeat Robin’s own observations about how long it takes frogs and salamanders to cross the road: the salamanders average 88 seconds, during which all the years of their lives are at eminent risk. The class is also working to convince the highway department to install salamander crossings across roads, but to do this they first need to present hard data. Tonight, then, they are recording estimates of how many amphibians are crossing the road.

It’s easy to count the destroyed bodies on the road, to “tally death,” but harder to keep track of which animals survive. To do this, the class has installed temporary fences along the road’s edge, where the salamanders will be temporarily stalled and naturally drift along the fence’s edge as if it were any other obstacle that they could go around. Eventually they fall into pre-placed buckets, where they can be counted and then released to continue their journey.

The students are performing this study to ultimately benefit the salamanders in the long term, but to remain objective observers they cannot disrupt their experiment by actually saving any of the animals from death. Robin and her daughters’ work has also biased the experiment, decreasing the number of salamanders that would have otherwise been killed. The short-term dead are seen as necessary collateral damage to save more salamanders in the future.

This study is a project run by a well-known conservation biologist named James Gibbs, Kimmerer says. Gibbs himself sometimes can’t sleep on nights when he knows the salamanders are moving, and he comes out to rescue them like Robin is doing. Kimmerer then paraphrases Aldo Leopold, saying that “naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.”

By midnight the road is empty of cars and the salamanders can cross in peace, so Robin and her daughters head home. Robin listens to the news as she drives, hearing more about the invasion of Iraq and wondering what is being crushed under the wheels of the tanks, just like the salamanders under the cars’ wheels tonight. She then muses on why she and the others have felt so compelled to come out on this rainy night to save salamanders. It’s not altruism, she believes—rather, it’s a gift to be able to witness a fellow citizen of earth performing such a spectacle as the salamanders’ mass migration.

Modern people have been said to suffer from “species loneliness,” Kimmerer says, an “estrangement from the rest of Creation.” On nights like this, however, this loneliness is eased. This is especially emphasized by the alien nature of the salamanders: cold, slimy amphibians totally different from human beings. “Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness,” Kimmerer writes, and “offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia”—thus connecting our sense of the “otherness” of salamanders to racism among human beings.

The act of saving salamanders from cars also reminds us of “the covenant of reciprocity,” and how all the citizens of this world have responsibilities to each other. Human beings are the invaders in the war zone of the road, so it is also up to human beings to heal the wounds of that war. Robin feels powerless listening to the news about the Iraq War, but she feels that she does at least have the power to save salamanders—and maybe she is driven to do this out of a desire for absolution.

When she arrives home, Robin listens to the calls of the frogs and imagines them crying out in grief, telling humans that “we, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of the Creation.” She imagines their cries echoed by the salamanders being crushed on the road, by soldiers sent off to die, and by civilians whose lives have been suddenly violated by war. Unable to sleep, Robin walks up to the pond by her house and continues to listen to the cries of the frogs, feeling overwhelming grief for the world. But “grief can be a doorway to love,” she reminds the reader, so it is proper to grieve for the world “so we can love it back to wholeness again.”