Post Show Photinus Macdermotti
I had just missed a female black bear and her cubs on the trail today and I was feeling wired post-performance so I went for a dip in the Townsend Wye, a popular swimming hole with a strong current that makes for a good workout, and then drove out to Cade’s Cove to try my luck at bear spotting. Honestly, I know The Smokies is The People’s Park but it’s no wonder the folks who settled here didn’t want to sell their land to create the park. I wouldn’t want to give up the protective calm of the mountains or the tall, wild grasses either for a steady stream of car traffic either.
Wildlife excursions are simultaneously apart from and indispensable to storytelling endeavors here. To better tell bear stories, I had to see some more bears. Observation, as has been drilled into me in the past two years, is the foundation of theater. Bears are tough to locate let alone observe but it was easy to spot Jake, an enthusiastic ten-year-old visiting the park with his parents, as he hailed me over to come look at a bear. Sure enough, meandering through the grasses, was a black bear.
A littler further down the road, the biggest black bear I’ve ever seen was loping along at the tree line. I immediately thought of Tender Morsels by Margot Lanagan and the line between fiction and reality was momentarily blurred. Which was fitting because he was moving so fast that I could only get a blurry picture of him in the fading light. I kinda like the blur. It’s true to the day drunk feel of Summer’s eve out there and somehow makes it more possible that we’re all just living in Lanagan’s novel.
Which, if you’ve read Tender Morsels, is not necessarily a good thing, but I’m a sucker for fantastical living. Fortunately, fantastical living came to me as I came across two little cubs playing up in a tree and chasing each other through a field alight with fireflies:
No sooner had they galavanted back into the woods than we heard them crying out for their mother, who was in the stream below, to come find them. It was the most adorable and heartbreaking sound I have ever heard. There were coyotes around, too, who would pick off the cubs if they had a chance so all of us along the side of the road were relieved to hear mama bear headed in their direction.
I sat down on an old fence (I know. I know I’ve already broken one fence on this trip.) and watched as fireflies began to light up the meadow. This particular breed, which I later learned are the Photinus Macdermotti, only light up when they are flying upward, creating the illusion that light was evaporating off of the fields. I was captivated and stayed long past sunset.
Even so, the popularity of the Cade’s Cove is such that it still took a full 90 minutes of stop and go traffic to make it 25 miles back to my home. GSM: Great Steam of Motorcars.
Alas, the wildlife adventure was not over. I walked into my bathroom to find this giant, speedy, spastic, jumping machine:
It’s no Brown Recluse (Did I mention that I found the other poisonous spider in my bathroom?) but it did take 10 minutes to get a bowl over him to take him outside. Good thing I’m a vegan little jumping machine…
