The Best American Essays 2016 (37 page)

In the country’s eastern half, many folks would be surprised to find they share their neighborhoods with
Ambystoma maculatum
, the spotted salamander, a creature that looks like it belongs in the Amazon. Two uneven rows of big bright-yellow dots extend from head to tail on its dark, glossy body, a body I have always thought looks purple, though most field guides describe it as steel-gray or black. Spotteds are stout and medium-sized; at four to seven inches long, they look like they’d make a good meal for something. But they’re not easy to find. Scientists tracking them with radio telemetry, through tiny transmitters surgically implanted into the salamanders’ midsections, discovered one spotted salamander living four feet underground. To find one of these brightly colored animals beneath a rock or within a log feels like hitting the jackpot.

My interest in salamanders renewed with surprising force the same spring my husband and I began the process of adopting a child. I had recently moved away from an area of high salamander density (from New Jersey, which has sixteen species, to Wisconsin, which has only seven) and ceased teaching environmental education; instead I was teaching English and spending my workdays indoors. Nevertheless, I aimed to be present for the annual nocturnal mass breeding of the spotted. There was a chance I would see them and a chance I wouldn’t, these creatures that seemed scarce but were relatively numerous, that lived singly all year long but on a single evening gathered in multitudes. It was just this odd combination of uncertainty and possibility that I would need to embrace in my journey to becoming a parent.

What’s more, the adoption process seemed at times (excuse the pun) rather cold-blooded. Mechanical. Deliberate. Too conscious. Take, for example, the initial paperwork, a long list of characteristics we had to decide whether we would accept in a child. We had checked “yes” for premature birth and low birth weight, and “maybe” for developmental delays and failure to thrive; “yes” for heart murmur, but “no” for heart defect; “yes” for cleft lip and club foot but “maybe” for epilepsy and microcephalus; “yes” for diabetes but “no” for hemophilia. Under both hearing and vision we’d checked “yes” for partial loss and “no” for total loss. Somewhat contradictorily, we’d checked only “maybe” for tobacco, alcohol, and drug use during pregnancy but “yes” for
no
prenatal care. We’d checked “yes” for criminal history in background, “yes” for mental illness, and “yes” for all the ethnic groups listed. We’d folded the paper into thirds, slid it into an envelope, and mailed it to the adoption agency we had selected, to enter it in the May lottery.

This was in March. As we waited to hear if we’d won, I needed something else to anticipate that, like a child, had as yet eluded me. I needed something to actively look for, something I couldn’t be sure I would find.

Many have attributed the “child wish,” as it is called rather poetically in the scientific literature, to biology—a yearning innate and necessary for survival. “This gazing at my child,” essayist Lia Purpura has written, “is a kind of eating, it is that elementally nourishing.” It seems reasonable to assume a species would die out if it did not have an inborn drive to create offspring. But natural selection would hardly hinge a species’ survival to a desire for such a delayed effect. And for most of our evolution we didn’t even know what act created children. If the biological child wish were true, we would be in peril—ingrained with a strong yearning for a particular end yet lacking any knowledge of how to achieve it; this would have caused extinction. By now the truth should be obvious: what we have an innate biological drive for is the
creating
, not the offspring. It’s sex we want, not children.

It appears, though, as if the human desire for children is innate simply because it is so common; most people want to and do have children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in 2008 the number of women who had given birth ranged from 6 percent of teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen to 82 percent of women aged forty to forty-four. So by the end of their childbearing years, most women have borne children—more than three-fourths, a solid majority. Of the 6 percent of married women, per the Centers for Disease Control, who have complete infertility, many seek alternative methods of fulfilling the child wish. More than 1 percent of infants born in 2012 were the result of assisted reproductive technology (ART), a number that does not include the likely high and rarely publicized number of failed ART attempts. In addition, 1 percent of all women aged eighteen to forty-four, about half of whom already have a child through birth, have adopted.

These last two groups clearly want children. They’ve gone well beyond the mechanisms nature has provided to acquire them: the first may have induced ovulation with drugs and undergone multiple cycles of in vitro fertilization, accepted eggs into their bodies they did not create and sperm from men they’ve never met; the second has perhaps made uncomfortable decisions about the sort of child they want—its age, ability, race, and, for a little more dough, gender—and spent so much time preparing and signing paperwork that the process may begin to feel more akin to divorce than adoption. Both cases require significant amounts of money and entertainment of the child wish for much, much longer than the year it takes most people to have a child naturally. So when we go to such extremes to have a child, is it really the child wish we’re fulfilling, or has the wish taken on some other nature? In other words, what exactly is it we desire when we desire children?

I’ve always been fascinated by salamanders. Early on, I saw them retreating now and then beneath a ring of pioneer-laid stones around a favorite spring in the woods where I grew up. Later, walking off some adolescent woe, I leaned into a steep hill, brushed away leaves, and found the soil beneath so moist and rich with salamanders I could hardly believe it. (Long before, there would have been unbelievably more: the nonnative earthworm, brought to America in European ship ballast, gobbles up the forest’s leaf litter, leaving less to support our native invertebrates and thus fewer invertebrates to feed our woodland salamanders, then, finally, fewer salamanders.) In my job as an environmental educator in New Jersey I taught elementary- and middle-school students. Salamanders, if you knew where and when to look, were often the easiest thing to conjure up for a hundred city kids who had just two and a half days to spend in the woods. Salamanders are more numerous than turtles. They are easier to catch than frogs. You kneel at a forest seep, fingers numb, lifting and replacing rocks wrapped in moss, one after another. Most reveal nothing. But then something happens in the mud beneath an upturned stone: what looks like just the current of the stream escaping becomes a salamander.

In general, salamanders don’t bite, though, surprisingly, most do have tiny, flexible, cone-shaped teeth used for grasping prey. They don’t pee on you like toads, or musk you like stinkpots or mink frogs. They don’t scare the hell out of you at first like snakes do. As long as you don’t grab them by the tail (which would be cruel—many detach their tails in self-defense and leave them behind, wriggling wildly for the confused predator while they escape, then burn precious calories in tail regeneration), they are easy to handle. They seem relatively untroubled by capture, staring at you with dare-to-amuse-me eyes. If you want to commune with some animal, salamanders can be an exquisite choice.

Many species, despite overall general population declines, are still shockingly numerous. “If you took all the salamanders in the forest and put them in a sack,” I would say to my herpetology students at the environmental education center, “and then put all the small mammals in that same forest in a second sack, the sack of salamanders would be larger.” Another comparison: salamanders make up more than 2.6 times the biomass of birds during the peak breeding season. Once or twice a year, my students didn’t need these thought-experiments; on a warm day after rain, there would be mass migrations of red efts, the toxic-looking—and, to a blue jay, toxic-tasting—juvenile, terrestrial stage of the eastern spotted newt. You couldn’t walk without fear of crushing one. Those days were a great unplanned lesson on fulfillment and desire. With kids transporting efts by hand across roads and paths, adopting particularly cute ones as temporary pets, we never got where we were going. Where we were going became where we were. What we unearthed became what we had set out for.

Salamander courtship and breeding offer quite a few zoological surprises. Up to a third of red-backed salamanders are monogamous, a rarity for amphibians—though their monogamy, it turns out, is more social than reproductive. Many terrestrial salamanders guard their eggs, curling body or tail around their clutch in the kind of circumferential hug one might more reasonably expect of a canine or rodent. But perhaps nothing tops the reproductive behavior of the spotted, which once a year holds a bacchanalian nuptial dance that lasts into the wee hours of the morning.

No one is sure what drives the various species of ambystoma, the mole salamanders, out of the networks of small mammal burrows they occupy singly for up to fifty-one weeks of the year, to mate in spring. Because they all appear at the same time, migrating to safe, fishless waters, herpetologists have come to call this event “Big Night.” To ambystoma, the essential factors for Big Night must be quite precise. But to us, with our calendars and thermometers and sling psychrometers, it’s just another numbers game.

They emerge in the first warm rain after winter. But how warm and how rainy is anybody’s guess; different studies conclude different temperatures, and sometimes just fog or sudden snowmelt is enough. The most accurate predictor may have been right under our noses—or our feet—all along: in a ten-year study of mole salamanders in St. Louis County, Missouri, mass migrations started when soil temperatures a foot deep reached at least 40.1 degrees Fahrenheit
and
the thermal profile reversed—meaning it was finally warmer at the surface than underneath.

On that aforementioned first warm, rainy night after winter, spotteds return to the place of their birth, likely aided by the smell of the water and plants of each particular pool. In experiments, blindfolded—yes, blindfolded—salamanders have easily been able to find their pools; intercepted adults preferred home pond odors to those of foreign ponds.

Then, under the water, the dance begins. According to James W. Petranka, in
Salamanders of the United States and Canada
(2010), the male contacts the female with his snout, once, twice, again, and again; she prods him in return each time. He circles her ceaselessly, rocking his head back and forth over her back and beneath her chin. Then, shuffling aside, he deposits several packets of sperm on substrate in the water, or on top of other males’ deposits. Called spermatophores, these are six- to eight-millimeter tapering gelatinous stalks with little calderas at the top holding the seminal fluid. The female searches for them, a side step with the back feet, a walk with the front. She chassés across the pond bottom, squatting over spermatophore after spermatophore, taking in seminal fluid with her cloacal lips. The mating occurs in groups of three to fifty or more, and with all that twisting and turning of spots I imagine it must look like a sort of subaquatic Jackson Pollock painting.

Although it is referred to as Big Night, the mating period can actually last from three days to over two months; but even when prolonged, breeding usually occurs in just a few major bouts. The point is not to miss it. Because I couldn’t know when it was going to happen, by my logic, I needed to be at the water before it possibly could. So all through March I hiked to frozen pools. I wasn’t wearing snowshoes anymore—but only because the trail was so packed I didn’t need them; if I stepped off the path, winter was still knee-deep.

Five years ago, after four years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, my husband and I gathered with several other couples at a local agency for an informational meeting on adoption. It was exactly the opposite of Big Night. There we were: the city’s infertile, unfecund, no matter our achievements, unable to create in the most basic, most ancient of ways, in a way some people did by accident. There was no need to meet and greet. We knew all about each other—the baby-name books resignedly shelved amid rows of travel guides, all the insane things we’d considered, like postcoital headstands and egg-white lubricant. But in spite of the air of defeat, the faces of the women looked paradoxically triumphant; their determination to be mothers would not be trounced by this refusal of their unborn children to come into existence, to continuously pass out of them like tears, not solid, but liquid. After receiving a fat folder of handouts, my husband and I paraded to our seats, navigating the circuitous route afforded by round tables butted up against walls in a small room. We sat down and took off our coats. I heard something but didn’t move. Then, a voice:

“Your wallet,” it said.

I turned and saw the source of the sound I had ignored. My wallet had fallen out of my pocket. It was now lying on the floor in the center of the room. The finger of the man who had seen it fall extended toward it, as if accusing us all of what it seemed we were about to do: buy something. Not a baby, of course. What was it we really wanted?

Although the child wish itself may not be innate, it may still have natural underpinnings. Our biological clock is perhaps not set at “baby” but at more abstract things: security, love, esteem, meaningfulness. Such needs can be met in many ways, including having children. And the child wish, of course, like all human behavior, is heavily influenced by learning and environment. Perhaps no other period in history than the 1950s and 1960s, with its focus on the perfect family—think
Father Knows Best
and
Leave It to Beaver
—has made it seem as if not having children is abnormal, that if you choose to remain childless, you don’t know what you are missing.

The child wish can be so strong, sometimes good people who want to be parents do desperate things. A week earlier, I had read a blurb in the U.S. news section of my local paper about a man and woman who traded an exotic bird for two children. The guardian of the children wanted $2,000, originally, for the boy and girl, four and five years old, respectively. But the couple, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for years, did not have two grand, so they gave her $175 in cash and their $1,500 pet cockatoo.