A Prescription for Darkness

Written By Leigh Gray

I unplugged the clock on my nightstand and stuffed it in the closet after reading Leigh Ann Henion’s Night Magic. Prior to reading the book, I’d already turned the clock to face away from me. Every time I woke up at 3 a.m. the orange glow of the numbers was like a miniature sun reminding me of everything I needed to do in the daylight. AJR’s song “Way Less Sad” was the final straw: “Well, I can't fall asleep and I'm losin' my mind / 'Cause it's half-past three and my brain's on fire / I've been countin' sheep but the sheep all died.” My brain’s on fire. The sheep all died. I don’t think there could be a better description of the feeling than that, but soon I was picturing dead sheep roasting in the miniature sun of my alarm clock every time I woke up in the middle of the night.

Henion’s repeated forays into the dark are accompanied by the knowledge that all the light we expose ourselves to after the sun sets (lamps, phones, headlights, etc.) actually costs us not just our ability to see in the dark but also (as many of us already know) negatively impacts our health through lack of sleep or disrupted sleep. And she helps us understand that artificial light hurts the world around us too—insects are “energized to death,” and birds and plants have their natural rhythms disrupted in ways that can lead to starvation or damage.

But not only does Henion successfully argue for the importance of darkness, she brings the magic just as she promised. Her adventures with salamanders in ephemeral pools, synchronous fireflies, and glowing fungi transported me and had me dreaming about ways to work the magic of our world into the world of my novel. After the (glorious) high energy, data-intense An Immense World, Night Magic was, well, like enjoying a quiet moment in a rocking chair on an unlit porch after dark—a good balance.

One of my favorite parts was Henion’s discussion of foxfire (bioluminescent fungi) and the mycorrhizal network (mycorrhizae were an inspiration for the magic system in my novel): “For all the elementary school science book pictures I’ve seen of Earth’s molten core, I remember no lessons about luminous tattoos just under the planet’s skin… As we hike on, moving tenuously as tightrope walkers, I’m oddly comforted by the notion that foxfire might be knitting a net of light below me, growing and glowing as it has since a time before human religion, or language, or memory began.”

I love the poetry of “luminous tattoos” and “knitting a net of light below me.”

Unfortunately there were a couple parts of the book I struggled with—I wasn’t so sure about the moth viewing parties or her choice to keep a dying moth indoors for days instead of putting it back outside. Though there was no hope for that moth, I think the kinder thing would have been to return it to fresh air where it belonged/where a predator might have killed it off sooner. The act of keeping the moth made it feel like a trophy.

Moths on Defense

I was also skeptical about two assertions Henion makes and decided to dive a little deeper. The first was about Isabella tiger moths (what a woolly bear caterpillar becomes, by the way, which was news to Henion, me, and everyone I’ve talked to about it). Henion writes: “When bats try to eat them, they make their own clicks, telling the bats that they should back off.” This is… not very specific. I am picturing a moth giving a bat the middle finger, and the bat clutching its pearls with a gasp and flying away with a “Well, I never!” After reading An Immense World, I thought she meant that they were clicking to throw off a bat’s echolocation so they couldn’t get nabbed, but that’s not sending a message of “back off.” I found a post under a subreddit I didn’t know existed, r/Awwducational (“your source for all cute things in the natural world”) that seemed to further support my thought that Henion meant tricking bats’ echolocation: “When attacked, Tiger Moths (Bertholdia trigon) unleash ultrasonic clicks that jam the calls of their bat pursuers, disrupting their ability to accurately gauge distances or even feigning echoes off non-existent objects.” But the post comments and led me to an NHI study “Tiger moths jam bat sonar” and a study in the scientific journal PLOS One “Acoustic Aposematism and Evasive Action in Select Chemically Defended Arctiine (Lepidoptera: Erebidae) Species: Nonchalant or Not?” and from those sources it seems like Isabella tiger moths can indeed tell bats to “back off” by signaling that they are toxic. So maybe not the middle finger, just the noise equivalent of bright colors that say: “Hey, I’m poison!”

I bet you didn’t think we were going to talk about pirates. (Me either.)

The second assertion I questioned was about pirate habits. Henion remarks: “Recently, I learned that the pirates that populate childhood storybooks wore patches over their eyes not to hide some sword-fight disfiguration, as I’d long thought, but because they likely wanted to keep one eye attuned to the darkness belowdecks even at midday.” She provides a reference to a Mental Floss page from 2013 which was updated in 2024 (the same year this book was published). I’m not sure what the page said 2013-23, but the updated page casts some doubt on the idea’s historical accuracy. In a 2023 IFL Science post they note it’s “plausible” that an eyepatch could work in this way based on a Mythbusters’ test, but according to the pirate historian they spoke with, Dr. Rebecca Simon, the notion that pirates wore eye patches as a general accessory isn’t supported by historical evidence, but was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The power of novels!

A Spell Cast

Overall I found Night Magic to be a very enjoyable book and a worthwhile prescription for darkness. I’m sleeping a little better with that clock gone (and my phone put away). I’m thinking about when I will next venture into the dark, maybe with Lucas, maybe alone, maybe with a group at a session of Universe in the Park. And I’m keeping as many lights turned off as possible so I can give our friends in the dark a fighting chance.

Have you had any fun experiences in the dark? What were your favorite parts of Night Magic?

We’re Really Blooming Now

I wish I could invite you all over to sit in our sunroom and relax for a while. I have found nothing more peaceful lately than watching the bumblebees, butterflies, moths, and other insects buzzing from plant to plant. Currently blooming: coneflowers, swamp milkweed, bergamot, Culver’s root, ox-eye sunflower, yarrow, and blazing stars. Recent blooms: Michigan lily and climbing prairie rose, queen of the prairie.

What’s growing in your garden or near you?

August’s Book(s)

I’m planning to read two books for August—Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry and Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick. This is my first time reading a Wendell Berry book, so I found it a pretty fun coincidence that Leigh Ann Henion opens Night Magic with a quote from him and closes the book sharing her gratitude for their snail mail correspondence. (I love snail mail. How about you?)

Bringing it to the Table is a series of essays (great for the busy tail end of summer) introduced by Michael Pollan who notes: “Looking back on this remarkable fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I was rather less original that I had thought; and second that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves.”

Barons is also good summer reading—Frerick excels at straightforward writing and the book is short (183 pages sans the acknowledgements and notes). As my mom says, “Anyone who wants to know why food prices are so high should read it.” And if you live in Iowa, this book is even more pertinent. Frerick says: “I initially set out to write this book as a way to figure out why my home state has changed so dramatically since my childhood. Agriculture to Iowa is what motion pictures are to Hollywood, the cornerstone of the state’s economy and the root of its identity. The state is blessed with some of the world’s best soil: “black gold,” which, coupled with consistently good rainfall, makes for ideal farming conditions. I wanted to understand how this blessing has, over the past forty years, turned into a curse.”

So if you’ve been considering reading one of the books on the list but haven’t had a chance yet, one of these is a great place to dive in and add to the conversation.

Relevant Miscellany

See you in August!

Image Credits
Reference: Isabella Tiger Moth by Judy Gallagher
Reference: Cecropia Moth by Irish_Eyes
Reference: Cecropia Caterpillar by Laura Wolf
Reference: Luna Moth by kimhawk22
Reference: Luna Moth Caterpillar by Thomas Shahan
Monarch Butterfly by Lucas Gray
All digital artwork and other photography by Leigh Anne Gray

Leigh Gray
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The Bat & the Black Ghost Knife