RIP Newtie

Newt picture from Chipping Sparrows and a Newt website

Our newt has died. 

Or so we assume.

Jim came home from a conference last weekend and noticed that Newtie was not in his little habitat. Jim couldn’t get Newtie to surface even for a fresh worm. Then he noticed that there were a lot of fresh worms in Newtie’s habitat, all of them untouched, roaming free and unafraid. Jim was disturbed and saddened. Newtie was dead.

But after the sadness--or perhaps in tandem with it--came the obsession. Jim was obsessed with finding Newtie’s body. He had to see the remains, to understand why Newtie had died. Hadn’t he carefully cultivated fruit flies for him when Newtie was young? Hadn’t he fed Newtie enough worms? Hadn’t he carefully monitored Newtie’s habitat to make sure it was wet enough, mossy enough, shady enough, sunny enough? Hadn't he loved Newtie enough? 

I can say that Jim definitely did all of those things—much to my chagrin at times. Do you have any idea how unpleasant it is to smell rotting fruit as fruit flies are cultivated in a newt cage only 3 feet from the dinner table? Or how lovely it is to watch your husband and children feed the newt a nice little worm several times a week? Or dig up the lawn to find said nice little worm? Ugh.

To really understand this story, though, you have to know Newtie’s history.

Jim caught Newtie while out on a hike with the boys in Vermont. All three of them were thrilled with their discovery and determined to take the adorable baby newt home.

A hardened Northerner, I’d caught many newts in my youth and learned how difficult it was to keep a newt in captivity. Newts are master escape artists. They can get out of almost any contraption designed to keep them in. My optimism that we could keep this newt in captivity for more than a few hours was not high.

My grandfather, also a hardened Northerner, had the same perspective. “Better find yourselves a good cage if you think you’re taking him home,” was all Grandpa Harland would say when Emerson excitedly showed off his little red newt.

“I’m going to call him Newtie!” was Emerson’s enthusiastic reply.

Grandpa Harland and I exchanged a dark look. Never good to name something that can so easily be lost…or worse.

Despite our advice, the boys built Newtie a home out of an old pot, some moss, water, leaves, and bark. Over the top they laid a mosquito net.

“He’s going to get out,” I told them. “He’ll climb up the side of the pot, down the netting and escape.”

They all laughed at me—who did I think this newt was, Houdini? Har, har, har, Emily! You’re hilarious!

The next morning, Newtie was gone. Emerson was distraught. Jim was dumbfounded: how could the newt have escaped? How could he, a philosophy professor with a PhD, have been outsmarted by a creature with such a tiny brain?

They searched the entire cabin, which isn’t hard because the whole place is smaller than our bedroom at home. After ten minutes Newtie was discovered stuck to a sticky board under the heater (which was off, thankfully).

Jim and Emerson huddled over poor Newtie, assessing the situation. In hushed whispers they discussed the likelihood that Newtie would survive his predicament and hatched a plan for removing him from the sticky board.

“He’s not going to survive,” I told them, matter-of-factly.

“Maybe not, but we have to try!” Jim said reprovingly. Clearly I was a heartless, heartless being.

After running the sticky board under the hottest water Newtie could handle, they finally managed to get him free. This time Jim made him a home in a mason jar with a screw top lid that had tiny air holes poked in it. Newt proof! And he warned Emerson to leave Newtie alone, not to move the jar for a little while as Newtie was likely very traumatized and might not pull through.

But pull through he did. Newtie even made the 16 hour drive home to Pittsburgh where we went out and bought him a nice little plastic habitat with a very secure lid.

That was four years ago. Five years of watching the Newt while we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. Witnessing his change from land dweller to aquatic creature. Lovingly showing him off to the neighbor kids and feeding him hand-picked worms….

Newts don’t live long. I was amazed we were able to keep him alive for a week, much less years. Every day he lived was a gift, in my opinion. So when Jim discovered that Newtie was gone, I wasn’t surprised. Emerson was sad, of course, and we talked about it, about Newtie’s probable death. Jim’s obsession with finding Newtie’s body yielded nothing: even taking everything out of the cage, piece by piece, and sifting through the dirt and mud like a prospector, he found no remains.

“I want to find his little skeleton! I want to know what happened to him!” Jim said in distraught tones. (Side note: do newts even have skeletons?)

Out of Jim’s hearing I told Emerson the greatest gift Newtie gave us, other than five happy years of his presence, was his second escape, his escape to the Great Newt Beyond. That we will never see Newtie’s decomposed body means we can conjecture for the rest of our lives about what happened to him: did he escape and somehow find his way into the crawlspace under the house and then on to freedom? Did he rot in the basement? Did one of the overlarge worms in his cage eat him? (That was Harland’s suggestion.) We will never know! He is now part of the Carmine Family History, a mysterious part of it, too. How exciting! What a gift!

Jim isn’t too fond of this view. He is still gripped with the relentless desire to SEE Newtie’s dead body. To know what he, as caretaker, did wrong. Perhaps he has forgotten that things die when it is time, despite our best efforts to keep them alive. This is the way of Nature and it's natural.

Rest In Peace, Newtie. Thanks for the great, quiet years. And thanks for that one last great escape.