my firefly redemption
When I was a child, I did terrible things to fireflies. School would end for the summer sometime in early June, and my younger brother and I would revel in the knowledge that for the next nearly three months, we were utterly free to do as we pleased. That is, as long as we had mom’s permission (and occasional ignorance) on our side. We would head out to the backyard, which was more than half shaded by a grandad of a maple tree a couple feet in diameter, and play croquet, shoot baskets, or have battles with water guns. Sometimes we’d play army with our G.I. Joes in our sandbox that wasn’t a box but a half-buried tractor tire five feet wide. The summer was ours, and the backyard was the kingdom of our imagination.
Unfortunately, as a monarch, I could be a bit less than magnanimous at times. The fireflies–or lightning bugs, as we called them–were, more often than not, the brunt of my misdirected energies. I never did anything so horrendous as pulling their wings off or putting them in lidded jars without ventilation and watching them slowly wink their way off and on to suffocation. No, all my jars had holes in the lids; I merely deprived them of finding a mate and robbed them of their one, true prerogative in life. That’s not the terrible act of which I referred to, however. No, it’s worse, I’m sorry to say. I won’t go into the gory details, but did you know that when met with a sudden, mortal blow, a lightning bug (or firefly, if you prefer) will, for reasons beyond my ken, dump whatever chemical or energy that’s been stored in itself into its bioluminescent tush? And, if met with said mortal blow whilst in-flight, the poor guy (most flying lightning bugs are male) falls to his doom like a yellowish-green meteorite streaking through the night sky. Did you know that? Well, I’m not sure how I or my brother–who is not entirely innocent in this story either–discovered this fact. But discover it we did. When one can create miniature bioluminescent meteorites made to order in one’s own backyard, it’s hard to be satisfied with a jar that’s got holes poked in it. Badminton rackets usually sufficed, but–and this is the final confession, so brace yourself–we also possessed a large, red plastic bat five or six inches across that was ideal for my demented summer evening enjoyment. I cannot begin to guess how many eligible bachelor lightning bugs came to their doom in our backyard, but I have never, quite been able to overcome the guilty idea that one day there will be a firefly reckoning.
In my meager defense, while, at the time, I had some idea that what I was doing wasn’t exactly humane, I was still pretty young. Had someone caught me and told me to stop, I may have done so. But that never happened. Eventually, I grew out of that destructive phase of my life and moved on to more productive endeavors (like mastering all the fatalities in Mortal Kombat). These days, I enjoy being a passive observer of fireflies, and perfectly capable of appreciating their gentle, complex beauty.
In fact, last night, Chiharu and I drove up to Nagayo Dam and walked around the country roads in the darkening evening to do just that. We had a picnic dinner in the field near the Shiinoki River (????) and then strolled around until dusk. We started at the bus stop by the Shiinoki River and walked up to Medaka Pond.
While I was playing with my tripod and camera settings–I still don’t have much experience shooting in low light–Chiharu was on the lookout for any trace of glowing tushes she could find.
We were starting to get discouraged the closer it got to 8pm; Chiharu had been to see fireflies in a different part of Nagasaki the night before and, at 8:00, they’d been all over the place. The closer 8:00 loomed without a single glowing bug rump, the more hope we lost. Then, almost exactly at 8:00 on the nose, the fireflies appeared in unison and en masse.
Had I taken along a bat for the viewing, you ask? Of course not. Did we capture any of the soon-to-be-twitterpated fellows to bring home in a jar? Nope. As I stood on a rock in the middle of the Shiinoki River, I was surrounded by a lazy swarm of fireflies. They circled and rose, hovered and dove while shining their desire into the enveloping dark, silent against the sound of the river nearby and frogs in the distance. We stood, silent ourselves, and took in the display. When we walked down the bank of the river, the fireflies parted before us. After we had passed, they flew back into the space where we’d just been. As we enjoyed them, they gave us our distance, politely ignored us, and went about their business. There’s something magical about a benign interaction with nature, to be part of the life dancing around you for a time and then go your separate ways. I think I’ve known that for a while, but I’ve only really begun to appreciate it lately.
That’s not to say that a little harmless interaction isn’t OK, though.
